You can’t have your cake and eat it, bro – just ask Ekaterina
THE curious case of the fifth Mrs Richard Fields – the glam blonde Ekaterina, who is pursuing her ex-husband through the courts for cash while wearing an assortment of abbreviated cream Chanel suits – has been bugging me all week. It brought to mind something else, but I couldn’t quite work out what.
On the surface, it was just the sorry tale of a spoilt, lazy, rich woman who couldn’t be bothered to earn a crust herself. A divorcee determined to take her wealthy ex to the cleaners, even though he’d already given her £3.3million in assets, plus £370,000 a year in maintenance and rainy-day money.
If you drilled down a bit, you could also see the sadder story of a 43-year-old mother-of-two who thought she no longer had any skills or value in the marketplace (she was a child actress, model and beauty queen – all careers with a shelf life shorter than her skirts).
Instead, Ekaterina thought that a man was a plan, and she still does – she has said she doesn’t want to get a job as she is ‘a very good wife’, and her current life goal is to ‘find a husband’.
Then I got it. Fields v Fields, the tabloid tale of a gold-digging trophy wife is, actually, a chronicle of our divorce from Europe foretold. Bear with me here.
Like Ekaterina, you see, who voted to leave her husband but still wanted to have full access to his money, there are Cornish fishermen, Welsh farmers and so on who wanted out of the EU but also to keep their fat, juicy subsidies and payments, please.
Like Ekaterina, who wanted her independence but also the glitzy, international jet-set lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, there are the 17million Brits who voted for Brexit, who want to take back control of our laws and borders, but also want access as usual to the single market – in an ideal world anyway.
Last week it became grimly clear – to me at least – that Project Fear was not, when push comes to shove, nearly scary enough.
Marmite disappeared – albeit briefly – from supermarkets. The pound is at a 31-year low against the dollar. We have one of the biggest balance of trade deficits in the developed world, and national debt stands at £1.7trillion, so sterling’s not going to soar any time soon.
To my mind (I’m no economist, but a green side-salad in a beach self-service shack in Sardinia cost me the equivalent of six quid last week, thanks to sterling’s slide) this is a far cry from the claims that, by leaving Europe, the UK could save £350million a week. In fact, as one former UK Minister told the FT, ‘we could actually end up paying more into the EU budget’ after we leave than we do now.
According to a Treasury report leaked last week, Brexit is going to cost the UK £66 billion a year. The FT (my old paper) reported that the immediate cost of the UK’s split from its 27 EU partners would be up to £20billion.
On that sobering note, back to Ekaterina, the lady who hoped to leave her rich husband and still live high on the hog on his money.
FIELDS v Fields (the lawyers’ fees are currently at £1million and rising) is a cautionary tale not just of super-rich divorce but also of Brexit, and the takeaway is this. My brother Boris, the Foreign Secretary, who first spake so optimistically of the joys of having cake and eating it too, is wrong. Donald Tusk, the European Council chief, is right when he says: ‘There will be no cakes on the table for anyone. Only salt and vinegar.’
Ekaterina can’t have her cake and eat it too (and, by the by, this single phrase has done more to inflame our soon-to-be-ex-European partners than anything else since the referendum) and nor can we.
Yet this country is about to crack on with the most expensive divorce in history.
So cheers, everyone. We’re all being taken to the cleaners now.