What do Mary Shelley, John Stuart Mill and Tim Berners-Lee have in common? They’re all nepo babies, of course: weasels with no talent who swanned into the professions of their successful parents. Frankenstein, On Liberty, and the world wide web: the flukes of unworthies.
You get my point, though it’s not a popular one. Nepo babies are fair game. The very phrase, coined in 2020, isn’t meant as a compliment. At least not to Julie Burchill. In these pages in October, she rinsed India Knight’s new book for its witlessness and its author for being the daughter of a journalist – or ‘nepo-baby hack’. The article was a laugh, the insult a flash of something else.
We don’t hate nepo babies. We envy them and dress it up in the gowns of justice
Perhaps it was a cry for justice. After all, nepo babies cheat at life. Up to their necks in wealth and fame, none of it earned. Their success implies unfairness and decay: the result of a system that creates opportunity less than it recycles privilege. Like it has for Keira Knightley. This child of thesps was frank enough to say recently: ‘I’m a nepo baby.’ Her agent – wait for it – is ‘mum’s best mate’. (Deliciously, Keira’s admission came while she was on a podcast to plug her children’s book, the celeb’s literary cash grab of choice.) Meanwhile, those of us without a playwright mother or actor father are doomed to toil on the wrong side of a closed door.
As a failing writer and comedian, I’m tempted by this yarn. I’m certainly familiar with that door. Locked and bolted. A symbol of self-pity wilfully mistaken for injustice. If not for the kids of celebrities, I’d have a Netflix special and book deal by now. Sure. But, at risk of shilling for the enemy, someone has to stand up for the nepos.
Nick Clegg won’t. The ex-politician is back out there touting his new book, a guide to ‘saving the internet’ no less. In his political days, Sir Nick’s policy on internships was even more ambitious. Access ought to be based on ability, Clegg argued, not on ‘who your father’s friends are’.
Fair enough, in theory. But when you take on nepotism, what you’re really going after is every parent’s instinct to help their own. It’s why any appeal to rid unfairness from the job market is a waste of breath. And, in Clegg’s case, a comic turn: no sooner had he left his podium than it was revealed that his old man, a banker, had years before got young Nick an internship at a bank. Why? Because Nick Snr’s a good dad who looks out for his boy.
But loving parents are only half the story. Credit must go to gifted children too. No one denies that nepo babies have advantages in life. Good genes for one, but also a shining example. For others, a big job in a cool profession is a foreign country called Dreamland. For nepos, it’s home. The family business. What they’re used to. This doubtless contributed to the achievements of Shelley, Mill and Berners-Lee (whose parents were computer scientists). If the door was ever closed to them, it surely wasn’t for long. But they’re also brilliant in their own right, with the work to prove it. Same goes for Martin Amis, Marie Curie, Pitt the Younger, etc.
But my defence goes further than great sons and daughters. I’m leaving no nepo baby out. Calum Best, Hailey Baldwin, Grace Campbell, and all those celebrities we suspect are as useless as Ironside’s legs. Except, maybe being a pointless media personality takes a particular set of skills. This lot might not be geniuses, but their sense of entitlement, powers of self-promotion, and sheer charisma don’t come naturally to the hoi polloi. The Kardashians take vacuous success in their stride as only nepo babies can. Ditto sports promoter Barry Hearn’s son, Eddie. Who else could have the front to hype mediocre boxers as loudly as the kid of a celebrity?
We don’t hate nepo babies. We envy them and dress it up in the gowns of justice. Let’s resist the charade. If it helps, I have another target for our ire: the so-called ‘self-made’. Their pride, avarice, and self-mythologising are far worse than success that runs in the family. As Bill Clinton is fond of saying, ‘Every politician wants you to believe he was born in a log cabin he built himself – but it ain’t so.’
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