Always intriguing to watch the emergence of a new publicity circuit, so the warmest of welcomes to the loose collective of multimillionaires currently using their well-earned platforms to announce their imminent departure from the UK. If their number has an indisputable star at the moment, it is the Pimlico Plumbers founder Charlie Mullins, who resembles the world’s oldest boyband member, and sports so much dermal filler that I can only assume that even he lacks the drain rods to address it. Goes without saying I have always had a HUGE amount of time for him. Charlie claims to “often” be mistaken for Rod Stewart, presumably by moles or pavement satirists.
But you may recognise him from various legal challenges to Brexit, and – last year – the suggestion that “someone should kill” London’s “Muslim mayor”, Sadiq Khan. Back during the Brexit years, Mullins declared: “Nobody can tell me to shut the window on 500 million customers in the EU, and £225bn worth of trade.” Then, this year, he opted to throw his lot in with Nigel Farage’s Reform party. Please, please don’t try to rationalise it! Just let it flood your home like an uninsured act of God.
Over the past week or so, Charlie has graced media outlets including the Times, the Telegraph, the Mail and GB News, breaking 67 million hearts by informing the nation that, because of what he suspects will be Labour’s incipient tax raid, he is selling up and moving to Marbella and Dubai. Truly the biathlon of relocation for the international arseoisie.
Clearly, leaving a country should be like leaving Twitter (I decline to call it X): just stop posting. There really is absolutely no need to explain “with a heavy heart”, and despite “this place being amazing in the good years”, that you are now not going to bless it with your presence any longer. Honestly: just log off.
Alas, Charlie Mullins finds himself simply unable to log off the UK without fanfare, granting a series of landmark interviews on the matter, in which our crystal-tipped boy pensioner, 71, touches on both his fears for inheritance tax and his future with his fiancee, Ra Ra, 33. It was only last year that they were disclosing their plans to marry in St Paul’s cathedral. “We’re allowed to do that because I’ve got an OBE,” explained Charlie, who will now presumably have to plight his latest troth in one of Dubai’s architectural triumphs – a mall in the shape of a gold bar, perhaps, or a phallic golf hotel.
It must be said that the farewell interviews also seem to serve in part as lengthy estate agent’s adverts for what is variously described as his £10m and £12m London riverside penthouse, which various publications assure us is packed with “art and artefacts” Charlie has chosen himself. Squinting at the photos, I would say most pieces fit into the latter category rather than the former. I am looking at a wall-mounted illuminated question mark – certainly makes you think – and an antique bronze skeleton holding two bottles of Moët that even the leading cultural institutions of Dubai may think twice about accepting on loan.
As for things that should be hung in a gallery, I cherish the photograph from the day of one Brexit legal challenge, where Mullins’s personalised Bentley is parked half on the pavement directly in front of the door of the Royal Courts of Justice. Restrictions, of course, are for other people – all those boring little bods whose taxes are extracted by PAYE and don’t regard percentage contributions to wider society as an act of personal heroism. Not for them the epithet “wealth creator” – but then, Charlie does epitomise that particular self-importance of those who feel that wealth is not merely its own reward, but should buy them a whole row of seats at the table as well. One of Mullins’s justifications for joining Reform was an affronted “Tories not speaking to me!”.
The sense that other, lesser people are now being spoken to for five minutes by the governing party is evidently too much to bear for Charlie, and supposedly for record numbers of other millionaires fleeing for more tax-efficient climes. Those figures are all somewhat “citation needed”. But even taken on their own terms, they indicate a view that calcified remarkably over the past 14 years – of the UK as a place for capital investment at the right return, but not for social investment. We shall have to see if Labour is skilled and visionary enough to reset that; early signs are not wholly encouraging. But in the meantime, have we really “lost” Charlie Mullins? Or have we, happily, finally found the stopcock for him?
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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