VIVAT!

So there’s this family: the father’s in his seventies, his wife - his second - is in her forties, they have eight children, live in a big house. Their house is, frankly, a disgrace; their pet dogs eat scraps of food out of discarded fast food wrappers left on a coffee table, and the floors and the back garden are strewn with the dogs' activity's end result. The kids are out of control. The father sits in his pants, surrounded with piles of rubbish, eating pizza off a tray in front of a giant television.

Are they typical welfare dependents? Bound for Jeremy Kyle? No, because these people are multi-millionaires. They live like this because the father’s business is in trouble and they’ve had to lay off all the staff except for one nanny who lives in a wendy house in the back garden. They’ve also laid off all the staff in the business the father ran. 

This family is the subject of the film The Queen of Versailles; it shows a macro version of what’s happened to a lot of people since the sub-prime mortgage meltdown of a few years ago, and that’s reflected in the micro by a small subplot that follows a old friend of the wife who suffers a greater loss in the same financial disaster. 

One of the things that sticks most after seeing the film is how quickly the family spiral down into squalor; without staff, they have no idea and no capability for looking after themselves, and within weeks they’re up to their neck in old McDonald’s wrappers. Not that this stops them from spending atrocious amounts of money; there’s a scene involving a shopping trip that should, if you have any sense of social outrage, send you into a flat fury. 

What really stays with you is the sense of entitlement they have: despite having lost most of his considerable fortune, the father refuses to take the advice of everybody else and determinedly keeps hold of the fifty-two story timeshare complex that’s causing the majority of his problems, and his wife still makes plan for their new house - the largest in the USA, half-built, costing fifty million dollars so far with another fifty needed to finish it. 

If they were the typical Jeremy Kyle welfare-claiming family, they’d be the centre of all kinds of Daily Mail-style anger. But they’re not - they’re still an incredibly wealthy family for whom ‘poverty’ is a more relative concept than it is for the unemployed salesman let go in their company’s cost-cutting. 

But it shows that the divide between rich and poor is a lot more narrow than we’d care to think; no matter how much money you may have, you’re never that far from the people with nothing. It’s all a matter of self-respect. I know people who literally haven’t a penny but would rather die than let their houses - houses they’ll probably lose in the benefit changes coming next year - fall into the disrepair that we’re supposed to accept as some form of well-financed eccentricity from the family in the film. The simpering ‘well, I know I shouldn’t let this happen but it’s out of my hands’ attitude of the mother would see her demonised if she was claiming benefits. 

There are undeserving poor, according to politicians of a certain stripe - politicians that the father in the film boasts of having helped into office (and if you don’t see that scene, early in the film, and wonder why he hasn’t faced criminal charges, we can’t be friends). But it seems to me that there are a lot more undeserving rich. 

The Queen of Versailles is showing at selected cinemas, but as it’s a BBC Storyville production it may well be shown on television soon. You really ought to watch it.