Victims... or a poster couple for ALL that’s wrong with Britain?
They weigh a total of 55st, have 13 children between them and paid for their £3,000 wedding on benefits. So what happened when SARAH VINE met them?
‘I don’t want to be famous — I just want to be thin’ Their typical day? A fry-up, pizza, chips
and takeaways
THOSE readers lucky enough to have missed the TV documentary Too Fat To Work may be mercifully unfamiliar with the 32-stone figure of Stephen Beer. They may even have missed the extraordinary spectacle of the 45-year-old being carted off to hospital just hours after his wedding to Michelle (a mere 23 stone). There she stood, resplendent in several yards of white satin, fighting back the tears as the paramedics took away her wheezing groom. Such a shame. After all, it wasn’t exactly a cheap wedding: it cost £3,000. Except Stephen and Michelle didn’t pay for it — you did. Everything, down to the last sausage roll, came courtesy of the taxpayer, through the many benefits Stephen gets.
Between them, the couple receive £2,000 a month, a combination of Disability Living Allowance, Jobseeker’s Allowance and other entitlements. The £397-amonth rent on their one-bedroom flat in Plymouth is paid for by the taxpayer, as is the £8,000-a-year cost of a carer, who comes twice daily to wash Mr Beer (he can no longer fit into the shower cubicle) and help him dress.
Their story would seem to encapsulate everything that is wrong with modern Britain: a bone idle, feckless couple, sitting on their enormous backsides and stuffing their faces at the expense of the taxpayer, too morbidly obese to do anything other than shuffle to and from the supermarket in search of more high-fat foods.
It’s the obesity crisis and runaway benefits culture, neatly personified in one handy, roly-poly package.
What’s more, astonishingly, Stephen has had five failed marriages (to Eileen, Alison, Margaret, Fiona and Lynn), and is father of six children, many of whom have nothing to do with him.
Meanwhile, Michelle has seven children from a previous relationship, two of whom are in care and two who were put up for adoption. The others, she says, are ‘old enough to look after themselves’.
Suffice to say, the reaction to their story, featured in the Mail last week, has not been entirely sympathetic.
We meet in Hastings, East Sussex, where Michelle and Stephen are spending three weeks away from their Plymouth home to undertake some serious rehabilitation.
They are under the watchful eye of Mel from Fat Off, Thin On, a company specialising in intensive bootcamp weight-loss programmes for, as she puts it, ‘desperate cases’. She’s offering her services for free after hearing about their plight.
The couple greet me in sweatpants and trainers, clutching water bottles and preparing for a workout. Stephen looks much perkier than he did on the stretcher on TV, his cheeks flushed, his lips no longer blue from oxygen deprivation.
But he is enormous, his dark hair wet with sweat. He has a stick to help him stand and struggles to speak for more than a few minutes without gasping for breath.
The couple are training for six hours a day and are hoping to turn their lives around. If it works, they hope to be able to consummate their marriage: Stephen is too big at the moment. So why on earth did they expose themselves to public ridicule and condemnation?
Stephen takes a deep breath. ‘I wanted the public to understand there are people out there who feel horribly isolated and desperate because of their weight,’ he says.
‘They are scared to go out because of what others might say. People think we’re just ugly scroungers who eat too much. But it’s not as simple as that. I don’t want to be this way. Doing that film was really just a cry for help.
‘I wasn’t always this size. I used to be 12 stone. I used to do sport. I had my own cleaning business, working 12 hours a day.
‘Then in 2008, I was sitting in a car park going through some paperwork and I had a stroke. It was the stress. Afterwards, I had palsy and left-side weakness. I couldn’t work. The business collapsed, leaving me £20,000 in debt. I became sedentary and took to comfort eating.’
Fuelled by his favourite Chinese and kebab takeaways, he began to pile on weight. The more he ate, the less he felt like moving. He had physiotherapy after the stroke, but the problem wasn’t just physical.
Was he depressed? ‘Yes. Really low. I was put on medicine: it made me feel worse.’
Seeing him sitting there, wincing with pain as he tries to get comfortable, it’s hard not to feel sorry for this man. He is 45, but looks much older. His ankles are red and swollen, his feet look sore in their unlaced trainers. Even his eyelids look fat.
His predicament seems all the more shocking when he tells me how fit he used to be: he used to play football, as well as being a cross- country runner and avid squash player. He also claims — and I am not sure I believe this because when I ask to see photos, he says his former wife has them all — that he ran the London Marathon three times, in 1989, 1990 and 1991, the first time i n four hours, 15 minutes and 37 seconds.
This would make his decline even more remarkable. As to employment, before he started his own business he worked as a state registered nurse in Plymouth.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that huge, lumbering Stephen, who struggles to put his own clothes on, is — or at least was — a ladies’ man. Michelle is his sixth wife.
‘I was in love with all of them. I just needed someone to be there,’ he says.
