Did you know that Bruce Springsteen’s son, Sam, is a fireman? Fireman Sam Springsteen. It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Good on Sam: the child of a star, doing something useful for a living. Brooklyn Beckham-Peltz, the daddy of all nepo babies who has just launched his own brand of hot sauce, could learn a thing or two.
Nepo babies, despite their apparent good fortune, will forever be one of life’s plus ones
Beckham junior, son of David, might also take a leaf out the books of other celeb offspring who are doing something useful. The daughters of Richard Branson and Roger Taylor have both worked as doctors. Brian May’s son is a physiotherapist. And Alvin Stardust’s son is a headmaster: ‘Education wasn’t a pathway that was understood in my family,’ says Stardust junior.
I’m jaded enough to assume that the children of the rich and famous – no matter how meritocratic and proletarian their parents took pride in being on their way up – will do something easy and effete for a living. Thus I felt the same discombobulation on reading that these celeb offspring are bucking the trend.
Famous people’s children aren’t meant to have proper jobs; increasingly, they inherit fame, as royals inherit royalty. The assorted brood of Sting, for instance, comprise a model and several musicians. Imagine the shock and horror if one of them had gone home for Christmas and announced they’d wanted to be a midwife!
Poor befuddled Brooklyn isn’t likely to go down this path; still only 25, he has dallied with several careers, having been a model, a photographer and a TV chef. On an episode of his show Cookin’ With Brooklyn, in which he constructed a sandwich, it reportedly took a crew of 62 people and $100,000 (£77,000) to make an eight-minute episode. At least it was made by an American commercial content company; Gordon Ramsay’s daughter Matilda started her BBC TV show – featuring three of her siblings – when she was only 13, while the BBC also awarded Jamie Oliver’s 12-year-old son Buddy his own cooking show last year. Doesn’t it warm your heart to know that your licence fee is being spent assisting the spawn of the super-rich to clamber up the greasy pole?
Now the Beckham boy has introduced a breathlessly waiting world to his hot sauce. Cloud23, costing £15 a throw and coming in a bottle featuring naked canoodling cherubs. Cloud23 is a ‘testament to the joy of discovery in cooking,’ we’re told. Beckham-Peltz’s ‘journey as a tastemaker infuses our sauces with soul and excitement that inspires adventure,’ his website promises. Good luck with that.
If the oldest Beckham offspring has achieved so much so young, it’s frankly awe-inducing to imagine what he will have contributed to our culture by the time he turns 30. And is it really fair to his younger siblings – a model, a musician and a pupil at a stage school (Harper, whose name her mother Victoria trademarked when she was just five) – to have to stand in the shadow of such a colossus?
I’ve been mocking nepo babies for a decade now; long before the 2022 cover story in New York Magazine about the likes of Dakota Johnson and Zoe Kravitz, headlined ‘She Has Her Mother’s Eyes – and Agent’ and defining the nepo baby’s credo as: ‘Try, and if you don’t succeed, remember you’re still a celebrity’s child, so try, try again.’ Last year alone I had a pop at the nympho-nepo daughters and the Blairite variety (crossing over at the ghastly Grace Campbell) – and it’s getting worse by the week.
This may not seem the stuff on which civilisations fail and fall, but it is symptomatic of the wider malaise which saw the son of Lord Falconer – Hamish, now a Labour MP recently made a minister for the Middle East at the Foreign Office by Keir Starmer – make such a clown-show of himself earlier this month while commenting on the departure of the PM’s chief of staff, Sue Gray. As Jawad Iqbal wrote: ‘Hamish Falconer, privately educated, scion of a Labour peer, on the fast track to high office, reveals much about the new government which is against private schools, against privilege and on the side of “working people”. It is failing the smell test. The stench of entitlement is everywhere in the air.’
It was Douglas Murray who wrote that:
One of the main arguments against hereditary peerages is that talent and ability are not always passed down across generations. Students of history will know that all the great dynasties see some kind of falloff in capability. Whether the Habsburgs, the Plantagenets or the Kinnocks, the families produce a man – or occasionally a couple of men – of quality, only to see their heirs and successors squander everything.
This is why the nepo babies are more than mere annoyances; they symbolise the naked flaunting of unearned privilege at every level, and represent an attack on the whole idea of meritocracy. We wonder why so many kids bunk off school. We wonder, too, why some young people rioted this summer; was it because they knew that the odds are stacked against them from infancy and they felt they had nothing to lose, even if, as it turned out, many of them lost their liberty?
Starmer can jail as many people as he wants; with the flagrant cronyism of the new government already evident, he will create a hundred such alienated youths for every ten he punishes. It was adding insult to injury on this issue when he protested that he had accepted Lord Alli’s hospitality because of his son: ‘If you’re a 16-year-old trying to do your GCSEs and it’s your one chance in life…’ No way is that child ever going to fail, no matter how thick he might be – look at Hamish Falconer!
The rot has spread to my own profession
Sadly, the rot has spread to my own profession. Journalism was once a way out of a life of boredom for bright working-class kids; now it’s a glamour profession which you can probably only do if your parents are rich, in the racket or both. The outright mistrust of the mainstream media is partly due to this, as is the lack of any upcoming journalists who are seen as objects of inspiration and aspiration.
To blow my own trumpet briefly, when I was in my twenties, I was surprised and pleased to hear two very different teenage soap opera characters (Elizabeth Archer of The Archers and Karen Grant of Brookside) tell their parents ‘I’m going to be the next Julie Burchill!’ One cannot imagine a young person from EastEnders or Coronation Street referencing, say, Flora Gill (daughter of the late AA) who at the age of 27 proudly announced on her socials that she was chatelaine of a £3million apartment in Kensington belonging to her family: ‘I have a library, a garden square and a wine cellar.’
When I was 17, in my first job as a journalist, I was so skint that I had to retrieve bottles from rubbish bins and take them to corner shops to get back the deposit. (Ask your nan.) But I’d rather have my story than Flora Gill’s – or any other hack with a famous name – because, unlike them, I will always have the knowledge that I made it on merit alone. This is a crucial element in self-respect, a thing without which, in my opinion, life isn’t really worth living.
Nepo babies, despite their apparent good fortune, will forever be one of life’s plus ones, knowing that everyone believes they’re only where they are because of what their name is. In the long run, what kind of effect does this have on people? I’m sure that nepotism saps the souls of those who profit from it. Will James Middleton really die a happy man knowing that he couldn’t even run a marshmallow empire without crashing it? Wouldn’t he have been happier training as a plumber, making a fortune and doing it all by himself? It’s to be hoped that Brooklyn Beckham-Peltz applies to be a fireman before his poor, threadbare soul is desiccated any further.
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