By Dan Amor
I
think it was John Paul Getty, the American-born British billionaire,
philanthropist and heir to oil industry fortune, who quipped, when asked how
rich he was, 'No one is really rich if he can count his money.' In Getty's day,
anyone with one million British pounds ( or even one million dollars) was rated as
'rich' and anyone with more than five million pounds was 'very rich'. Above
that and you were in the 'super rich' category, and when you got above the
fifty million pounds level, you rated as a 'can't count'.
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| President Buhari and Vice-President Osinbajo |
Nelson Bunker Hunt,
who with his brother inherited a fortune even greater than Getty's, was a
'can't count' man before he tried to corner the silver market. Asked by a
Senate Committee how much he was worth, he snapped, 'Hell, if I knew that, I
wouldn't be worth very much'. In the United States, for many years
Forbes Magazine and Fortune, among others, have
published lists of the very wealthy which have been eagerly awaited events in a
society where wealth is a macho symbol, to be boasted about rather than hidden.
In Great Britain, however, wealth is something best not talked about, and it
has never been easy to establish authoritatively just who owns what, and what
they are worth. Most of the stupendous wealth in Britain
as in Nigeria,
had been shrouded in secrecy.
Yet,
in 1989, the Sunday Times of London broke with tradition by publishing the
first real guide to Britain's wealthy, causing a considerable amount of unease
among those who hated being on it. In 1990, the Sunday Times repeated the
exercise, adding a further 70 names to the list and raising the stake to £70
million. Both the 1989 and 1990 lists which occupied most of one entire colour
magazine, have since been widely discussed and copied by the rest of Fleet
Street. They have also been used as ammunition by both sides of the Old Britain
versus New Britain, quoted on the one hand to
show how even in the Thatcher years old money had reinforced its power, and on
the other hand, to record the rise and rise of the new rich at the expense of
the old in Britain.
When the Sunday Times published the first list in 1989, the paper commented
editorially on its own study, mourning the fact that, after a decade of
Thatcherism, old money still dominated and paternalism appeared to be making a
comeback. Others, of course, took an entirely different view of the list,
expressing astonishment at the amount of new money, at the relative decline of
old wealth, and the degree of egalitarianism which had crept in. It generated a
debate which still goes on more than two decades after the publication.
