Nepotism is the third column of SIN

Sixtus IV Appointing Platina as Prefect of the Vatican Library by MELLOZO DAL FLORI

When Prime Minister Robert “Bob” Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, appointed a young Arthur Balfour to the position of Chief Secretary to Ireland, eyes from London to Limerick began to roll. How on earth, the newspapers wondered, had this political pipsqueak – with his outrageous teenage inheritance and his penchant for séances and the occult – found himself at the helm of the nation’s most coveted office? The answer, of course, was as simple as it was nauseating: Balfour was the PM’s nephew. And you can be fairly sure that the wily character who coined the adage “Bob’s your uncle” inflected it with a great deal more disdain than we might today.

That little moment in British political history represents something of the gold standard in the nepotist’s playbook, not least from an etymological point of view. The word nepotism derives from the Latin root ‘nepos’, meaning nephew, and for a long time the practice was indeed the sole preserve of the Catholic priesthood: a set of heirless men compelled to pass on their wealth and standing to the favoured sons of their siblings.  The word is more closely related, however, to the 16th Century Italian ‘nipote’, a catch-all phrase that describes an extended family member or clansman: anyone, when it comes down to it, who the subject happened to be fairly fond of. It’s in this latter form, in fact, that the dirty word has been kept alive: as an umbrella term under which crouches many proponents, from over zealous family friends, to wily dinner party networkers and Old Boys circuit butterflies. Today, nepotism is the biggest elephant in the boardroom: a soft and subtle force made all the more potent precisely because we can’t quite put our finger on what it means, much less whether it’s really such a bad thing.  Forget the august days of Uncle Bob’s cabinet: in 2016, nepotism is more pervasive and beguiling than ever.

Don’t believe me? Turn on the current presidential candidate debates and take a quick look at the surnames of the front-runners: Clinton; Bush; Trump. Haven’t we been here before? Or, put another way: how democratic can a country really be if its future leaders are pegged to a dynastic past?

Forget the august days of Uncle Bob’s cabinet: in 2016, nepotism is more pervasive and beguiling than ever.

Hillary has taken something of a lateral pass from Bill. Jeb Bush has borrowed his little black book from brother George Bush Junior. George Bush Junior achieved the premiership with the help of a hanging chad or two (the Supreme Court ruling on which, by the way, was overseen by a court of his father’s appointment) and his positioning as the prodigal son of former president George Bush Senior. George Bush Senior got his own sizeable leg-up from a banker-turned-senator father: a man, as one political commentator put it, who was “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” Donald Trump, meanwhile, first got his hooks into the American public by telling absolutely anyone who’d listen just how much money he had, all the while omitting a couple of crucial facts: that almost all of this wealth came from his real-estate mogul father; and that, had little Donald simply invested his initial inheritance in a mutual fund pegged to the S&P 500, his 2.9 billion dollar fortune would now sit closer to eight. And by the time you get to the Murdoch family, the monopolistic dynasty in charge of the very channels on which you’re watching these debates unfold, the point begins to make itself.

It’s not hard to see how this status quo has been maintained. In the rarefied atmosphere of politics or penmanship (A recent New York Times study identified that the sons of Pulitzer Prize-winners were around 8500 times more likely to repeat their fathers’ feats than the average author), surnames act as certified brand names, both reassuring and validating. What’s harder to explain, though, is just how persistent this trend has become further down the pecking order. In 2015, the U.S Census discovered that more than 1 in 5 American men will find themselves working in the same company as their fathers before they reach the age of 30. Skip over the Atlantic to our own Scepter’d Isle, meanwhile, and you’ll find that things are just as cosy: Debrett’s – itself the arbiter of social etiquette and the purveyor of British feudalism – identified in March 2015 that 72% of young people have used a family connection to secure their first job. And in a recent Commons debate over the family values of Nick Clegg and James Caan (the Coalition Social Mobility Advisor who hired two of his daughters and crowned one “Employee of the Year”), Labour MP John Mann decried – to outraged cheers – a modern age in which internships remain “the exclusive preserve of the well-connected.”

If those odds don’t seem overwhelming, then imagine, for a second, how you’d feel to discover that 72% of your peers were actively engaged in another ‘–ism’: sexism or fanaticism, for example. And then consider just how far even that statistic may fall short of the truth. It’s not unthinkable that you’re reading this article at work. Look around you, for a moment, and ask yourself how many of those gathered here got themselves into that room via some familial privilege: an enlightening lunch with a industry-savvy uncle; a financial cushion to soften the blow of an MA; a public school tie in the interview room. Nepotism today is so pervasive precisely because it’s so tacit, so understated. It is bedfellows with all the other forms of love and succour that we expect from a supportive family. And that makes it terribly hard to rally against without looking spoilt and ungrateful.

Look around you, for a moment, and ask yourself how many of those gathered here got themselves into that room via some familial privilege

And so we shouldn’t. At least, that’s the advice of Adam Bellow (himself the son of literary godhead Saul Bellow) in his book In Praise of Nepotism. “Nepotism may be objectively discriminatory, but given that people are going to practice it anyway, we may as well infuse it with meritocratic principles so that all can benefit” he argues, citing the modern chumocracy as a pillar of Western progress. Alexander Waugh, meanwhile, the scion of a publishing canon that spans father Auberon and grandfather Evelyn, picks up the baton with an acerbic missive against the “hypocrites of the anti-nepotism lobby”. “If” he argues in an essay in The Telegraph, “they wish to cease the practice and have their graves to be spat upon by their disgruntled descendants that is their choice. But the wise parent knows where his duty lies.”

Believe it or not, reader, you may one day be that wise parent. And you may find yourself, at one time or another, forced to decide just how much of your own good luck to pass on to the litter. In fact, Even the self-made man might hear a version of those ominous lines of W.H Auden as he looks down on his brood: “What all schoolchildren learn:/ Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.” And just how much parental love – to borrow the words of Hamlet, himself a wronged son with uncle-issues a plenty – is “A little more than kin, and less than kind”?

Turney Duff, the powerhouse Wall Street hedge-funder of the 2000s, recalls a Q&A meeting he held with a group of bright-eyed graduates: “This young, aspiring kid asked me ‘What’s the best way to get a trading job at Goldman Sachs?’ and I said, ‘Build a time machine and go back and convince your grandfather to work there.’” Hearing that – and glancing fondly at your own happy lineage, not to mention the grease piled high on the corporate pole – you might find yourself pinned between a rock and a hard place. Would you rather that your child grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, or a bitter taste?