Why it’s time for the ultra-rich to abandon luxury in order to save the world

Do you fancy chartering a private jet for a £1m world tour? Perhaps spending £62,000 on a new watch, or £89,000 on a bracelet? There is a magazine to cater to your needs, writes Alan Rusbridger. But given the state of the climate crisis, it is time to dispense with celebrations of mindless consumption

The champagne lifestyle (Getty)

Are you planning a party night in, say, Ibiza in the near future? You can get there for around £270, round trip, in a little over two hours with BA. But why risk all the hassle when you can rent a private jet for four to six friends? A snip at £30,000.

You don’t have £30,000 to splash on a Phenom private jet? Then it’s possible you’re not a reader of HTSI, the Financial Times’s glossy magazine aimed at the one percenters, or the would-be one percenters. Each week you are invited to gawp in a kind of aspirational haze at the lifestyles of the mega-rich. Or, as we must now call them, the ultra-rich.

Like their in-house magazine, the ultra-rich have their own acronym: UHWNIs, or ultra-high net worth individuals. And don’t the UNHWIs just love HTSI.

Before it was rebranded HTSI the magazine was called How to Spend it. A reporter for the Independent found a “well-thumbed copy” of the journal in a compound that once belonged to the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. An influencer before his time.

Gaddafi wouldn’t have been seen dead in a Phenom. He had his own private $120 million private Airbus A340. with several bathrooms, two showers, a jacuzzi and many leather sofas. He knew how to live.

But in 2022, with the nation still recuperating from Covid, the FT began to feel a bit squeamish about being seen to flaunt conspicuous wealth and wondered if the original brand, How to Spend It, was a little dated. The humour behind a wry wink at the stinking rich might have worn a little threadbare in the intervening 28 years.

The magazine’s new editor, Jo Ellison, explained: “We want the title and indeed our masthead to reflect a world with deeper sensitivities.” She said readers could interpret the “S” in any way they choose: it could be how to save it, or how to steer, surf or savour it.

Others were less kind, remarking that it sounded like a cross between a sexually transmitted disease and a large infrastructure project.

No matter. If Gaddafi had been alive today he might well have picked up last week’s magazine, which weighed in at 110 sumptuous pages. Newspaper advertising is withering on the vine, but not for the super-loaded. He would have thumbed through the initial splurge of plugs, starting with a “high jewellery” Cartier necklace in rose gold with coral beads and brilliant-cut diamonds for £31,000, or roughly the price of a round trip to Ibiza.

Then a Chaumet Bee My Love cuff in gold and diamonds for £89,000, followed by an Andersen Geneva jumping hours “timepiece” (never “watch”) The Rising Sun edition will set you back £62,000. Sanctions permitting, he could have contemplated a night at the luxury Emory hotel in Belgravia where – with starting prices at £2,460 a night – they throw in a courtesy car to selected private airfields and private jet terminals.

But that’s all puff advertising and, as a journalist, I have never much minded what happens in the spaces between the real words. As one historian of the newspaper wrote: “The daily press would never have come into existence as a force in public and social life had it not been for the need for men of commerce to advertise.”

But that quote – from Francis Williams’s Dangerous Estate in 1957 – does assume that some care has gone into what’s entailed in being a “force in public and social life.” Perhaps, as an editor in 2021 – slap in the middle of a climate change conference in Baku – you might pause before giving over a whole page of HTSI to “everything you need to know about flying private.”

The writer has, no question, done a comprehensive job, breaking the subject down into eight categories of the sort of exclusive travel that HTSI’s UHNWIs might be thinking about.

It begins with long haul flights, where the toss-up is between the $60m Bombardier Global 6000, which offers first class comfort and sleeps eight; or the $78m Gulfstream G650, which sleeps 10 but is reportedly “no less luxurious”.

Then we turn to mini breaks, where it looks as though a good option might be the Cessna Citation XLS, which at least has a lavatory. It will set you back $6.4m for a 2009 model. The “Best for Work” section recommends a $54m Dassault Falcon 7X for your next trip to New York, which comes with a cabin attendant and hot meals for a mere £120,000.

I’ve covered the section on Ibiza party possibilities (above), which alternatively holds out the potential of landing at Engadin Airport – “just 10 minutes from St Moritz’s bars.” Then we have the “best for pets” section for those wishing to fly to LA or Melbourne with their labradoodle side them.

And so on, culminating in a Dassault Falcon 7X which can be chartered for a two-week world tour with family and friends for around £1m.

Which “S” comes into your mind as you read about these sleek private airborne limousines? Spend? Save? Savour? Stuff? Screw? Scorch? Survive? Stop?

Sorry to be a bit sandal-wearing about this, but it doesn’t seem to be seriously disputed that flying in a private jet is one of the most catastrophic things an individual can do to really screw up the planet. Some private jets emit two tonnes of C02 in a single hour – the equivalent of 400 cars – and one takes off every six minutes in the UK. They are 50 times as polluting as travelling by train, spewing out nitrogen oxides and the effects of vapour trials on top of the Co2 emissions. In short: the super-rich 1 per cent are responsible for half the world’s aviation emissions.

Not that such figures seem to matter much to the people who habitually use the jets. You can travel from Farnborough to London in around 40 minutes on the train and it will cost you around twenty quid. Yet that route was the most popular UK internal route for private jets, with 131 such trips in 2022. The most popular European trip was Geneva to Paris (636 trips emitting 1.1 tonnes of C02) whereas the 99 percenters are happy enough to take the train which, for just over €200, will get you there in just over three hours.

But these are sobering times for the UHNWIs, what with Rachel Reeves slapping a £450 tax on each private jet journey. Added to which, the ridiculous timepieces that HTSI readers apparently covet are increasingly being snatched off their wrists. In 2022 more than 6,000 such timepieces were thus filched many of them by a gang known as the Rolex Rippers.

“It’s a perfect storm” one hedge fund manager lamented in another one percent magazine as he explained why he was fleeing London for Zurich. Not only were your Rolexes at risk, but – wait for it – “the fact that English law entitles a spouse to around half of family assets is another turn-off for many.”

It is perhaps too much to expect that journalism can any longer have much effect in turning the tide in the urgent battle to save humanity from drowning or scorching itself. But it’s quite another to be publishing such tasteless celebrations of the needless degradation of our atmosphere.

“Deeper sensitivities, indeed!” I think my S is Shove. And rebrand the magazine WTSI.