The desperate shortage of domestic staff is causing bidding wars among super rich households
Our writer lost her housekeeper for an offer five times the going rate and a gifted compound in the Algarve - and she s not alone
26 June 2021 • 6:08am
One top agency with 35,000 candidates on its books could not find one single housekeeper recently
Credit: Getty
It was not unusual - before the pandemic - for the wealthy to move between multiple homes on the basis of a weather report. As all their homes were staffed, stocked and on standby; it was only a matter of their pilot confirming a departure time.
Macron and Biden at the G7 summit in Carbis Bay earlier this month
Credit: Getty Images
2020 will always be remembered for the pandemic. and the clips of the Texas lawyer who couldn t work out how to turn off the kitten filter during a Zoom court debate and felt the need to say I m not a cat , or the New Yorker journalist who was fired after being caught performing a lewd act (on himself) during a Zoom staff meeting thinking his camera was switched off.
In January 2020, there were 659,000 Zoom users in the UK. By April that had risen to 13 million. By the end of the same month, Google Meet was adding three million new users every day. Never in living memory has there been such an upheaval of the way many of us live and work.
Why Graydon Carter s feud with haute restaurateur Keith McNally is just a little too showbiz
Carter has been banned from McNally s restaurants for life - but this spat may have been a long time boiling
The former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter
Credit: Larry Busacca/VF16
Keith McNally, owner of some of New York’s most glamorous restaurants, took to Instagram outraged last week, owing to an unannounced stand-up from Graydon Carter, the ex-Vanity Fair Editor.
The story goes like this: Carter booked a table for 12 people at 1pm on a busy day at McNally’s top-tier Morandi restaurant, then failed to show up. According to McNally, extra staff had been brought in to help with the service and Carter’s actions cost Morandi money, as well as tip money for the servers.