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........

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