TOM EATON: Lady Victoria Hervey and the contempt of inherited power

For Victor, a hustler and low-grade gangster working the posher parts of London, 1937 was a difficult year.

It had started enterprisingly enough, with plans to leave behind petty crime and branch out into arms dealing, maximising return on investment by planning to supply weapons to both the fascists and the republicans in Spain’s civil war.

But gun-running is a tough gig for a 21-year-old, and Victor’s debts — roughly £10m in today’s money — wouldn’t go away: he was declared bankrupt, and things were looking decidedly grim.

With few options left, Victor fell back on burglary, but that December things went from bad to worse as four of his rumoured henchmen savagely attacked and robbed the manager of London’s Cartier store, celebrated by going on a bender in swanky Mayfair, and promptly got arrested.

Victor wasn’t among the accused, but two years later his luck ran out: he was convicted of stealing jewellery and a mink coat and sentenced to three years in prison.

There are rumours that jail didn’t reform him and that he continued breaking into rich people’s houses through the 1940s, nicking their loot, but it’s safe to say that the public life of crime was over. The glamour was gone and the years rolled past, grey and monotonous as the approach of late middle age …

And then, at last, in 1960, Victor finally caught a break: his father died, bequeathing him the title of Marquess of Bristol, along with a gigantic, centuries’ old family fortune Victor had been waiting for, along with their accompanying place at the centre of British politics and business.

On Friday the aristocrat’s family was back in the news; this time one of his younger daughters spoke to LBC radio about her brush with Jeffrey Epstein.

She’s reminded us that our earnest little myths — meritocracy, democracy, hard work rewarded, misdeeds punished — are the punchlines of jokes told on the Champagne-sticky, blood-flecked decks of their yachts.

Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t encourage you to pay a great deal of attention to the thoughts and opinions of Lady Victoria Hervey, a person who has done very little but spend her ancestors’ money and who, while expressing concern about homeless people being cold and hungry in winter, famously suggested that “they should go somewhere warm like the Caribbean where they can eat fresh fish all day”.

In this instance, though, it’s worth listening to what she had to say, and not just because she had a brief relationship with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor or because she socialised with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Epstein, explained Hervey, “knew everybody and was very powerful…. So, like, if you were on the scene and you were powerful, like, to be honest, like, if you’re not in those files, it would be an insult. Because it just means you were a bit of a loser.”

It is right that most of the focus on Epstein right now is on his appalling crimes and the identities of his accomplices. But by publicly disparaging those who didn’t get close to him and, more tellingly, implying that those who enabled, protected or even joined him in his depravities are “winners”, Lady Victoria Hervey has reminded us of some fairly important things.

She has reminded us that we live in a world still owned and run for the benefit of people like Victor Hervey and his children and their vile friends: inheritors of a system, inextricably tied up with capitalism and Anglo-American power, that breeds impunity and contempt.

She’s reminded us that our earnest little myths — meritocracy, democracy, hard work rewarded, misdeeds punished — are the punchlines of jokes told on the Champagne-sticky, blood-flecked decks of their yachts.

And she has reminded us that while we should be appalled, we really should not be surprised. Not anymore.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.