Which is the odd one out: Benazir Bhutto, Lester Bird, Tony Blair or George Bush? The correct answer here is Tony Blair: he is the only one to have become the head of his country's government without a father who had done so earlier. None of them directly inherited the top job, in the manner of an absolute monarch, like King Mswati of Swaziland, or of an absolute despot, like Kim Jong Il of North Korea; Pakistan, Antigua and America were all democracies when the junior Bhutto, Bird and Bush rose to power. Yet democracies and dynasties are far from incompatible. Indeed, the success of the three BS is replicated to some degree by politicians' children throughout the alphabet. How on earth, in a meritocratic age, do they do it? Nurture must play a part. Amy Carter may have read comics at White House dinners when her father Jimmy was president (1977-81), just as Jerry Brown may have been more interested in God than government when his father ran California, as he too would some years later (1975-83). But much of the buzz in a political household is inevitably of politics, and it would be odd if it did not spark an interest in at least some of the offspring. That is certainly what happened to Violet, the daughter of Britain's prime minister H.H. Asquith (1908-16), who was often taken into her father's confidence about matters of state when she was little more than a child. Nor was she alone among the political progeny of her era, at least in sharing the professional curiosity of their parents. When Violet told the young Winston Churchill, also the child of a member of Parliament (Randolph), of these chats with her father, he answered wistfully, "I wish I could have had such talks with mine."
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