It's hell being posh but poor: Petronella Wyatt has sold her pearls and given up dining at the Ritz in Chanel suits because, like her friends in the 'Broke Generation', she says you just can't live on six-figures



Petronella Wyatt can no longer afford the finer things

Sipping the remainder of my glass of chablis after a pleasant meal in a London restaurant with a man in his early 40s, my mood was one of contentment. It was our first date a month ago, and the man, an affable television executive, was enjoying a brandy when the waiter brought the bill. My date examined it forensically.

‘That’s £60 each,’ he declared. ‘Do you want to give me cash, or shall we give him two credit cards?’

I pushed my glass aside in consternation. I don’t object to going Dutch, but I feared my credit card would be rejected.

My companion seemed as mortified as I was. ‘You must think me very unchivalrous, but I’m skint,’ he said. As he appeared to be in a confiding mood, I asked how much he earned. ‘Around £80,000,’ he replied. ‘Some people might think that’s riches, but in London it gets you nowhere.’



Most of his friends were in a similar predicament, he said. Men, women, even those without dependants. No one seems to have money any more, despite, on paper at least, earning enviable salaries. I listened intently — he may well have been holding up a mirror to my own life.

I, too, earn between £80,000 and £100,000 a year, yet a rejected credit card is only the start of my financial woes. I’ve even come to the point where a visit from the bailiffs is a very realistic prospect — a troubling predicament I’d lived with for years.



But how did I, a privately educated, privileged Oxbridge graduate come to be part of what I call the Broke Generation? My friends come from similarly well-heeled backgrounds. We work hard. Ten or 15 years ago, this would have guaranteed financial security, yet it has become increasingly difficult for us to make ends meet.

At a dinner party last week, a friend renowned for her wardrobe of designer outfits and Louboutin heels asked how I was getting home. A criminal lawyer, she earns upwards of £120,000.

‘Do you want to share a taxi?’ I asked hopefully. ‘No, I’ll take the Tube,’ she said. ‘These shoes cost £370 — it was either them or taxis.’ Readers will no doubt accuse us of being spoiled. And I am — or rather I was.



Time was when a salary of £120,000 allowed one to live the life of a potentate. I know. My late father, the politician Woodrow Wyatt, never earned more than £130,000, yet he maintained a Grade II-listed house (albeit rented) in the same London street as Sir Paul McCartney, with a cook and a butler.

For many years, he owned a Queen Anne manor in Wiltshire, which was similarly staffed, while renting holiday villas in expensive Italian resorts. He dressed in bespoke suits, owned a cellar full of first-growth claret and a collection of pre-Castro Havana cigars. My mother, to whom he gave an allowance, was clothed almost exclusively in Chanel, and had her hair done every week at the high-end hairdressers, Daniel Galvin.

Il Pellicano hotel, Porto Ercole, Italy, where Petronella remembers a happy, expensive, holiday

When I was four, I had a Dior nightdress. I was sent to the expensive St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, while my brother boarded at Harrow.

When my father died in 1997, he left me only his books. He, like me, assumed I was quite capable of earning my own living. Today, my father’s salary would fail to stretch to a small flat in a rather scruffy part of town, let alone a house in an exclusive part of London.

I earn twice as much now as I did in my late 20s, but back then I lived in a way that would be impossible now. Back then, on a visit to Paris, for example, I treated myself to two nights at the Ritz.



That same summer, I booked myself a week at the Pellicano, one of Italy’s priciest hotels. I owned a sizeable flat in Primrose Hill on which I had no difficulty paying the mortgage, dined at The Ivy and thought nothing of spending £800 on a designer outfit.

I have calculated I would need to earn at least £300,000 now — a sum quite beyond most journalists — to enjoy the luxury to which I had once become accustomed. I’m not exaggerating when I confess whenever the doorbell rings at my rented flat in North London, I worry if it is the bailiff. Six months ago, it was. I told him, quite honestly, that I had nothing worth confiscating.

Petronella remembers a time when she would not think twice about staying at the Ritz Hotel in Paris

To my relief, then growing chagrin, he agreed. (Note to future bailiffs: my television is probably the only non-flat screen left in Britain, my CD player jumps and all my jewellery is paste.)

Among the many reasons for my predicament is that prices have risen disproportionately to salaries, the country remains in recession, and the arrival of the uber-rich from countries like Russia has priced the once well-off out of the market.



But there are other, less palatable, causes. Like many of my friends, I have no capital to speak of. We never thought to save. We simply assumed our golden days would last for ever. I have a loan and a credit card bill which I know I will be paying off for years.



Robert, a financial PR I have known for 20 years, told me: ‘I spend my time paying off loans. I took out three in the Nineties, and now I can’t sleep. We never foresaw the recession.’

He had been going through bank statements and discovered, in 1998 alone, he spent £30,000 on holidays, restaurants and gifts to his then girlfriend.

As for me, I was treated like a queen by the men who took me out. One boyfriend, who earned £150,000, bought me real pearls (note to bailiffs: I sold them), valuable first editions (also sold) and also sent me flowers every week. For my birthday, he flew me around the world first class.

