The food hall of Harrods shut. Ocado deliveries restricted to one a week. Chanel blazers relegated to the back of the wardrobe on account of being too formal for Zoom.
Forget, for a moment, the grim reality of daily life for the masses in lockdown Britain. Spare a thought, if you will, for the super-rich and how they are coping as the pandemic plays merry hell with life’s little luxuries.
A jaw-dropping insight into this parallel universe came this week in the form of an article in the Financial Times by columnist and mother of two Shruti Advani, who stepped out of her usual sphere of private banking to describe life in lockdown for her well-off family.
Spare a thought, if you will, for the super-rich and how they are coping as the pandemic plays merry hell with life’s little luxuries
Writing from her multi-million-pound home in London’s Kensington — where she has already suffered the inconvenience of giving up two spare rooms (one to the nanny; another to a friend who needed to isolate from her surgeon husband) — Ms Advani shared her domestic woes.
Working and schooling her children from home were, she said, ‘twin terrors’ only ameliorated by the purchase of £420 silk pyjamas to make the ‘dullest Zoom meeting come alive’ and private tutoring for the children costing between £65 and £95 per hour, ‘depending on whether it’s for chess or maths’.
Still, as Ms Advani reasoned, ‘a tutor costs half as much as the psychiatrist we may have needed otherwise’.
The article sent ripples — or should that be 25ft crashing waves — through social media.
In wealthy circles, however, it generated not so much chatter as downright laughter.
For Ms Advani’s account of a plutocrat’s pandemic does not remotely capture the lockdown life of the super-rich. Believe me, it doesn’t even come close.
The first crucial difference is that the super-rich are nowhere near the Petri dish that is London during lockdown.
Not for them, a cramped capital city where at its peak more than 1,000 people a day were being diagnosed with Covid-19.
They are happily ensconced on their second or third country estates which, of course, contain up to seven cottages for staff — not to mention a warehouse which now contains a year’s worth of provisions.
Not that the super-rich have stocked up on essentials themselves, or spent hours scouring the internet for the Holy Grail of home delivery slots. They have outsourced the dangerous-yet-boring business of food shopping to a string of enterprising youths, some of whom are paid handsomely to go and queue at Waitrose.
Their shopping bags are then deposited in an outbuilding where they are disinfected by staff; discreetly, of course, since one of the biggest boasts among the lockdown landed gentry is that they don’t need shops at all.
They have their own poultry, cattle, bees, fish and five-acre walled vegetable and herb gardens. They also have pizza and rotisserie chicken ovens.
And whatever they can’t produce or cook themselves, they outsource to a handful of top London chefs who are only too happy to deliver it personally to a gatehouse (or a driver collects). As for flowers, they grow their own — that’s why they have three gardeners.
They also tend to have three nannies: a live-in one and a live-out, plus a third for the weekend.
Some families I’ve heard of demanded that the nannies isolate in shifts in several of those outbuildings. After all, when you pay triple the going fee, time-off for a pandemic is not an option.
Nor, as Ms Advani would have you believe, do the super-rich resort to last-minute tutoring, certainly not at a mere £65 to £95 an hour. If you want a top-tier tutor, who does Oxbridge preparation, you’re looking at spending between £175 to £300 an hour.
However, most tutors to offspring of the super-rich are not paid by the hour, but have been kept on retainer since the children were infants. One family I know of locked their tutor in at the start of the pandemic, putting him in a separate house on their estate with his own cook. For this, the tutor would have been paid the equivalent of the annual salary of an NHS doctor.
‘We have a client who has sent a private jet to collect a tutor in London but then said he wanted to put him on a trial period,’ says Charles Bonas of Bonas MacFarlane private tutoring. ‘How is he supposed to get back?’
A minor detail, of course. In the world of the rich, staff issues are outsourced to a private office where a manager, constantly on call, checks contracts carefully.
These sorts of outfits (used by celebrities as well) work closely with employment agencies, who have a large list of fully quarantined replacements ready to go should one of their client’s housekeepers or nannies actually get Covid-19.
Initially, some butlers and cleaners were asked to work in full hazmat suits but as time passed they relaxed into their normal uniforms with gloves and masks.
