Remember when Friends Reunited was a thing? Twenty-something years ago, before Facebook even existed, this primaeval social networking site connecting people with their old schoolmates was the most searched thing on the UK internet. It is, now, at one with Nineveh and Tyre. In fact, the only truly memorable thing it achieved was to inspire a black-hearted spin-off site called ‘Bullies Reunited’.

That site purported to help reconnect the pre-teen thugs of yesteryear with their sniggering accomplices, or the boys and girls whose knees they’d skinned, pigtails twisted or Y-fronts wedgied to shreds. It was a joke, but a good one.

The nastiest, most aggressive, most tantrum-prone ten-year-olds grew up to be the most successful 46-year-olds

Because you do remember the bullies, don’t you? For all that Thomas Hughes loved pious Doctor Arnold, the standout character in Tom Brown’s School Days, as George Macdonald Fraser recognised, was Flashman. Most of those of us who grew up with Grange Hill in the 1980s will, I dare say, remember only two characters clearly. One was Zammo, obviously – the lad who was in all the papers because he couldn’t handle his drugs. The other was ‘Gripper’ Stebson, the school bully. Dennis the Menace, at least until he was emasculated by the Woke Stasi, was a straight-down-the-line bully, and readers of the Beano were expected to cheer for him. The poet Thom Gunn, a nice man who liked a bit of rough, was candid: ‘I praise the overdogs from Alexander/ To those who would not play with Stephen Spender.’ Nietzsche was on to something with that ‘will-to-power’ thing.

Unfortunately, the two cliches with which we victims seek to comfort ourselves about bullies are right up there with ‘size doesn’t matter’ and ‘your call is important to us’ among the great fibs. The first is that bullies are always cowards. The second is that, in the long run, they don’t prosper. Many of us discovered that the first one was a lie through bitter experiment. Empirical evidence for the second, though, has been patchier and longer coming. Yet yesterday it arrived in the form of the findings of the British Cohort Study’s multi-decade longitudinal survey of the lives of 7,000 children born in 1970.

They took data gathered from the primary school teachers of 1980 and matched them up with how their subjects were faring in 2016, at the age of 46. I don’t know whether it was personal mortification or fear or reprisals that caused the knock-kneed social scientists concerned to spend fully seven years before publishing their results, but there it is: the nastiest, most aggressive, most tantrum-prone ten-year-olds grew up to be the most successful 46-year-olds. On average, said one of the study’s authors, they found ‘a strong link between aggressive behaviour at school and higher earnings later in life’. Bullying other kids at ten was associated with a four per cent lift in earnings in middle age.

A surprise? Perhaps not. Many of us, I think, will see these results as reflecting a world we recognise. We had a sense of what bears do in the woods, even if we hadn’t before been given a detailed and scientifically verified account of the distribution of their leavings. Bullies occupy positions of power in all sorts of walks of life. They like power, after all; it’s their thing. You can be sure the ‘Alexander’ of Thom Gunn’s poem wasn’t Alexander Graham Bell or Alexander Beetle. The pop-psychologist Oliver James wrote a book a few years back called Office Politics in which he argued that those who thrive in white-collar environments often exhibit the so-called ‘dark triad’ of qualities: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and malignant narcissism.

The very metaphors with which we talk about the business world – of ‘cut-throat competition’, of fighting for market share, of driving out competitors, of hostile takeovers, ‘killer instinct’, even of bulls and bears – are metaphors of violence. They imply an arena in which aggression is rewarded and ‘ruthlessness’, which is literally a synonym for lacking pity, is a quality to be admired.

And as for politics, hooboy. Vladimir Putin’s career and his baleful effect on international politics aren’t to be accounted for by his silky diplomacy. It’s looking very likely that the next president of the United States will again be a man whose chief appeal to his fans is his jeering aggression against anyone and everyone he perceives as weak, vulnerable or a ‘loser’. Even among those whom decent people might admire, the most successful often show a bullying streak. Whatever her many virtues, Mrs Thatcher never really acquired a reputation as a patient consensus-builder.

That’s not to say the consensus-builders never prosper – none of Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair or David Cameron seemed to have much of the bully about them in office – but even the consensus-builders tend to keep a tame bully or two on the staff. And the last few cabinets have contained enough triadic individuals that the phrase ‘bullying inquiry’ has seldom been out of the headlines. (Rishi Sunak’s difficulty seems to be that he’s a decent man but isn’t enough of a bully himself to keep the real bullies in his entourage under control.)

It looks bleak for the meek

One of the authors of the British Cohort Study was quick to deny that their findings mean we should all encourage our kids to channel their inner Gripper Stebson. ‘I suppose [it means] encouraging your child to stand their ground, rather than being aggressive,’ said Prof. Emilia Del Bono. I can’t help thinking that sounds a little like an attempt to spin the result in a way palatable to our moral sensibilities. Standing up for yourself is a slightly different form of assertiveness to pushing the other fellow over.

Hopeful noises were made, too, in the report I read of these findings, that perhaps things will be different for later generations than the one surveyed; that the post-#metoo era has shaped a cohort in which the kinder, gentler, more feely-touchy and consensual virtues are valued and aggression gets you nowhere. But looking at the state of our public discourse – where the ‘pile-on’ (whose very name is drawn from playground violence) is the quintessential form of engagement and even supposed victims are now (in Julie Burchill’s phrase) cry-bullies – I kinda doubt it.

Few people see themselves as bullies, mind you. As a conjugation, it goes: I don’t suffer fools gladly; you are pushy and aggressive; he’s a bully. But whichever way you parse it, it looks bleak for the meek.