Servants of the super-rich

‘Let me tell you about the very rich,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘They are different from you and me.’ Indeed they are. They can afford to live in London.

Just how different became clear when The Spear’s 500 — ‘the essential guide to the top private client advisers’ — landed at the office. (We assume Spear’s sent it by mistake. We write for love here at The Spectator, and would be insulted if the editor offered us anything so vulgar as money.)

Still I was glad to read it. Spear’s paints the best portrait I have seen of a world beyond our means and comprehension. Do you have a starstruck child you wish to impress? One Lady Cosima Somerset of Concierge London boasts how she arranged a ‘chance’ encounter between a famous actress and a client to ‘wow’ his 12-year-old daughter. Or maybe you want a party that would make Fitzgerald’s Gatsby gasp. Dora Lowenstein Associates describes how they threw a bash for a client which was so star-studded that ‘Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles were little more than faces in the crowd’.

The editor, William Cash, son of Bill, does not quite say so, but the guide is aimed at helping the world’s super-rich find a home among us. It tells them that everything their money can buy is here waiting for them.

There are lists of private bankers, investment managers and tax lawyers, to manage their money; family lawyers, who can draw up pre-nups and fight staggeringly expensive divorce cases when the loves of their lives turn out to be gold-digging hussies; immigration lawyers, who can get them residence in Britain while sparing them the need to pay British taxes; libel lawyers who have rebranded themselves as ‘reputation managers’, who will sue those who fail to show them the required respect; and security specialists who can help them ward off fears of polonium-210 in the granola.