BILLIONAIRES IN NEED

AS Christmas approaches there is no shortage of appeals to your charitable instincts. Should you give to this good cause or that, buy one charity’s Christmas cards or another’s? It’s a strain on both principles and wallet.

Nevertheless, there is one cause that is exceptional, and so worthy of your immediate attention that you will be ashamed for not thinking of these poor souls before. Yes, it’s billionaires.

The Swiss bank UBS estimates there are 1542 of them in the world.

America has the most (563), then China (318) and Germany (117). If you prefer your good causes to be local, the UK has 55.

Their plight came to light this week with the sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for £341 million – the highest price ever paid for a painting.

Searching for an explanation as to why anyone would hand over so much, the Today programme turned to Georgina Adam, author of Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century (yours for a very reasonable £19.99 on Amazon, as owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s number one billionaire).

Ms Adam said the market was being fuelled by “the sheer amount of money that billionaires have”. If you are worth tens of billions, £341 million is not a huge chunk out of one’s fortune.

Suddenly, the plight of billionaires became all too clear. It’s supply and demand, innit? There are only so many London townhouses, Manhattan apartments, yachts, diamonds, bottles of rare wine and private islands in the world. Yet the number of folk who want to buy them is increasing in number, and the mountain of money they have to spend is growing by the second. The market cannot meet the demands being placed on it.

How could Marx not foresee such a glaring deficiency in the capitalist system? Too busy fretting about class struggle to predict there would one day be billionaires scrambling to find things to spend money on.

I jest, of course. Any billionaire worth his or her salt and place in heaven can easily find a home for their money in a good cause, and many do.

What the likes of the da Vinci painting, and before that the Paradise Papers leak, make clear, however, is the increasing gulf between the super rich and the rest of us. They don’t just live in bigger homes; they might as well be on a different planet.

Here on Earth, in the UK to be precise, we are about to have our own ponder about haves and have nots. It’s Budget time, when we turn back the political clocks and pretend that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has ability to make huge differences to millions of lives with one speech to the Commons.

Yet that has not been the case for some time. Budgets used to be momentous events, now they largely exist as political theatre, an occasion for Westminster to dress up and think of how it used to be. But the days of Jenkins, Healey, Lawson, even Brown and those extra billions for the NHS in his 2000 Budget, are gone. Only accountants, think tanks and the media can get excited about Budgets now.

One could blame globalisation, the crash of 2008, or a looming Brexit, but there is also the not inconsiderable problem every Chancellor now faces: the Great British public has become allergic to income tax rises.

As with full percentage hikes in the interest rate, an electorate worn down by stagnant pay and rising prices simply won’t tolerate being asked to hand over more. Denied the means to bring in the big bucks via income tax, Chancellors are forced to tinker around the margins, nipping here and tucking there.

Not every party, of course, agrees that tax rises are taboo. Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, said this week he would raise an extra £17 billion through taxes to spend on public services. Scotland, the First Minister has promised, is to have its own great debate on tax. Given the outcry in some quarters over the SNP Government’s freezing of the 40p threshold, and this week’s row over how many Scots were paying more in tax than their counterparts in England, any “debate” is going to be of the stairheid variety. Or will Scotland buck the perceived trend on income tax the way it has with minimum pricing for alcohol? 

In the meantime, prepare for a lot of sound, perhaps even fury, after Philip Hammond resumes his seat next Wednesday afternoon. And don’t worry. Unless he is getting ready to pull the mother and father of rabbits out of his hat, his Budget will contain nothing to trouble any billionaires on the hunt for that next special something to buy. Small seasonal mercies, eh?

GRUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE

THERE is something about the Johnson family that reminds me of the old story about Mike and Bernie Winters at the Glasgow Empire. 

You know the one: Mike comes on stage to a tumbleweed welcome, Bernie joins him, only for someone to shatter the silence with the cry: “Oh God, there’s two of them!”

Except in the case of the Johnsons there are more than two. Among the most prominent are Boris the Foreign Secretary, Jo the Universities Minister, Rachel the columnist, and their father Stanley, whose long list of jobs includes writer and conservationist. Now Stanley is to take part in I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, which starts its annual run tomorrow. For those who have been holed up in an Australian rainforest for the past 15 years, I’m A Celeb is an ITV reality show in which a group of people, many of whom you have never heard, endure all sorts of indignities to win food for their campmates. 

The 77-year-old is favourite to win, too. One way or another there is just no escaping the blonde ambitions of the Johnsons.

HIGH FIVE TO ONE BRAVE DOG

HERE’S to Mali, the eight-year-old dog yesterday awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal for his contribution to a British Special Forces assault on a Taliban position in Kabul.

The citation says the Belgian Malinois “displayed outstanding courage in the face of fire” and there was no doubt that his actions, including searching for explosives, had helped to save lives. Mali was hit by shrapnel during the 2012 assault, but carried on despite his injuries.
Taking their name from Maria Dickin, founder of the PDSA, the medals were first handed out in 1943. Over the years they have gone to dogs, cats, horses, pigeons and other creatures. 

Just as no human knows how they will fare under fire till it happens, so it is hard to imagine our pets in such extreme circumstances. Take a look at that big lump on the sofa (the dog, not your other half), or that little darling who has just stormed through the door demanding her dinner (the cat, not the daughter). Are they the stuff of medal winners? In the eyes of those who love them, too right they are.