It is refreshingly honest of Ferdinand Mount to offer so blatant a confession of success achieved through nepotism as that contained in his admirable autobiography, Cold Cream (Bloomsbury, £20). Having explained how, in youth, he landed a job on the Daily Sketch through the influence of a family friend "Esmond" (Viscount Harmsworth to the rest of us), he describes how this set the pattern for his life: "Every time I actually applied for a job, I failed ignominiously to get it. If there was any question of sending in a CV or undergoing a comprehensive interview, I was done for. My only avenue of survival was personal recommendation, my only method of arrival the parachute. I lived on the oxygen of influence."

Hard cheese on the rest of us, you might think, who have not such influence to exert. His approach reminds me very much of that adopted (hardly surprising perhaps) by his son Harry Mount, now with the Daily Telegraph. Four years ago, in his book My Brief Career, this young shaver (Old Etonian, natch, like dad) charted the various false starts in his career - barristering, chiefly, but before that banker and architectural historian - that preceded his rapid advancement up Fleet Street. He wrote: "I had started a new job in a completely different field every autumn in the first three years after I had left Oxford."

Commenting on the book at the time, I noted: "The casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that Master Mount appears to have been very fortunate in the series of career opportunities presented to him. But then the casual reader might not realise how happily placed in the jobs market Harry has been."

Near the end of his book he declares: "Unable to face doing what I'd hated - staying at the Bar - and unwilling to do nothing, I stumbled my way into doing something I liked writing for the Times Literary Supplement."

'Stumbled into' are curious words to describe joining a writing team on a journal that happens to be edited by one's dad - which salient information, incidentally, was denied to readers of My Brief Career.

Father Ferdy, as I said, at least makes no attempt to cover up the strings he has pulled. Cold Cream is a candid and entertaining memoir. It will be particularly enjoyed by those with an interest in lions, social and literary, and other beasts of the jungle. Among these can be numbered the Great She-Elephant herself, Margaret Thatcher, whom Ferdy served (without it would seem very much thanks) as advisor and speechwriter.

Mount is not the first of her associates to find opportunity for amusement in her character and conduct. As a consequence of her notorious lack of a sense of humour, he realised at their first meeting that their time together was going to be a "holiday from irony". He writes: "It was well known that she . . . often had to have jokes explained to her. But she was also indifferent to most of the tricks of paradox, ambiguity, understatement and saying the opposite of what you mean, which pepper the talk of almost everyone else in this country."

Among Oxford figures, Mount provides an affectionate portrait of the celebrated English don Lord David Cecil: "He talked with his whole body and listened with the same physical commitment as he threw back his head to let rip his gurgling jay's chuckle. I have never met anyone who laughed with his legs as he did. The convulsive piston-like motion of the knees beneath the tweed trouser could rattle the change in his pocket."

Just occasionally one spots an error in the text. A particularly obvious one for me came on Page 172 concerning Oxford college barges . . . "now all sunk, burned or demolished".

Actually not. Had Ferdy walked down to the river from his old college, Christ Church, earlier this week he would have found the old St John's barge (now owned by the Four Pillars Hotel) moored in roughly its old position on the Isis. Other survivors include those of Magdalen, Brasenose, New College, Queen's and Corpus Christi - the last two as house boats in Oxford.