The Reality Check Of A Billionaire: He Says Money Can't Buy Happiness

 Billionaire 'John Caudwell' with his partner of 15 years Claire Johnson. The Phones 4U founder has revealed that the couple has decided to separate

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 says.

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’.