TAKE MY WALLET, MISS JONES: secretaries and big swinging dicks.

When I was growing up, intelligent women were still expected to become secretaries before they could get anywhere interesting. You could have a first-class degree from Oxbridge and still be told you would be unemployable without learning touch-typing. Naturally, some of us chose this path, and though most went on to become illustrious publishers, lawyers, journalists, film-directors and BBC executives enough experienced the brain-numbing tedium and weird humiliations of the job to feel a pang of sympathy with Joyti De-Laurey, the 35-year-old secretary at Goldman-Sachs currently on trial for stealing £4.3 million from her boss. Ms. De Laurey is of course innocent unless proved otherwise, but the relationship between boos and secretary is perennially fraught. You don’t have to have seen Steven Soderburgh’s film, Secretary, to know that there are some utterly despicable bosses out there, even if their sadism is indirect. I’ve never forgotten how the late Marc Boxer, a man of irresistible charm to the posh and lush, reduced his lovely, gentle secretary to tears every single lunch-time when I worked for him on Tatler.

If no man is a hero to his valet, still less is he a hero to his secretary. A deliciously funny romantic novel published next month – Robyn Sisman’s Weekend in Paris (Penguin), – realises precisely the fantasies of revenge women indulge in when writhing powerless in an office. You long, like Sisman’s heroine, to hit back at your rich, hated boss who dismisses you as “just a stupid secretary” and escape into a world of glamour. And why not, when the people you’re working for are so rich that they don’t even notice the odd couple of million missing from their bank-account? Whom are you really hurting? Aren’t you just being a modern-day Robin Hood? Top-flight lawyers, bankers and executives expect their trusted PAs to look as if they lead the same kind of life as they do, with designer clothes and perfect grooming, but how do you manage it in a big city if you’re no better-off than Melanie Griffiths in Working Girl? According to the New York Times there have been dozens of recent cases in the US, fuelled by “lack of oversight and an abundance of envy”, of secretaries stealing millions from their bosses by forging their names on cheques or transferring funds to their accounts. Amazingly, the firms involved are often too embarrassed to prosecute the thief, and write off the loss. Once you are rich enough, and busy enough, to hand over your cheque-book to another person, you may as well sit back and wait to be fleeced.

Nothing corrupts like City cash. The world of the super-rich executive is one I’ve dipped a toe into from time to time because so many of my peers and friends flocked into the City on graduation. There are a tiny elite of men and women who work 18-hour days but earn many millions in bonuses. Some manage to be genuinely good people, but it gets harder and harder to be friends with them. If they can go on holiday to a £50,000 pw villa in Mauritius, or hire a box at the opera and you are invited, you find yourself slipping into the role of the hired entertainer, not an equal. They don’t understand why you and your husband are fed up at being given a minute double bed in the lavishly-appointed guest-suite of their country house, or why you’d rather have a picnic in the park than share a restaurant meal that brings you to the verge of bankruptcy. Money warps character, and will-power, and its siren song can only be dismissed by the pure of heart or those, like Philip Larkin, who could see little to enjoy, ever. More of us, however, live lives of Balzacian intensity where money is concerned. Because it is glorious to have, at first. The big swinging dicks of banking and law always say they will retire when they were thirty – or thirty-five – or forty. They give blood, make charitable donations, employ craftsmen and even read novels, but there is always another house, another car, another girlfriend, another holiday- and then, surprise! another wife and another family and another house! The stupidest man my husband was at school with, who went into the City, recently divorced his first wife and still has enough left over to buy a house in Notting Hill. You can’t believe how much money washes round our capital until you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Even now, thanks to the regeneration of the US economy, there are management consultants and lawyers, rich from wrecking our railway service or the NHS flying to Brazil for the week-end, coked to the eyeballs; there are private planes to parties in Zimbabwe; there are second homes of over £1.5 million getting snapped up in days. Every child probably remembers the wonder of seeing the dwarfs’ jewel-mine in Disney’s Snow White: these people are living it.

Money swims in their eyes like grease over a lens. At one dinner-party my husband and I went to in Kensington we were asked, “If you did a favour for a very very rich man, and he asked you to name anything you wanted, what would you wish for?” “A small Georgian house in the country,” we said, boringly. “But what about the land around it?” we were asked. “What about the village? The people who lived there? The Views?” Like the Fisherman’s Wife in the Arabian Nights, our hosts (all of whom already had large and beautiful Georgian country houses, needless to say) would never be satisfied. They did not possess money: it possessed them.

When I was poor and young it was a kind of joke – “money is a kind of magic” we would say, quoting Wallace Stevens – that people we knew as not especially bright or personable could have £1000 lunches and pick up the tab without blinking. Yes, they worked long hours, and had big responsibilities, but no more than, say, medical students or mothers. I’ve never seen the point of envy, largely because it makes you feel so miserable about yourself, but I could and can see how, long before mortgages and school-fees began to bite, the sight of your employer earning so much money without apparently needing much of it might induce not just resentment but corruption. For secretaries, this must be fuelled every time your boss treats you like an appendage yet trusts you with his mail and finances. You don’t need something as vulgar as Joyti De-Laurey’s alleged Cartier addiction or a taste for flashy cars and hotels: in London, these days, £1 million will scarcely buy you a modest family house, thanks to a property-market fuelled by City salaries.

The wonder is that more secretaries do not steal. They are bright enough, and few now believe in the God Ms. De-Laurey allegedly prayed to. Of course office workers have all kinds of underhand weapons at their disposal, including that of gossip, by which to vent their spleen. They may have a strong fantasy life, fuelled by novels like Weekend in Paris, which keeps them from acting out their desires. They may simply be afraid of getting caught. They may have one of those really nice bosses who remembers to give them a slap up present on their birthday, a regular pay-rise and makes his or her own coffee.

Or they may not. The point is that, while some secretaries are undoubtedly well-paid, well-treated and well-satisfied with their employment it is always dangerous when extraordinarily wealthy workers live cheek-by-jowl with those on pretty modest incomes. It isn’t, in the end, a question of money. We can only continue to function as a society, and as an economy, if we are able to trust each other. The power of the poor is no less than the power of the very rich in this. When people stop trusting each other it destroys forbearance, accommodation, co-operation: what makes us human. And rich.

The Sunday Times February 1, 2004