Petronella can no longer afford hotels and fine wines on her six-figure salary - and says many of her friends face the same predicament

We spent weekends at his country house near Oxford. I never cooked because he employed a chef.



When we had arguments about money, it was because he had spent thousands of pounds on a 17th-century chair on which I was not allowed to sit lest I damage the upholstery, or complained about my smoking because it ‘wasn’t good’ for his Zoffany paintings. The other day I bumped into a mutual friend and I asked after my ex.

‘He’s not doing so well. He had to sell his house and his art collection,’ he explained.

‘Did he go bankrupt?’ I enquired in horror.

‘No, he still earns about £200,000. It’s just you have to be an oligarch to live the way he used to.’

These days, many members of the Broke Generation are finding that the money they earn can’t even buy them love.

‘I can’t afford to have sex at the moment,’ says my former school friend Rosamund, a slender, 40-year-old lawyer who broke up with her banker boyfriend after he demanded she pay half the rent on his Mayfair flat.



She’s now ended up in a rented flat in a not-so-nice part of town — and men are an unrequired extra while she battles to pay the bills.

Gone are the days when Petronella could clothe herself in designer goods - the writer claims that she no longer has anything the bailiffs would consider worth confiscating

Another woman I know, who has curves that — to paraphrase Raymond Chandler — would have a bishop kicking through a stained glass window, has been celibate for six months.

She says: ‘I spent thousands on my last boyfriend. It wasn’t just the expensive beauty treatments I had to have to keep myself looking good — many men these days expect you to be a cash cow, too.’

To attack male members of the Broke Generation for parsimony would be unjust, however. As my date said: ‘I would love to buy you dinner at The Ritz, but I don’t have the cash.’

Recently divorced, he had two sons to educate (privately of course) and was paying maintenance to his ex-wife.



In order to foot the bills, he had been forced to sell his house in Knightsbridge and move to a flat in the less-salubrious Wandsworth. He despaired of ever having enough money to move back to Central London.



Petronella never had to cook when she stayed at friend's country mansions because a cook was always hired

In the past six months, three of my friends have also been forced to sell properties in such prime areas as Fulham, Chelsea and Primrose Hill, and settle for flats in the suburbs.

Of course, some of us are more broke than others and sadly, it is no longer the case that an educated woman with a university degree and a strong work ethic enjoys a successful professional life.



Middle-class women in general are faring worse than men, as employers cut jobs in the public and private sectors.



Overall, the rise in female unemployment in the last quarter of 2011 was up by 32,000, while for men it was up by only half that number.

In the private sector, female unemployment rose by 18 per cent, compared with eight per cent for men, while a breakdown of unemployment figures shows 79 per cent of women who joined the dole queue last year were childless.



As a childless woman paying a mortgage of £350 a week, not to mention utility bills and council tax, there is not much, even after my relatively high earnings, to play with.

So, far from having it all, the Broke Generation are having to give up their treats.

Last year, for example, I had to decide between a summer holiday and a new summer dress. I decided on the holiday, but as the cost of the flights and hotel added up, I realised I would have to raise an additional £400.

I began selling the summer clothes I had bought the previous spring. I now buy vintage, and rummage through charity shops.

Owning a Chanel suit, the price of which has risen over ten years from £1,000 to more than £5,000, is out of the question. Indeed, I can barely afford the charity shops in St John’s Wood, where I live.

Despite these savings, I no longer take a holiday in the winter and rarely eat in a fashionable restaurant, let alone visit places like the Ritz. It is a struggle to pay the rent.

The last time I ate out was two weeks ago at the local pub. And even then we managed to get the bill waived because my girlfriend spotted a rat on the premises and complained.

Petronella recalls when her mother was clothed almost exclusively in Chanel

I’m broke and nothing, it seems, will fix it any time soon.

Friends of mine who are single or divorced hope, like me, that they will meet a rich potential partner. Yet all the rich men seem to be over 60 with body odour, double chins and a Slavic-sounding accent.

I once met Bernie Ecclestone, before he remarried, and he invited me to be his guest at a Formula One event. I politely declined.

‘Why didn’t you go?’ a friend enquired. ‘You’ll never meet another man who could keep you in such luxury.’

‘Sorry,’ I replied, ‘but it would have been like living with Boris Karloff’.

I am one of the luckier ones. Other women I know have been forced into sexless relationships because they have dependants to support.

A close friend wed a minuscule man old enough to be her grandfather ‘because he promised to put his house in Chelsea in my name and pay for private schools for my son’.

In my social circle, marrying for love alone is becoming rare among both sexes. A handsome surgeon friend recently walked down the aisle with someone with a nose like the Shard and the temperament of a shrew.

He explained his decision thus: ‘I’m poor, she’s rich. I have a four-year-old daughter and I don’t want her to grow up without the things I had.’

We of the Broke Generation have discovered penury is not only a financial privation, but also an emotional one. We are damned if we follow our hearts and inclinations, and damned if we don’t.



As the money trickles away, prices rise ever higher and the loans we took out so carelessly haunt our dreams, a take-out from the local pizzeria seems our only option.