Few issues have defined life for young adults in the UK today like the country’s housing crisis. Never in living memory has the difference between what we earn and what property costs been so stark. In the past 30 years, the average household income has tripled, while average house prices have quadrupled.
As such, a generation of frustrated adults have found themselves paying extortionate rent or moving back to the family home to scrabble together the cash for a deposit on a house that costs far more than their parents would have paid at their age. It’s an emotive issue, a headache for politicians, and of course young people themselves.
So, when beloved shouty chef Gordon Ramsay shared the story of buying his first flat with his wife Tana on Jake Humphrey’s podcast High Performance, ears pricked up around the country. What tips might we glean? If good old Gordon could do it, maybe there was hope for the rest of us after all!
Unfortunately – though thankfully, hilariously – Ramsay’s story couldn’t have been less relatable if he’d workshopped it with a writers room full of the world’s top satirists.
First, he explained that he took his father-in-law out to lunch, where he asked him to lend the couple £20,000 – why didn’t I ever think of that?! – only to be chastened by the older man’s hard bargaining.
“He [his father-in-law] said: ‘Okay, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll have another lunch with you when you sell your Porsche,’” recalled the chef. “I thought, you f**ker. But, you clever f**ker. Here I am driving around in a flash 911, and we didn’t even have a house, a flat, a roof over our heads. It was the best advice he ever gave me: sell your f**king Porsche.”
Hard to argue with that – imagine your upstart son-in-law turning up for lunch in a luxury car to ask you for tens of thousands of pounds. But while Ramsay delivers the anecdote like a mic-drop life lesson, I’m afraid it doesn’t register for those of us without Porsches to sell.
“We were young, we were stupid, we were skint,” says Ramsay in the podcast; young and stupid perhaps, but Ramsay’s definition of skint won’t have aligned with that of many listeners.
While I’m generally a fan of the straight-talking chef, this sell-your-car-sacrifice story has more in common with the avocado toast brigade (you know the ones, who say young people can’t afford flats because they go for brunch too often, rather than because the economy is almost comically stacked against them) than his customary anti-establishment vibe. The anecdote is meant to be about prioritising necessities such as housing over luxuries like sports cars – trouble is, for many young people in 2023, there aren’t any extravagances left to cut.
It’s not Ramsay’s fault that he married a woman whose family could help them out with a deposit, or that he earned enough to have bought a fancy car in the first place – the trouble is rather in the lack of self-awareness, the idea that his privileged experiences are something that could be meaningfully rolled out to the rest of the population. Housing crisis solved – just ask your father-in-law for a chunk of cash and sell your sports car!
Luckily, it’s not down to Ramsay to solve the sorry state of housing in the UK or the broken economy that entrenches it with every passing day. Less luckily, the people who are responsible for those things are far, far more privileged than Ramsay could ever hope to be; this time last year, nearly two-thirds of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet had attended independent schools, some are millionaires and the prime minister’s family is worth £730m.
While I’m a firm believer that lived experience shouldn’t be a prerequisite for empathy, I do think that at a certain point, the cushion of privilege must make it almost impossible to imagine what life is like for normal people. Ramsay’s years in the limelight seem to have carried him some distance from that yardstick, but here’s hoping that ruthless giggling on social media can pull him back.
