The appointment of Sajid Javid as the new Secretary of State for Culture has been much criticised on the grounds that culture is not his forte; and in an interview with the Times the other day he confessed that he had never been to the opera. This is a little surprising because, as a former banker in the City earning an estimated £3 million a year, he is just the kind of person you might expect to go to the Royal Opera House if only to flaunt his wealth. However, Javid has never seen an opera; and the reasons he gave for this in his interview were that when he was young he was too poor, and that once he had become rich there was ‘not much time outside work’.
Not much time outside work? It used to be the case that very rich people had much more time to enjoy themselves than anybody else. I once asked a godmother of mine, who was very well-off, where she was going on holiday that year, and she replied with furrowed brow that people like her didn’t go on ‘holiday’; they just went wherever they wished whenever they felt like it. She was, I suppose, a member of what used to be called the ‘leisured class’, those people who were rich enough to work very little and to devote themselves instead to philanthropy or to private interests such as art, music or gardening.
But it seems now that the rich are no longer as free as they were. Research conducted by sociologists at Oxford University has purportedly shown that the people who earn the most money are also the people who work the longest hours. It is not entirely clear to me why this should be so, but one reason appears to be that working for huge rewards is so stimulating that it becomes addictive; and another that it generates intense competitiveness and feelings of insecurity.
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