Rich Rishi never feels the pinch
COMPARED with most people on this planet, I’m stinking rich. No question about it. I’ve never been hungry, I’ve lived in nice places. If I want to buy a new lipstick I can afford it. Yet anxiety about money is the background hum of my life. The anxiety comes at different times (often at three in the morning): the fear of losing a job, not being able to pay the mortgage, depriving the children.
There’s that moment of dismay when you open a bill that’s more than you expected, the regret when you’re extravagant, the resentment when you find yourself having to pay through the nose, the panic that this crazy money-go-round could easily spiral out of control. So you slam on the brakes and scour the supermarket shelves for reduced items while just the week before you’d been trawling the internet for weekend breaks.you daydream about what you’d go out and buy if you won the Lottery.
Like most people I had no education about personal finance whatsoever and it’s been a hard process to pick up the basics.
And last week (not for the first time) I got to thinking about what it must be like to be really, really rich... like Rishi Sunak and his missus. For a start I don’t suppose that fixed penalty fine made much of a dent in his bank balance.
How can anyone have so much money that they can give £100,000 to their old school as Rishi Sunak did, donating that astronomical sum to Winchester College?
Just magine having a flat in Santa Monica worth
£5million as the Sunaks do.
I’ve just paid the deposit for a week’s rental of a holiday cottage and winced a little as I clicked on “Pay Now”.
It’s commonplace to say politicians are out-oftouch with voters and don’t know the cost of a loaf of bread or a pint of milk. But how can you possibly be in touch when your level of wealth is that of the Sunaks? This isn’t the politics of envy, this is simply that they have never known that stress about money which is the reality for most of us.
Jeffrey Archer once told me that the difference between him and other people was that – thanks to his novel-writing career which has earned him £200million – he didn’t have to worry about the brown envelopes landing on his mat. And he knew what money anxiety was like having been declared bankrupt in 1974 when a fraudulent cleaning firm in which he invested his life savings went bust.
The current cost-of-living crisis makes that hum of anxiety a lot louder – but not for the Chancellor.
He’ll never know what that’s like, lucky so-and-so.