Billionaire whos proof that money CANT buy happiness: Hes a mobile phone tycoon with money to burn - and a lifestyle to make your jaw drop. But whats that worth when your familys in turmoil? John Caudwell, the founder of Phones 4U has a £2 billion fortune But it recently emerged that his son, Rufus, 19 suffers severe agoraphobia He has also separated from his partner of 15 years Claire Johnson Phones 4U recently went into administration with the loss of 6,000 jobs Mr Caudwell says that although it helps, money doesnt buy you happiness As one of the richest men in Britain, John Caudwell possesses a £2 billion fortune and all the grown-up toys that go with it: two vast mansions, a yacht, a helicopter and a fleet of luxury cars. Indeed, the man once known as the Mobile Phone King, and founder of Phones 4U, is the first to admit he enjoys his wealth. ‘My favourite thing is to come down to London from my home in Staffordshire in the helicopter and then get my bike out of the back and cycle into London. It’s wonderful,’ he tells me. Home in Staffordshire is a £10 million Jacobean affair, and the one in London an £85 million ‘super mansion’ that once belonged to a playboy member of the Brunei ruling family. It is a lifestyle that naturally engenders envy — until you discover that all is not as it seems behind the gilded doors of those opulent homes. Recently it emerged that Caudwell’s eldest son Rufus, 19, his youngest child by ex-wife Kathryn McFarlane, suffers severe agoraphobia. The affliction is so bad that a boy with the world at his feet spends most of his days confined to his bedroom, unable to leave the house. This week, meanwhile, Caudwell revealed that he and his partner of 15 years, Claire Johnson, have taken the reluctant decision to separate, leaving them both ‘desperately worried’ about the impact on the son they have together, ten-year-old Jacobi. ‘We have been growing apart for some time, but it has taken many agonising conversations to get to the point where we have been forced to acknowledge it would be better for us to be separate rather than together,’ he says. ‘Jacobi has been at the forefront of our minds through all of it, and of course we’re worried. All we can do is reassure him that he has two parents who love him very much and who will do everything in their power to be there for him.’ Still, it is far from an ideal situation — especially given the plight of Rufus, by all accounts a gentle soul who has been so crippled by agoraphobia for the past eight years that he has had periods of being unable to leave his room for days on end. His problems came to light in a recent documentary, in which he confided that a normal day was ‘depressingly devoid of purpose’. ‘It’s heartbreaking,’ says John, speaking about the situation for the first time. ‘We have had eight-and-a-half years of watching Rufus struggle with this thing and trying to make the best of it. He is a lovely, gifted boy and it’s so very sad to see what he is going through. He is surrounded by a lot of love, but love can’t solve the problem. If only it could.’ Nor, indeed can Caudwell’s many millions. ‘I would be the first to say that while a lack of money can cause misery, money doesn’t buy you happiness,’ he adds quietly. ‘When it comes to something like this, money doesn’t come into it. It can give you access to different people and help, but it doesn’t change the helplessness you feel when you see your own flesh and blood struggling. ‘The only really important thing, at the end of the day, is your health. If you haven’t got that, then all the money in the world isn’t going to bring you happiness.’ It’s a glimpse of the more emotional side of this somewhat unusual billionaire: a capitalist who is passionate that the wealthy should pay their fair share of tax, and a flamboyant bon viveur whose idea of a nice dinner is personalising a supermarket frozen pizza with his own toppings. Caudwell still shaves his own head and beard with a pair of clippers, rarely spends more than £30 on a bottle of wine and would far rather cycle than take a taxi. Still, he’s hardly slumming it either: we meet at his London home — a vast sprawling mansion in the heart of Mayfair which until last year belonged to Prince Jefri, the brother of the Sultan of Brunei and, at the moment, remains an eye-boggling vision of gigantic chandeliers, heavy gilt ornamentation and tapestried walls. It is actually two houses linked via a basement tunnel. Caudwell plans to renovate it to create a ‘mega mansion’ with a potential value of £250 million. It does beg the question: how many gigantic rooms does anyone need? But Caudwell is bullish, pointing out that as well as giving half his business profits to charity during his lifetime, the vast bulk of his wealth will also be donated in his will. ‘It should be very documented now that at least half of my wealth goes to my charity Caudwell Children, which raises money for under-privileged children. So I make no apology for wanting to make a profit — the more I make, the bigger percentage will go to charity. So most of the work I do now is motivated by that.’ The company that made Caudwell this vast fortune put him back in the headlines recently, when it emerged that Phones 4U had gone into administration, with the possible loss of nearly 6,000 jobs. Caudwell sold the company to two private equity firms in 2006, pocketing £1.46 billion — money that propelled him into the wealth stratosphere, freeing him to pursue all kinds of interests, from property development to fashion. It all sounds fabulous fun — on paper at least. Yet it’s now clear that a hidden shadow has been hanging over this gilded world for years. Even before his father sold his company for millions, Rufus was already experiencing panic attacks. ‘Rufus started having them aged ten,’ John recall. ‘We took him to see various people but we could never find a reason for it. What happens then is that it becomes a self-fulfilling illness. Rufus started to panic about the panic attacks.’ His daughter, too, has suffered psychological problems, believing her father’s extraordinary wealth contributed to the bouts of depression that blighted her years growing up. On the face of it, Libby Caudwell, now 26, enjoyed a blissful childhood, admitting she was spoiled rotten — she had a £3,000-a-month allowance in the sixth form at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Leona Lewis sang at her 21st birthday party. But from the age of 17 she, too, suffered anxiety attacks. ‘I was neurotic about my studies,’ she said in a recent interview, ‘unable to sleep for fear of failing. Dad became more high profile as his wealth grew and, as a coping mechanism, I developed a false confidence: I told myself that I was interesting and worthy because he was. I lived vicariously through Dad’s success. I began to feel depressed. And, increasingly, guilty. ‘What did I, the daughter of a billionaire, have to feel sorry for? The world really could have been my oyster — but its vastness simply paralysed me.’ Things got so bad that she asked her father to ‘cut her off’ and she rebuilt her life in relative anonymity in Australia, where she helped organise upmarket boat trips, before recently returning to the UK to work as a PA. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the children endured a period of some emotional uncertainty when growing up. After marrying Kathryn (also known as Kate), his teenage sweetheart and a former librarian, at the tender age of 21 (long, it must be said, before he had made his millions), the couple separated 25 years later in 1998. The couple have three children together — Rebekah, 35, a property developer who lives in New York, Libby and Rufus. The marriage ended on good terms, but years of romantic upheaval followed. In 2001, Caudwell met Claire, a former model and beauty queen, with whom he went on to have Jacobi. Before Jacobi was born, however, Caudwell embarked on a brief affair with Jane Burgess, a celebrated violinist who had found fame as the former mistress of Tory MP Rupert Allason. A pregnancy swiftly followed, leading to the birth, in March 2002, of daughter Scarlett, now 12. At the time, Caudwell was said to be furious and wanted no contact with mother or daughter, telling his local paper in Staffordshire, The Sentinel: ‘I can’t find any feeling about the child. All I can do is despise the mother and that makes it impossible to see the child.’ Years later, the unpleasantness seems to have been smoothed over, however, and Caudwell is now reconciled with his love child. It was a bad start, but I just thought I needed to put an end to that and make it all good. It wouldn’t have felt right otherwise,’ he says. ‘Now Scarlett is fully integrated into the family, she comes on holiday with us the whole time and we all get together when we can.’ It’s hard not to speculate that these emotional dramas during his childhood may have been a factor in creating Rufus’s unhappy state of mind — but it’s a suggestion his father robustly refutes. ‘It is a convenient supposition, but it’s pretty well established by those who know him best that his problems are nothing to do with Kate and I splitting up,’ he insists. Certainly, while largely resident with his mother, Rufus saw — and continues to see — his father regularly, and though his parents are divorced, they remain great friends, So much so that Kathryn is godmother to Jacobi. ‘For Kate’s 50th birthday I threw her a surprise party and bought her a villa in the South of France — this was long after the financial settlement had been signed and sealed. So I’d say that’s quite a good relationship,’ says John. It is a model he intends to follow with ex-partner Claire, who will move from the Staffordshire mansion into a new home in coming months. ‘We have told Jacobi we will still be a team, even if we are living apart. We have to be, because it would be a disaster if we weren’t,’ says Caudwell. When it comes to all his children, meanwhile, he insists he has taken the same approach — one of making them realise how privileged they are. I brought the children up to know the value of money, to understand how blessed they are when most of the world is not. They worked in my call centres in the early days and I’ve involved them a lot in my charity, meeting disadvantaged kids.’ They will also not inherit his entire fortune, as Caudwell has signed up to The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic movement set up by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage the wealthy to leave half their money to charity. This, though, appears to have not stopped his children feeling the pressure of their father’s legacy. ‘We will never quite live up to Dad, whatever we do,’ Rufus told the recent Channel 4 documentary. ‘We almost feel guilty that we have this. You think “What have I done? Why do I deserve this?” It’s the luck of the draw. I just happened to be born from a certain set of parents.’ Rufus’s troubles clearly weigh heavily on his father. ‘It is very upsetting and frustrating,’ says Caudwell. ‘But most of all for Rufus. It’s been a roller-coaster, a total roller-coaster. ‘We’ve tried everything — different doctors, different therapists. There’s nothing we’ve not tried really, to help him. Sometimes we think there’s a breakthrough. Around Christmas time he seemed to get a little better — sometimes something as small as a change in medication can make all the difference — but subsequently he got worse again.’ He pauses. ‘It’s very, very hard.’ But then Caudwell, 61, has known hardship before: like all the best entrepreneur tales, his is a classic rags-to-riches. The eldest of two brothers, he was born to a working-class family in Stoke-on-Trent and his father was gravely ill through much of his childhood, dying when Caudwell was 18. His mother worked in a postroom to make ends meet. Caudwell abandoned his A-levels to become apprentice at the local Michelin tyre plant. Even then, a certain business flair was emerging: on the side, Caudwell — still in his teens — was running a mail order business selling motorbike clothing. Assorted low-level jobs followed — shifts in a car factory here, a corner shop there — before, in 1987 at the age of 35, he bought a job lot of gigantic, clunky mobile phone handsets, reasoning that mobile technology was a growing business. He got that right: it took a while to shift that first consignment but Caudwell had found his niche. Phones 4U was born. A cornerstone of the boom era in mobiles, it became a feature of most British High Streets and, by 2003, was selling 26 phones every minute. Not any more — last month the company collapsed almost overnight after mobile networks Vodafone and EE severed ties with it, joining O2, which did the same six months ago. Being unable to sell phone contracts left the company with effectively no business, and left Caudwell fuming with anger. ‘My issue is the way that it has been killed off with such a ruthless, predatory action. So yes, I’m upset. ‘Not for the business as such — although there is an emotional attachment there — but for the people and their livelihoods. Some of them will be facing very tough times.’ They are not the only ones, it seems. While Caudwell will never have to worry about where the next penny comes from, his anguish over the breakdown of his complex family means few today would be quite so quick as they once were to swap places with him.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 06:24:39 +0000
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