Status Anxiety: All equal in Ibiza

I spent last weekend in Ibiza. That makes me sound like a plutocrat, but I discovered that if you’re prepared to arrive on the island at 1.15 a.m. on EasyJet it’s just about affordable. A friend who’s taken a villa invited my whole family to come and stay and that’s so rare these days I couldn’t turn him down.

He took Caroline and me to a party on Friday night that was attended by the crème de la crème of Ibizan society — and Ibiza is pretty ritzy these days. These are the sort of people commonly described as the ‘super rich’ — the owners of high-street fashion chains, hedge fund billionaires, Russian oligarchs. Many of them had arrived in Ibiza that morning on private jets. It provided a fascinating glimpse into a world I usually only encounter in the pages of the Daily Mail.

The most striking thing about them was that they were all dressed like teenage clubbers. It was as if their luggage had got mixed up with that of the passengers arriving on the Ryanair flight from Birmingham. Men in their late sixties — leather-skinned robber barons — were sporting diaphanous white cotton shirts, their necks festooned with thongs and peace symbols. But this was not fancy dress. My host assured me that this is typical evening wear for the super rich in Ibiza.

Later, as the evening wore on, the guests were directed towards the dance floor, where a famous DJ was playing the latest club sounds at top volume. To my 47-year-old ears it sounded like the sort of ‘music’ the psy-ops division of the US Army blasts at entrenched enemy forces in the hope of driving them out of their hidey-holes.