Eva Rausing. Photo: http://youtu.be/ZT_bf-l6rVM
The background
After the sad death of Eva Rausing at her London home, the cause of death is still unknown, but suspected to be a drugs overdose. Her husband, Hans Kristian Rausing, remains in hospital; he is the heir to the £4.5 billion Tetra Pak fortune. There are reports that Eva’s body may have been in the house for a week.
The Rausing family came to Britain in 1982 to escape Sweden’s punitive tax regime; until Roman Abramovic moved in, they were Britain’s richest family. Drugs dogged Eva and Hans K Rausing: they were arrested in 2008 for taking drugs into the American embassy. They had a vast property portfolio, including a house in Barbados and in Cadogan Square in London; but never seemed to find any purpose.
“Heroin was the only thing that really worked, the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster’s wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that it matched every splinter of the break,” Edward St Aubyn, Some Hope, quoted by Harry Mount.
Rich drug users have only one brake
Harry Mount on The Telegraph said that when Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited, he was aware of two demons for the uber-rich – “sex and drink.” If he were writing it now, “he’d throw in a third demon – drugs.” Rausing “multiplied her fortune – and her troubles – a thousand times” by marrying Hans Kristian Rausing. They had too much free time, and filled it in with drink and drugs. Hans K’s sisters, Lisbet and Sigrid, have both “plunged themselves into rewarding activities” – Sigrid owns Granta magazine, and Lisbet has set up university foundations. The problem with dynasties often lies in the third generation, when “the work ethic has often dissolved.” The very rich don’t go by the usual rules. There are “no brakes on their habit – no overdraft, no criticism from the hangers-on, no lonely nights.” There’s only one brake – “the physical capacity of the human body to withstand poison.”
Drugs are no respecter of wealth
We’ll only know the truth about Eva Rausing’s death when Hans Kristian is released from hospital, said Damian Witworth in The Times. Photographs of the coupe in recent months showed them gaunt and dishevelled. It just shows that drugs are “no respecter of class or wealth.”
Be wary of drawing conclusions
There may be “nothing especially edifying in the Rausings’ tragedy,” said Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian, “but some will insist that there is – that we must learn from it that more money breeds more problems, or that the drugs don’t work if you think they’ll bring happiness, or that trustafarians can readily be destroyed by what looks like a gift with no ties. Opinions rush into the vacuum left by the Rausing family’s reticence, most of them cheap, all worth resisting.”
The gilded life of the troubled heir
People like Hans K, said Catherine Ostler in The Daily Mail, can’t live up to their ancestors. Pampered and without needing to work, they “struggle to find any kind of meaning.” Look at Jamie Blandford, the heir to the Duke of Marlborough (of the Churchill family); he has a string of drug arrests. Maybe it’s because “neither boardroom success, such as that achieved by the Rausings, nor military pride, like the Churchills,” goes “hand-in-hand with empathy.” With the Rausings, “there is the gilded life of the troubled heir, where drugs provide an imaginary security blanket and the money is a trap that seems like a means of escape.”
