The super rich wives divorced from all reality...
This has been a tumultuous and terrifying week for the future of Great Britain. Thank goodness, then, that at least one aspect of our national life remains exactly the same. i’m talking about the eternally unedifying spectacle of disgustingly rich people debasing themselves by trying to get even richer.
in the high Court in London, former Pirelli calendar girl Christina Estrada is locked in a divorce battle with her billionaire saudi sheikh ex-husband Walid Juffali. he has offered her a £37 million settlement — but she is demanding £196 million. Why? Because she is worth it. in one of the biggest financial battles ever seen in a British divorce court, the judge heard how Christina’s demands include up to £62million to buy a property in London, £4.4 million for a house in the country, a £600,000 fly-fund for private jets, a £1 million-a-year clothes budget — including £40,000 for fur coats, £109,000 for haute-couture dresses and enough to foot the bill for 54 pairs of shoes, just seven pairs of which (for white tie events) will cost £21,000.
Then there’s £9,400 for four bottles of moisturiser, £26,000 for her mobile phone bill and a budget of £50,000 a year for Christmas lunch. Whatever way you look at it, that’s a lot of chipolatas.
in this post-Brexit world, 54-year-old Christina’s grandiose demands and sense of entitlement perfectly encapsulate the gulf that splits this country.
Like Posh and Becks, like Benedict Cumberbatch, like Richard Branson and every other luvvie who voted to stay in the EU primarily because they or a cause dear to their hearts benefit from its tainted largesse, they fail to see that there is another reality beyond their own dreamy, mink-lined lives.
On the one side, we have the fabulously wealthy, the vaunting upper and middle classes, the privately educated, the metropolitan elites, the Leftleaning users of social media who have been howling into the wind since more than 17 million people in the UK used their democratic right and voted to leave the EU.
On the other side, there are the disregarded, the politically unloved, the downtrodden; those who live in underperforming towns and have scant hope of improving their circumstances by hitching their wagon to a passing billionaire or selling frocks that cost £2,000 each.
UnLiKE Miss Estrada or Miss Posh, i travel a lot around this country and see with my own eyes the reduced circumstances and lack of opportunity for people in places such as Perth and Lincoln and hartlepool and Penzance, with their high streets full of shuttered businesses, rows of junk-filled charity shops and barely legal loan-sharking outlets.
in the big cities, most children don’t — like Miss Estrada’s daughter — attend private school, have two nannies and a personal chef.
They attend the kind of floundering state schools where funds are scarce and teachers struggle to educate children who between them speak dozens of languages.
Then there are people who, like many of our ageing parents — but not theirs — after a lifetime of diligently paying their taxes, have to wait weeks, sometimes months, for nonemergency treatment on the nhs. At a time in their lives when they most need medical care, they find themselves at the end of the queue.
Who can blame the Brexiteers for hoping that the money currently being shovelled into the black holes of the EU coffers might now be invested in our schools, hospitals and other public services? They want to see their families get something like the levels of care and comfort that they see the wealthy enjoying.
But the rich can’t see beyond their own first-world problems. During her emotional appearance at the high Court, Miss Estrada banged the table, sobbed and requested frequent ‘comfort breaks’ as she was questioned about her financial requirements.
Wiping back tears, she told the QC representing her husband: ‘i am Christina Estrada. i was a top international model. This is what i am accustomed to.’
Poor Christina! Even if the random high spots from her long-gone career don’t amount to much — a Cosmo cover, a calendar, a spread for Loaded, a snog with Prince ‘Randy Andy’ Andrew and a few dates with John Taylor from Duran Duran — she has become accustomed to the grand life.
The California-born beauty finds herself appalled at having to downgrade from her 20-bedroom mansion near Windsor — grander than the Queen’s! — to a mere six-bedroom home. We can all feel her pain. she cannot, she told the court, countenance living on the same floor as her staff, whose numbers include a butler, housekeeper, chauffeur and two cleaners.
however, what really got me — just like those pious Remainers who now clamour to tell the Brexiters where they went wrong — was Estrada’s claim that she wasn’t doing this for her own good: she was doing it for yours.
ShE defended her claim for a vast settlement by insisting that she is ‘standing up for women’. Good grief. have the rich ever been scarier or more out of touch? Yet Estrada’s demands are typical of a grasping new breed of superrich wives who want it all — with lots of expensive face cream on top.
They are the covetous spouses of oligarchs, the nail-hard divorcées of tycoons, or just the happily married partners of the obscenely rich, living in a platinum-plated bubble of wealth.
Women like Tina Green, the wife of retail billionaire sir Philip Green, who gleefully inspected her new £100 million yacht just a few days ago — the third luxury boat in the couple’s armada of avariciousness. Padding around the decks in her tiger-print top, Lady Green clearly had little thought for the collapse of her husband’s former business Bhs — nor the Bhs workers, who risk losing their jobs and pensions because of his financial manoeuvring.
As she checks the teak decks, tweaks the porthole curtains and continues to live a life of decadence that would embarrass Marie Antoinette, one wonders how she has the nerve.
in these straitened times, where austerity still casts a long shadow and huge numbers of Brits voted for Brexit in sheer despair at seeing their life chances — and those of their children — ebbing away like jetsam on a morning tide, the jaw-dropping sense of privilege exhibited by these women does them no favours at all.
it seems to me that Christina Estrada has done pretty well out of a 13-year marriage that was over a long time ago; and, whatever happens, she has enough wealth to insulate herself from the concerns of ordinary folk.
Who knows if the high Court will look favourably upon her demands, but all we can agree upon is that, whatever happens, Christina will remain remote from reality. Doing it for other women? she will never understand what it is like to worry about a husband’s redundancy, search for pound coins down the back of a sofa, visit a Pound shop or eke out a packet of rice and three fish fingers until payday.
instead, she will carry on with her shallow, narcissistic life, convincing herself that she cannot live without 54 new pairs of shoes every year, plus 15 pairs of sunglasses to go with them. she joins the chorus of wealthy, entitled, self-righteous voices, shouting about their needs and wants.
she does not speak for me. And i suspect she does not speak for you, either.