Don’t be too jealous of the super rich. Many of them are ghastly — and unhappy
As the 2017 Rich List is published, a writer who occasionally rubs shoulders with billionaires says ...
SUNDAY was a red-letter day for the brothers Hinduja — Sri and Gopi. Lucky them. They have topped the annual Rich List yet again, with a fortune estimated at £16.2 billion.
Meanwhile the poor old, or rather poor young, Duke of westminster must live with the shame of ranking at a mere No 9, with a measly £9.52 billion.
As for our dear Queen, how can she hold up her head in public? She ranks only 329th, with £360 million. She could make more than that by writing Harry Potter books to pass the wet days at Balmoral.
And think of the unhappiness of a man who is no doubt a household name, but whom some of us may have missed: Mr woon wing Yip ranks absolutely last in the top thousand, with an estimated fortune of just £103 million.
It is all complete nonsense, of course. Not only the money, which we shall address in a moment, but the List.
None of us knows what we are worth unless, or until, we sell everything. I doubt whether the Hindujas have a clue, to the nearest few billion, about the real size of their pile.
Even quoted shareholdings can look quite different, upwards or downwards, if one becomes a seller.
Lots of rich people take care to stay below the radar of newspapers: I can think of a dozen examples worth more than the £100 million threshold who are nowhere to be seen on the Sunday Times Rich List, and jolly happy about their absence from it.
Moreover, no researcher knows how much debt tycoons carry. How can anybody credibly price Sir Philip Green, when most of his fortune is garaged in Monaco and we are not told how much his wife Tina spent on pedicures last week?
ALLwe can sensibly say about the sort of people who feature on such a List as this is that they are pretty loaded. we can no more rank them on a squash ladder and quantify their fortunes than guess how many seats Labour will lose on June 8.
Nonetheless, everybody, including me, reads this stuff with a sort of mindless fascination.
It is hard for us to imagine what it would be like to have a few million pounds, never mind a billion, ten billion or whatever. Think of being able to go shopping for absolutely anything, from islands to football clubs, without needing to ask what they cost!
The late Duke of westminster, who died last year, was a good egg and a pillar of the Territorial Army. I once asked him whether a story I had heard was true, that when the reservists were told they couldn’t have any more Thunderflashes — pyrotechnic devices used in military training — for their exercises, he bought the factory that manufactures them to ensure they could have all the bangs they wanted. Slightly tetchily, Gerald admitted that was, indeed, the case.
I know somebody who was offered £50 million for his house. The would-be buyer was a tycoon so rich he was happy to pay an idiotic price because the amount had no significance for him: he just really, really wanted this particular house. My friend refused because, as he shrugged: ‘ I’ve got to live somewhere.’
Extreme wealth buys more choices than strawberry or vanilla. Of women, for instance. I am thinking of one supremely beautiful example, described by a man who knows about these things as ‘ the most high- maintenance woman in London: nobody worth less than £100 million need apply’.
The problems with these allsinging, all-dancing glamourpusses start, of course, in the divorce courts, where they set about their former beaus with a vengeance.
Overheard conversation I have been privy to among Rich List types defies parody. One wife rang her husband in London from Kennedy airport in New York, in a rage after her British Airways flight was delayed.
She swore she would never fly on a commercial airline again. She demanded that he buy a plane — I seem to remember she specified a Gulfstream something — before she got home, or else. And, of course, she got her wings.
Speaking of private planes, I once heard another woman dismiss a friend with contempt because he had that ‘pathetic old thing with twice-changed engines’. Only the super-rich notice whose planes have had their engines changed, just as they always know what each other’s yachts cost.
This week Sir Philip Green’s massive yacht, his new £115 million pride and joy, Lionheart, was moored off Monaco. Yet it’s hard to believe he wasn’t piqued to see his floating home dwarfed by two even more monstrous yachts, which both belong to a Russian oligarch and have a combined value of £600 million.
My point in all this, as you will have guessed by now, is that most of the super-rich become barking mad, spending unimaginable sums on their toys, as a consequence of their freedom from the financial constraints that keep the rest of us on the rails. And they are savagely competitive.
Since Sunday, those who appear on the Rich List will have been poring over it, mad with envy of those who have allegedly overtaken them, and gleeful about the fallers.
I heard not long ago about a man who is terribly miserable, although he has £20 million. I asked: what has he got to be miserable about? ‘Because a year ago he was worth £100 million.’
Sir Michael Caine said the proverb that money does not buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich to stop the poor killing them. I would agree with him, had I not known so many unhappy rich people.
For them, just like the rest of us, everything turns on their relationships with the other people among whom they live, above all husbands, wives and children.
If those ties work, wealth can be jolly nice, too. If they do not, however, if someone is lonely, then their millions or billions become meaningless. There is nothing more humiliating for anyone with an ounce of self-respect than to feel they can only stand tall with their money under their feet.
I once lamented to a rich friend that I am a hopeless investor. He asked me: ‘If somebody gave you £20 million, what would you do differently? Change houses?’ Absolutely not. I Iove our house.
‘Change wives?’ I am potty about her, too. ‘Have different holidays?’ Nope — but I suppose we might have a bit more help.
My friend waved a dismissive hand and said: ‘It doesn’t matter how much money you, Max Hastings, have or have not got. From what you say, you have got enough.’
HEwAS right, of course. And that is the only money issue about which any of us needs a positive answer.
The palaces of most of the superrich are so ghastly, their pleasures so tawdry, their servants so often and obviously recruited from Fawlty Towers, that only a lunatic could be envious.
As for the ‘cutting- edge’ food served at the tables of some of those on the Rich List, it is garbage compared with what some of us are lucky enough to get at home.
The only thing we may envy in some of those trumpeted as the richest 1,000 people in Britain are the talents that have enabled them to achieve things of which they may be justly proud.
we should admire the James Dysons, J. K. Rowlings, Andrew Lloyd webbers, Johnnie Bodens and suchlike for what they contribute to our society, much more than for their bank balances.
As for a slot on the Rich List, forget it. Just wish for enough.
Otherwise there is a very real danger you will turn out like the woman of immense wealth who emerged from a cinema one night and announced that she would never repeat the experience: ‘The smell of the people. Yuck!’