‘A little bit extra’

A very chic lady turned to me at a dinner party recently and in tremulous tones confided that she was being investigated for benefit fraud.

‘Infernal cheek,’ I said. ‘How typical that our chaotic benefits system should make such a stupid mistake. Instead of going after the layabouts, some idiot pen-pusher has put two and two together and made nine.’

‘No,’ she said, her cut-glass voice lowering until it was almost inaudible. ‘I have been fiddling benefits.’

I stared and stared at this elegant woman, dressed from head to foot in Armani. With her salon blow-dried hair and impeccable taste, she was to me the antithesis of what a benefit claimant looked like, never mind a fraudulent one. But it turned out that while  living in central London and working part-time as an upmarket consultant in something terribly clever, she had also been registering as unemployed and claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance. When I questioned her about why on earth she had been doing this, she shook her head, said how ashamed she was, but that she had seen it as ‘a little bit extra’.

Gosh, I thought, what an odd person. I bet you don’t get too many like her to the pound. But then I heard another disturbing anecdote. A friend who lives in a genteel part of central London tells me that a rebellion is quietly rumbling there. She and other residents in their smart apartment block are up in arms, she says, because they have discovered that one of the flashiest tenants is on housing benefit. This girl lives the high life. She has one of the larger apartments in the block. She holidays two to three times a year, returning to tell tales of lavish parties on friends’ yachts.