When he was released from prison last month, having served eight months of a 30-month sentence for hiding £2.5 million from his many creditors after being declared bankrupt in 2017, Boris Becker flew back to his native Germany in a private jet. Not exactly reading the room there, Boris. He was then paid a reported £450,000 for his first post-slammer interview, during which he broke down in the obligatory tears and made some colourful claims about inmates wanting to murder him and how prison had made him a better man. Apparently, he then filed a criminal complaint against Cathy Hummels, a German celebrity who had the temerity to say he should have served his full sentence.
Now he has posted a new year message on Instagram while sitting shirtless on a tropical beach in his partner’s home country of São Tomé and Príncipe. He was never big on humility, Boris. This time he has really outdone himself.
“I call this the most difficult year of my life,” he says to camera, the waves lapping gently behind him. “But it’s done, it’s dusted . . . I think I came out stronger. I think my mental health is better than ever before. Let’s call it quits, 2022 is over.” Nice try, but the people he owes money to may be less keen to let bygones be bygones.
I’m not one for throwing away the key (Boris’s enduring combination of self-pity and arrogance is excellent evidence that prison signally fails to rehabilitate its customers), and yet I agree with Hummels. I know foreign wrong ’uns are regularly deported to ease overcrowding, but even so, a celebrity serving roughly 25 per cent of his sentence is not a good look for the justice system. Especially when the guy set free seems as unremorseful as Becker.
If he really did get £450,000 for his tears and triumph-over-tragedy tell-all and did not compensate those to whom he owed money, that means the self-styled-strawberry-blond-but-everyone-knows-he’s-ginger earned about 13 grand for each week he was banged up.
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I know all criminals should be treated equally, justice is blind and so on, but isn’t there a case for locking up famous offenders for longer? Given the attendant publicity, a stiffer than normal sentence would serve as a wider deterrent. Also, most of them will get a book, interview, Netflix series or some other payday out of “my prison hell”, so at least make it hurt. Give ’em something to cry about.
On the plus side, Boris says he lost seven kilos inside, and to be fair, he does look trimmer. Which is just as well, because before he went down he was rapidly turning into his fellow countryman Gert Fröbe, the German actor who as Auric Goldfinger told James Bond: “I expect you to die!”
How I’d revive the high street
More shops — almost 50 a day — closed in Britain in 2022 than during the preceding two years of pandemic lockdowns. Cue much hand-wringing about the death of the high street. Except I reckon it’s a straightforward matter, reviving town centres: get people living in them again, as people still do on the continent. Here, a flat above a shop is seen as downmarket, iffy, seedy even — somewhere endured by students and the poor. In mainland Europe high street living is normal for all income brackets.
On my German exchange many years ago my partner’s family lived in a flat on the pedestrianised high street of their midsized city in the Ruhr. Coming from the suburbs, at 15 years old, I found this location wildly exciting. At 58 I still do. If my wife agreed I’d move further into London when we’re older, not further away. Lots of retirees do this. The trend is growing, but it could do with a good nudge from the state.
As for youngsters, why doesn’t the government buy a load of scuzzy city-centre residential property, do it up and rent it cheaply to young public sector workers such as nurses, coppers, bus drivers and teachers who can’t otherwise afford to live so centrally? Once you have a settled population back on the high street the shops will follow.
Beware of the baby shark
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Respect to Paul Myles, a surfer in southern Australia who seeing a young shark in distress in the shallows off Eastern View picked the squirming fish up and carried it into deeper water. Fair enough, so the creature was only a metre or so long, but one day not too far off it could exceed ten feet and weigh 400lbs. Besides, it already has a fearsome set of teeth. Plus, it’s a blinking shark! Doesn’t matter how big it is, Mr Myles did a brave thing.
Myles, 55, has been surfing for 40 years, so he knows as well as anyone that sharks sometimes mistake boarders for prey. I hope his compassion doesn’t one day come back to bite him.
