Editorial: It's hard work being a millionaire

When Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm sung "Who wants to be a millionaire?" in High Society, their assumption was that getting hold of a million dollars primarily meant the chance to give up the day job. More precisely, it meant wallowing in champagne and riding a supersonic plane. That, and "having fancy flunkies everywhere", of course.

Inflation over the years has put paid to those goals; a million pounds doesn't get you that many flunkies now. Forget planes. At the same time a cultural shift against wallowing in general has taken place, if the results of a new survey by the National Lottery are anything to go by. This shows that almost 20 per cent of those who became millionaires went back to their old jobs, including one man who eagerly returned to his post at McDonald's. Evidently, the words "idle" and "rich" no longer belong together as automatically as they once did.