Be honest. Aren’t you a teeny-weeny bit jealous of the super-rich?
Are you a little annoyed by the new Sunday Times Rich List – which showed the top ten richest people in the country now have £182 billion between them, more than three times what they had in 2010? Don’t your hackles rise on seeing the masters of the universe pad around Davos in their identikit blue suits and tieless white shirts?
Well, stop worrying and thank God you aren’t a billionaire. The Super-Rich World Problems are endless.
Bucketloads of money should inoculate the rich against anxiety. In fact, money only heightens the worries, particularly about their two principal bugbears: staff and taxes. They make for the most popular topics of billionaire conversation: how your staff are letting you down; and how to pay less money to the government. Watching paint dry suddenly has its own fascinations.
If you think it’s boring dealing with the admin for your tiny flat, try looking after the house in Mayfair, the shooting lodge in Scotland, the villa in Tuscany, the condo in Miami…
Of course, there are staff galore – and staff to deal with those staff. But who has to deal with the staff who deal with the staff? Poor old you – I mean rich old you.
Hell is checking in at Heathrow with a pyramid of Louis Vuitton suitcases
The fear of tax makes the super-rich do an extreme thing: send themselves into exile. And the problem with being a tax exile? You have to live with other tax exiles. Here’s a warning to anyone considering such a move: rich people who choose to live somewhere just to get even richer aren’t always that scintillating.
Along with taxphobia, a widespread super-rich affliction is poor-people-phobia: they think all non-rich people want their money. What a relief for the non-rich to choose friends for their wit and kindness – rather than their bank balance. How reassuring to know your husband or wife isn’t a gold-digger – because there’s no gold to dig in the first place.
Super-rich anxieties snowball into full-blown psychological conditions. The latest accessory is the wealth therapist to deal with your guilt. There’s an answer to your problem, Mr Moneybags – give away your cash. No gilts – no guilt. Strangely enough, it isn’t a very popular solution.
Nature abhors a vacuum. And the super-rich must fill those long, yawning hours. Thank your lucky stars Daddy didn’t leave you £100m – it means you aren’t released from the obligation to find interesting and enjoyable employment.
So the super-rich must learn expensive ways to fill time – and lose money. Sailing and polo are excellent, long-winded ways of tearing up £50 notes. How much easier and quicker to bet £5 on a horse rather than buy one for £5 million.
The more dangerous the sport, the more popular it is among the super-rich. Why do they love risk so much? Why go parasailing or fly helicopters when you could be, say, playing bowls? Well, not only are they more expensive and exclusive pursuits – and so flatter the amour propre of the gazillionaire class. Dangerous sports also provide the burst of adrenaline empty days by the pool just can’t give.
It helps if the sport takes up a lot of time. Thus the straightforward shooting weekend. You couldn’t have a straightforward football weekend – you’d be exhausted after 90 minutes. But shooting takes up the whole day for day after day.
The dangerous corollary of avoiding poor people is being fatally attracted to rich ones – and so inviting billionaire paedophiles to shoot at Mummy’s Norfolk home. Then you have to stay in their oddly decorated houses in New York. And ask Mummy for lots of money to make that horrid court case go away.Money can’t make rude people go away, though. And, when they’re offended, the ultra-sensitive super-rich can’t just laugh it off. A word of advice to Hollywood superstars and footballers’ wags: you don’t have to sue every time someone’s rude about you.
Again and again, money causes the rich brain to make perverse decisions. How strange to pay extra to wear clothes made by overrated designers. How weird to enter that charming restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean – and spray champagne over your friends’ heads rather than drink it.
Money means never having to say ‘stop’: ‘Stop pouring’ or ‘Stop ringing up the drug-dealer.’ The non-rich don’t have to develop a punishing, multi-million-pound drug addiction. No need to clean up and bang on about the benefits of cleaning up. No danger of developing a family ‘curse’ because so many of your relations have died in tragic circumstances.
The most extreme déformation professionnelle of the super-rich is exactly that: deformation – of the face. When I lived in New York, there was a particular corner, on 65th St and Madison Avenue, near Chanel and Giorgio Armani, where the older women must have just passed through a handy wind-tunnel – so stretched and taut was their skin.
Those ladies kept strictly within their tribe at home in Manhattan and on their annual superyacht migrations. If you’re a Have-Not, don’t be jealous of the Have-Superyachts. However big they are, they’re still essentially floating caravans that only move in the direction chosen by your spoilt host. Want to visit that charming Doric temple on the Aegean coast? Fat chance! The captain’s been ordered to sail to that awful nightclub in Mykonos – the only other option is to walk the plank.
Even when they’re allowed off the superyacht, spare a thought for the rich holidaymaker. Oh the agony of having expensive possessions. ‘Can I leave my diamonds on the beach when I go for a swim?’; ‘Oh no – I went swimming with the non-waterproof Rolex!’ ; ‘Do I dare leave the Bentley overnight on that street?’
What relief there is in the unstealable, paint-spattered bike; the soup stain on the Primark shirt; the £1,000 secondhand car that just keeps on going and going.
Hell is checking in at Heathrow with a pyramid of Louis Vuitton suitcases. Heaven is going straight to the departure gate with a spare shirt and a pair of clean pants in a plastic bag.
Less is more.
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