I suspect I’ve had a lot more fun writing about the annual Sunday Times Rich List over the years than many of its denizens have had clambering into it and staying there behind their high-tech security gates and their phalanx of tax advisers. The 2024 roll call includes some great British wealth-creation stories – led by the industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the inventor Sir James Dyson and the Far Eastern trading Swire dynasty. But if the completed jigsaw of 300 names makes any sort of picture, it is of a vast treasure hoard from elsewhere, and in some cases from nowhere, that has found a relatively safe vault in the UK.
That’s not a bad thing in itself as an advert for our quality of life and rule of law. But it hardly speaks of entrepreneurial joie de vivre – while a real advert, poignantly placed in the middle of the list, highlights the burdens of boundless wealth: it’s a double-page spread for Clinic des Alpes at Montreux in Switzerland, offering ‘exceptionally private’ treatment for substance dependency, anxiety, depression and burnout.
Irish heroes
All the more reason to salute a self-made billionaire who in his heyday exuded joie de vivre in spades: Sir Tony O’Reilly, the Irish rugby international, inventor of Kerrygold butter, newspaper proprietor, transatlantic tycoon and all-Ireland philanthropist who has died aged 88. Stamina, style and ego combined to bring O’Reilly to prominence in the days when Ireland was still a grey economic backwater. He invested his own money in his home country while simultaneously running HJ Heinz in the US – his achievements far outshining the next generation of Irish high-rollers who made easy money in the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years before the 2008 crash.
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