The £9bn duke: a heavy inheritance
You may think this is “nuts”, said Carole Malone in the Daily Mirror, but “I actually feel sorry for the new Duke of Westminster”. Until last week, Hugh Grosvenor was a pretty normal 25-year-old, living in London, going to the pub with his mates, working as an account manager at bio-bean, a green energy company. But last Tuesday, his father suffered a fatal heart attack, aged just 64 ( see page 36). In an instant, young Hugh became the 7th Duke of Westminster, the third-richest person in Britain, and the second-richest person under 30 on the planet. His £9bn estate comes with weighty obligations. The new duke will have to move back to the family seat in Cheshire and spend the rest of his life managing the ancestral fortune. He will have to become more guarded towards potential friends or lovers, in case their motives are venal. Instead of opening up possibilities, his money will constrain and isolate him. “I’m not saying that being rich is bad. I am saying being NINE BILLION rich is.”
It didn’t have to be that way, said John Crace in The Guardian. The Grosvenors could have lessened the burden by, for example, paying the standard 40% inheritance tax. That would have given the nation’s post-brexit coffers a timely £3.6bn boost – while still leaving the family rich beyond most people’s dreams. But the super-rich don’t abide by the usual tax rules, and the Grosvenor fortune is safely salted away in family trusts. Speaking of “unfair distribution”, said Grace Dent in The Independent, what about Hugh’s three sisters? While he gets the title, house, lands and bulk of the money – simply by virtue of being a son – they get fobbed off with petty cash. Historically, primogeniture has been one of the methods by which “the wealthy stay so very wealthy”. Still, “this would rankle me greatly”.
The late duke “denied both his country and his daughters significant portions of his wealth” in the hope of making it last longer – “like one big ice cube instead of several smaller ones”, said David Mitchell in The Observer. The question is, why? It wasn’t greed. He was hardly “a Philip Green figure, cavorting on a yacht. He was a quiet man, obsessed with the Territorial Army and duty.” But aristocratic duty is a strange thing. It means feeling obliged not just towards your ancestors, but to generations yet to come: “your child’s child’s child’s child’s child’s child’s child’s child”. It means putting an imaginary stranger with whom you might share a “fleck of DNA” ahead of your own daughter. “That’s not insincere and it’s not selfish. But it is bonkers.”