Blairite ‘nepo babies’ are the worst of the lot

When the singer Lily Allen found herself flak-catching recently, she was quick to point out she was the OK kind of nepo-baby, because: ‘The nepo-babies y’all should be worrying about are the ones working for legal firms, the ones working for banks, and the ones working in politics, if we’re talking about real world consequences and robbing people of opportunity’. But Allen misses the point. People feel cross about the showbiz nepo babies – those who have made it thanks to their parents’ fame – because being an actor, model or TV presenter seems far cushier than being a lawyer or a politician. In those jobs, you have to at least turn up at an office and get yelled at just like a regular person. If an entertainer’s child also becomes an entertainer, the back-scratching seems amplified to an insulting degree, as we’re aware of how highly-paid such people are.

The most outstanding of these is Brooklyn Beckham, variously a model, footballer, photographer and now TV chef, most recently mocked for rustling up spag-bol while – get this – wearing a rescue dog around his neck. It gives a whole new double meaning to the cooking term ‘medallions’. The poor befuddled lad’s flagrant display of averageness and privilege is so extreme that he sometimes appears to be part of a communist plot designed to make the people rise up and riot against the entire principle of inherited wealth. Brooklyn is by far the funniest nepo baby, but there are loads like him in the business of show, both here and abroad.

However, Allen is correct to claim that the presence of nepo-babies in the political arena is corrosive. Way back in 2014, the then-education minister Liz Truss quite rightly pointed out that too many MPs with the same surname leads to a fatalistic feeling on the part of the electorate. Her targets were the ‘Red Princes’ – the sons of Labour politicians who sought to be similarly anointed at the ballot box in 2015, such as Stephen Kinnock, son of former Labour leader Neil and his ex-MEP wife Glenys, who was selected as Labour candidate for the safe Welsh Labour seat of Aberavon; Will Straw, son of former foreign secretary Jack, who was selected as a Labour candidate for the constituency cosily next to his dad’s; and David Prescott, son of John, who stood as Labour candidate in Gainsborough in Lincolnshire.

Kinnock has since been a moderate success in politics. He appears to be a thoroughly modish model of a Euro-portion bureaucrat; he met his future wife and future sexy prime minister of Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, at a sinister-sounding place called the College of Europe. The other two weren’t so lucky, losing to Tories. These rejected Red Princes were early warnings about Labour taking voters for granted, written on the Red Wall which tumbled in 2019.

But there’s more than one way of being an embarrassment to one’s parents. On this front, the senior Straw and Prescott can have a good snigger at Alastair Campbell, their Glorious Leader’s groom of the stool back in the golden hinterlands of the New Labour dawn; unelected but getting more airtime for his attack-dog defences of Blair than any mere cabinet member. Campbell’s first writing gig was penning pornography, so it may well be a matter of some paternal pride that his daughter – the alleged comedian – Grace specialises in anal sex gags. (Talk about being the butt of the joke.) She – along with Honey (daughter of Jonathan) Ross and Emily (daughter of Jeremy) Clarkson and Flora (daughter of AA) Gill – is one of the nepo baby sub-sects I named here earlier this year. 

So yes, as Lily Allen pointed out, there are different nepo baby tribes, but perhaps one philosophy unites them. It’s been noted by Stephen Poole in this magazine that nostalgia for the 1990s is rife. In this country, this was personified by Brit-pop – and of course by Tony Blair, who began his decade-long rule over Cool Britannia in 1997. There is an air of Blairism about the whole nepo-baby racket – how telling that he dreamt of being an actor or a rock star before he found a world stage in politics. How sweet were his meritocratic croonings, that siren song of ‘Education, education, education’.

But far from heralding a new age of meritocracy akin to the Swinging Sixties (when you had to practically pretend to be working class in order to become a film star – contrast this with the public school thespians of today) this would be an age when slippery people of all shades (not just Labourites like Ed Balls and Campbell, but Tories like Portillo) could slide seamlessly into showbiz and media, leaving their slippery trails for their children to follow. Meanwhile, social mobility – which back in the 20th century we all presumed would rock on regardless – has reversed, doing over the already vulnerable working class with the force of a steamroller. If you came here from another planet, you could easily believe that to be successful, you have to be born to famous parents; see the actual Blair babes, such as oldest son Euan, 39, who last year trousered an MBE for ‘services to education’ and bought a £22 million house to celebrate – that’s a lot of service.

In her cover piece this week, Katy Balls writes that ‘many of the new faces waiting to come to the stage look almost like a Blairite and Brownite restoration…Douglas Alexander, a former New Labour minister, is planning a comeback in the key Scottish target seat of East Lothian. But it’s the aides to Blair-era figures who are the main people making a return. Emma Reynolds, a special adviser who then became the MP for Wolverhampton North East until she lost her seat in 2019, is back to fight the more winnable target seat of Wycombe, currently held by Steve Baker. Kirsty McNeill, a former Gordon Brown aide, has been selected for a target seat, as has David Pinto-Duschinsky, once the right-hand man to Alistair Darling. A few offspring of Blair-era luminaries are poised to take their places. Hamish Falconer, the eldest son of Lord Falconer, Blair’s former flatmate (and lord chancellor), has been selected for Lincoln…he is a member of the diplomatic service and an alumnus of Westminster School, Cambridge and Yale, and is already being talked up as one to watch.’

And so the merry caravan of self-promotion rolls on, from generation unto generation. Brooklyn Beckham is married to a billionaire’s daughter and will surely start spawning any minute now. And then there are the other three: model/footballer Romeo, model/musician Cruz and the baby of the merger (sorry, marriage) made in heaven, little Harper, who became a trademark at the tender age of five, thanks to her doting mama’s interest in her future. When one hears of a celebrity child doing a job that isn’t self-serving  – as when Roger Taylor’s older daughter Dominique came to notice as a hard-working GP during the pandemic – it seems almost shocking. But do not panic, gentle reader, normal service has been resumed, with the Queen drummer’s younger daughter Tigerlily Taylor, posing in her underwear on Instagram.

Nepo babies aren’t going away. There will always be more; an incident last year saw Gene Gallagher (son of Liam) and Sonny Starkey (grandson of Ringo Starr) in court over a drunken brawl in Tesco. As Judge Joanna Greenberg summed up after charges in the case were dropped: ‘It is hard enough for people running late-night stores without entitled young men thinking they could get what they want by misbehaving, and this is what the two of you did’.

If you’ve had enough of the nepo babies, get ready for the nepo-grand-babies – because things can only get wetter as the drippy, entitled NBs of Blairism continue their ascent.