I’ve never cared about status symbols, because my talent is the only one I need, so of course I wasn’t concerned with mobile phones, which were once tremendous markers of rank. Since then, not having a smartphone (or pretending not to) has become a thing some high-status people boast about now that 95 per cent of the UK adult population (and a great deal of the child population) own them. Ed Sheeran claims to have dumped his in 2015, Elton John describes himself as a Luddite, while Simon Cowell sensibly told the Mail on Sunday way back in 2007: ‘It was actually stopping me from working or living properly, so I just turned it off and I went a month, three months, then a year, then two years, then three years and I love it…it’s absolutely made me happier.’ At the other end of the scale, in the same year but very ickily, Tom Cruise simpered: ‘I have no iPhone, no mobile, no email address, no watch, no jewellery, no wallet.’
If you have managers, agents and personal assistants to run everything, including crucially your social media accounts, you probably won’t need one.
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