As for the threat of the super-rich catching Covid-19 themselves, there’s no end to what money can buy. Just before lockdown, I had an interesting conversation with the former CEO of a multinational company. He told me his private doctor had helped him install a home oxygen machine along with a small pharmacy’s worth off anti-virals and antibiotics.
To give the CEO his dues, he did donate a few ventilators to a hospital, just in case. He didn’t need personal protective equipment as almost all wealthy families stockpile it already.
As for Covid tests, the rich all got magically tested even before hospital staff. If you give hospitals millions per year in donations, it’s the least they can do to say thank you.
There is a twist, though. While the rest of Britain commiserates together about being locked in, home-schooling their children all day with no domestic help while trying to work from home, the rich feel a little left out of the national mood. Normally superior, they now feel a certain sense of shame.
The result is that some of the wealthiest people I know have been doing their utmost to pretend they are going through the same struggles as the rest of us.
One friend has been boasting on Instagram about making sourdough and ironing her own sheets. It’s funny because her neighbours all know her live-in Filipino help, who have stayed in her house throughout the pandemic, by name.
Financial Times by columnist and mother of two Shruti Advani, who stepped out of her usual sphere of private banking to describe life in lockdown for her well-off family
It’s a bizarre kind of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Not least when the same wealthy people who’d have us believe they’ve dispensed with their staff and are cleaning their bathrooms for the first time, then post pictures of family barbecues in immaculate gardens with clear views of a table set with a crisp ironed tablecloth, sparkling silver candelabra and a row of crystal vases with fresh-cut flowers.
Not something those of us loading and unloading the dishwasher all day would bother with. The same family then posts pictures of another meal by a pool, in a different house.
I heard another woman complain on a charity Zoom call that she was exhausted by the relentless cooking and shopping. But there in the background, moving steadily around her enormous kitchen, was a woman in an apron. Her cook. Dramatic bouquets of flowers could also be spotted that I promise you were not her handiwork.
Nor was the woman in question displaying the unkempt lockdown hair the rest of us are struggling to hide. Quite the reverse. She showed no roots whatsoever and had a perfect blowdry.
I shouldn’t be surprised. A top hairdresser, who asked not to be mentioned by name, tells me she has been driving up and down the motorway since lockdown began. ‘Many of my clients have never blowdried their own hair,’ she says. ‘They don’t even wash it.’
She charges hundreds of pounds for home visits and is expected to work in a hazmat suit. ‘One client even asked me to cut her dog’s hair,’ she says.
I guess it must be difficult for the very rich to be locked down with their own family. After all, they’re used to jumping on planes for any art fair or party going; and ‘a night in’ is when the chef prepares dinner on a tray and brings it to the cinema room.
I’ve heard of a tycoon who has created a designated drinking house for lockdown to avoid seeing his wife. He goes there every evening and sometimes doesn’t emerge until the next night.
Then there’s the tech mogul who has been breaking lockdown from the start, using his gardener’s car to escape to London where, his friends believe, he either visits his mistress or his plastic surgeon.
Others, though, will admit it’s been a sobering experience.
A very wealthy female hedge fund manager I know, who travels the world, says lockdown has been tough. ‘I’ve never ironed my own shirt,’ she says. ‘I have never spent a week without getting a blowdry or a manicure.’
Though she rapidly redeployed her cleaner after the initial two‑week quarantine period, she was reduced to paying a car service from London to deliver her bespoke hair dyes (her stylist refused to drive the 100 miles to visit).
But then, the super-rich don’t see themselves as subject to the restrictions that apply to the rest of us. Especially when it comes to travel.
As most of Britain eagerly waits to find out if we can go abroad for a summer holiday, one European trust fund child I know said he couldn’t understand what the fuss is all about. ‘Why don’t they just charter a jet?’ he asked.
A hedge funder’s wife told a friend of mine the other week that she was off to ‘get some vitamin D’. By that she meant, charter a private jet to take her to her house in St Tropez for the weekend.
The summer will be a big challenge for the super-rich for all the wrong reasons. As the average Brit stays home because he can’t afford a holiday, the rich consider the practicalities.
‘I’m driving to my house in Spain this summer,’ says an acquaintance. ‘I don’t trust the private jet company to disinfect its planes properly.’
It’s a tough life, but someone has to live it.