Filling in the answers for Norm’s profile was great fun. It also set me thinking a little more about that first question: why do I do this in the first place?
One reason is the sheer unpredictability of it all. Never knowing who you will encounter next, not to mention discovering masses of untapped expertise on all sorts of subjects. So far, anyway, differences of age, gender or race don’t count for all that much. In a couple of cases, I’m not even entirely sure which country people live in. And it's good to be able to escape from the old media and that sense of being trapped at some unending cocktail party where the same faces keep swimming into view.
I’ll give you one small example. About a month ago, I was idly reading a long feature in the Sunday Telegraph about a middle-aged man’s recovery from serious illness. It was only after a few minutes that I registered the author’s name: Ivo Dawnay. If the name seemed vaguely familiar, it was because he’s the husband of the journalist Rachel Johnson who, as luck would have it, had her regular column on the very next page. As well as the Telegraph - whose sister paper is home to a column written by her brother, Boris - she also writes for the Spectator, which is, yes, the home of Boris and Kimberly Q and Petronella, daughter of Woodrow. (The Sunday Telegraph is of course, edited by Dominic Lawson, brother of Nigella and son of Nigel.)
Small world. I have a feeling I’m stepping over a line by mentioning this. Bad form, and all that. So, in my defence, I refer you to Cristina Odone’s article on the metropolitan village. Or Christopher Lasch’s essay on the rise and rise of self-replicating elites
I’d better stress that I’ve no personal grudge against any of the people I’ve just mentioned. And I don’t have a score to settle with Boris J (whom I’ve never met) just because he rejected the article on Fox News that I sent to him months ago. (Somebody will one day publish a piece on Fox that doesn’t portray the network as Triumph of the Will with big hair. But that’s another story.) The thing is, if you try to talk about class in the media, especially if you don’t come from a middle-class or media background, you do risk sounding like one of Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen. Besides, who am I to complain, since my wife is a radio producer?
Then again, there are connections, and then there are connections. I’ve been brooding on all of this since reading a column
by Alexander Waugh (yes, he is the grandson of Evelyn and son of Auberon, in case you’re wondering). It was called "Nepotism: It Never Did Me Any Harm" and contained possibly the most fatuous opening line of the year: "Why is everyone criticising Kofi Annan for alleged nepotism towards his son Kojo?"
Waugh continued:
"[B]eware the plaintive squeals of the anti-nepotism lobby. They are hypocrites who have all benefited from nepotism in their time. If 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….
Much of the success of our frail human species is based upon our in-grown and natural desire to pass knowledge, property and authority from one generation to the next. Upon this one simple instinct have the foundations of all our greatest civilisations been built.
Well, maybe. I actually think there’s a big difference between kinship as a force for social cohesion and having your dad write a flattering column about you.
But perhaps I’d better shut up now.
[PS: I somehow got my Waughs all muddled in the original post. Alexander Waugh, as he makes plain in the piece, is Auberon's son, not Evelyn's. Thanks to Tim Worstall for pointing out the error.]