Was he a good father? He looks a little shifty. ‘My son doesn’t speak to me,’ he says. Last week, 23-year-old Matty Symons told a newspaper that, having tracked down his father at the age of 14 — his parents split when he was a baby — Stephen said he didn’t want to see him. Against this turbulent background, there is also tragedy. Stephen’s first wife was pregnant when she died in a car crash in her 20s. Tell me how it happened, I say, and he opens his mouth to draw breath. But his eyes fill with tears. ‘ I’m sorry, I just can’t,’ he says.
However, his former wives have a fair bit to say about him. His fifth wife, Lynn Kirby, and fourth, Fiona Burt, paint a picture of a serial cheat.
Lynn claims she helped him wash and dress, but somehow he was nimble enough to nip out to B&Bs for trysts with Michelle after they met at a school reunion in 2009 and started an affair.
Fiona tells a similar tale: she was ‘seduced’ online by Stephen while he was married to Margaret, wife number three.
So, how did he and Michelle become a couple? He smiles broadly.
‘We were at school together,’ he says. ‘I was going out with her best friend and she was going out with mine. I liked her from the start, but she couldn’t stand me.’
Michelle, who has been sitting quietly thus far, chuckles. ‘He used to tease me,’ she says. ‘He would pinch my bottom and I would whack him with my schoolbag.’
Michelle’s weight problems started, she says, when she had three babies in quick succession when she was very young. Afterwards, she found she just couldn’t shift the weight.
She has seven children, aged between five and 23, with her former partner, with whom she lived for 19 years.
‘That’s why I never had a job. I was looking after them,’ she says. Does she see them? ‘No,’ she says. ‘I speak to two of them on Facebook, but the older ones have turned against me. I stayed with my former partner all those 19 years just for the children, but then I kicked him out.’
Social services got involved, she says, when her former partner reported her for ‘having an untidy house’.
It all seems troublingly vague — surely social services doesn’t take away children because of an untidy house. But Stephen leaps to her defence.
‘When I started a relationship with Michelle, she’d never even had a holiday because of those children,’ he says.
Whatever the truth, Stephen and Michelle are looking to the future. Do they want children together?
‘When we got together, six years ago or whatever, we used to make love quite a bit.
But then it stopped, see, because of my weight,’ says Stephen.
‘That’s one of the reasons for doing the TV show: Michelle and I want to sort ourselves out so I can go back to work and we can have a child. I imagine being 12 stone again. I’ll get a job, make love on the sand, go to new places.’
It seems l i ke a noble dream. But I wonder how much of their relationship is based on the one thing they have in common — their weight?
Stephen looks horrified. ‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘When I get thin I won’t run away from Michelle. Look, I met her 32 years ago. I fell in love with her at the age of 13.
‘That’s why it was so important for me to have this wedding — even though it nearly killed me and people have criticised me for spending my benefits money on it.’
Ah yes. The money. Is it fair that the taxpayer should pick up the tab for his and Michelle’s calorie-rich lifestyle?
A typical day is a massive fry-up for breakfast, chips and pizza for lunch, snacks in between and then one — sometimes two — takeaways for dinner. Still, Stephen makes his case: ‘If I were an alcoholic, drug addict or smoker — which I’m not — there would be plenty of help for me. Rehab and stuff. But because my addiction is food, people think it’s my fault.’ He has a point. When you think of the amount of money — and goodwill — that goes towards helping people with drug and alcohol addictions, and the vast amounts poured into getting people to stop smoking, our attitude towards the obese does seem arcane. The columnist Katie Hopkins’ view — all that fat people have to do is stop eating and exercise more — is simplistic. We don’t ask an alcoholic to simply stop drinking or a heroin addict to simply s t op i nj ec t i ng. It’ s understood that the addiction is not merely physical, it’s also psychological. It’s the same with the majority of people who are overweight: the fat is simply a symptom of an underlying problem. But it’s a difficult addiction to treat because while none of us need tobacco, alcohol or narcotics to stay alive, we all need to eat.
Expecting a food addict to ignore the groaning shelves of high- calorie treats in our supermarkets is like expecting an alcoholic to take a job in an off-licence. It requires ten times the willpower.
No one gets this fat through choice. There is a difference between middle- age spread, which we are all susceptible to, and morbid obesity, which i s a symptom of a deeper malaise.
In Stephen’s case, depression, brought on by tragedy and misfortune; in Michelle’s, the longterm psychological effects of what she says were two decades of an unhappy relationship.
These people are not monsters to be put into the stocks of public opinion and have abuse hurled at them. Yes, they need to take responsibility for their actions and take very seriously the need to get their lives on track.
In reaching out via a TV show, this pair have shown a strange kind of moral courage that’s not i mmediately o bvi o us on t he surface. And they know they need to change.
‘People can judge us whichever way they like,’ says Stephen. ‘I won’t pretend it doesn’t hurt: of course, it does. But we’re just two ordinary people who are overweight, trying to get ourselves sorted out. At the end of the day, I don’t want to be famous. I just want to be thin.’
Will he be successful? We shall see . . .