Ten years ago Boris Johnson was part of a new intake of Tory MPs that included his Eton, Oxford and Bullingdon Club contemporary David Cameron, but while Cameron went from virtual unknown to Tory leader in 2005, Johnson took a slower and subtler road on the path to political power.

Even before his election as MP for Henley in 2001 Johnson had started to imprint himself on the minds of the British people with his appearances on Have I Got News for You, in which his bumbling, charming, upper class idiot persona could be displayed to the full.

This persona, which was unashamedly Tory, educated and wealthy experienced a brief period of demand, with Johnson also appearing on programmes like Parkinson and Room 101. Johnson thus succeeded where numerous Tory leaders had failed in becoming a Tory that people actually wanted to see on TV.

Johnson is now a well established part of the political landscape and is rumoured to have designs on Number 10 in the future, but did the 2010 election also see the entry into the House of Commons of a seemingly ridiculous individual who is yet destined to go far?

Jacob Rees-Mogg is in some ways quite different from Boris Johnson. Rees-Mogg, a happily married Catholic does not seem to have a private life as colourful as Johnson's sometimes appears to be. In addition, rather than the chubby chaotic look that accompanies Johnson, Rees-Mogg appears to be the stick thin embodiment of the upper classes as portrayed by John Cleese in Monty Python many years ago.

Despite this there are in fact many similarities between the two even if Rees-Mogg has not yet made it onto Have I Got News For You and become the household name that Johnson has.

Rees-Mogg is not afraid of being called a "Tory toff" (he apparently campaigned unsuccessfully in Fife from his Bentley with his nanny in tow), nor is he afraid of being considered an eccentric. Best of all the MP for North East Somerset makes no attempt to dumb down for his audience but shows off his considerable education to the full.

His recent claim that he would like to subject EU judges to "floccinaucinihilipilification", which is not as horrific as it sounds, is perhaps a taste of the kind of thing we can expect from Rees-Mogg in the future.

As with Boris Johnson Classical or Latin references are never far away with Rees-Mogg, who recently said that Baroness Thatcher would be a good candidate for the deification of former rulers practised in ancient Rome.

More often than the Classical reference however is the Biblical one, perhaps arising from his Catholicism. Rees-Mogg has declared a financial transaction tax to be "the work of the devil", accused Lib Dems of leading the Coalition down "the path of unrighteousness" and described the hated EU judges using an unfavourable quote from the Book of Amos.

Finally Rees-Mogg seems to have a Johnsonian taste for bizarre ideas. However whereas "Boris Island" or the "Cable Car Crossing" might be proposed by the current mayor with all seriousness, Rees-Mogg has proposed his crank ideas in mockery.

His demand that Somerset have its own time zone (15 minutes ahead of the rest of the country) was aimed at wrecking a bill that would have put Britain on continental time, while his proposal to force over-zealous council officials to wear bowler hats was made so that people could easily avoid them.

Jacob Rees-Mogg appears in many ways to be a ridiculous fellow. He has been described in the Guardian as the kind of Tory MP who exists to get the core Labour vote out. Yet similar things could have been said about Boris Johnson whose candidacy for London mayor, derided as a joke when first announced, led to his becoming the most powerful Tory in the land before David Cameron dragged his way into Number 10.

Will we be seeing similar unlikely triumphs from the unlikely figure of Jacob Rees-Mogg?

London