Press Digest: “I’m rich, do you still like me?”

By Elli Davis, October 29, 2008

Property magnate goes underground to regain empathy

Photo by Grainge Photography

Nick, a social worker trainee is delivering hot meal to a rail, undernourished elderly lady in Glasgow. She hadn't left her flat for two years, and her bedsit so coated in cat excrement that Nick volunteers to heave sacks of it out to the bins.

The old lady doesn't know that Nick has just recently taken off his Lange & Söhne watch and that he is a in fact disquised millionaire, Nick Leslau.

He is chair and CEO of Prestbury Group, a private company having assets of £3 billion, including hotels, hospitals, Madame Tussauds and Alton Towers.

But it was exactly his wealth that made this entrepreneur uncertain if he really is worth the compliments and attention he's getting from pleople he's paying.

"People tell me all the time that I am wonderful," he told The Daily Telegraph, "but I'm a client. Teams of lawyers and surveyors earn money from me... but do they like me?" He was also scared that he had lost the ability to talk to people about anything but business.

So Leslau decided to do en experiment. He took up the challenge offered by Channel 4 to spend 10 days in Possil park in Glasgow. The TV series was designed to get a mainstream audience to consider what deprivation is like.

"Everyone I met there seems to have been to prison, have stab wounds or be a reformed drug addict," he says. "They were third-generation unemployed."

Now he was able to relive his early years when helping the milkman on his round for 50p. He also had an insight into poverty. "I would always condemn a drug pusher, but what would I do if I was having to live on an £8.50-a-day jobseeker's allowance? There is always an alternative, but it is very remote if you can't afford the bus fare to McDonald's to ask for a job."

Nick Leslau has become more interested social issues: he took his family to Malawi to help build an orphanage; they had a similar working holiday in Peru, too.

Leslau, however, opposes the idea of entering politics. "Politics is a business for men with small appendages," he says. "Maybe politicians were once altruistic, but now they are egocentric people who would mostly do very badly in the real world."

Read the whole story on Nick Leslau in the Telegraph.

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