Lottery winners are strikingly unimaginative about spending money

I thought that this week I might write about memory loss, but couldn’t remember if I’d written about it last week. Then I remembered that I had written about it, not in The Spectator but in the current issue of the Oldie magazine of which, if I remember correctly, I am the editor. I wrote there about my fear of being exposed by my doctor as mentally deficient in return for the £55 that David Cameron proposes to pay doctors every time they find signs of dementia in any of their patients. So I won’t go on about that again, but will instead celebrate the 20th anniversary of the National Lottery, which I have always hoped might come to the rescue if senility were ever to set in. I have never actually won anything on the Lottery since the then prime minister, John Major, introduced it in 1994, but hope springs eternal.

Those, like myself, who never win anything, let alone the jackpot, like to take comfort from the stories of those whose lives have been ruined by the sudden acquisition of great wealth, who have taken to drink or drugs, lost all their friends, and even ended up bankrupt because of their extravagance. But surveys have tended to show that, on the contrary, lottery winners are happier than they were before, more peaceful, less worried, more contented. How true is this? Last weekend the Daily Mail managed to assemble 20 lottery winners, one for each year of its existence, and picture them over a double-page spread in dinner jackets and evening gowns, clinking champagne glasses with complacent smiles on their faces. Their winnings ranged from £1 million to £40 million, and each gave an account of what he or she had done with the money.