For a real ‘budget’ break – how to do the Channel Islands like a tax exile
Famously a tax hideout for those looking to relax, Jersey is a favourite of the super-wealthy, but as Michael Hodges discovers, there is a lot more Channel Island life for the rest of us looking for a place to dine and decompress
The dread monotone of Rachel Reeves’s autumn Budget speech approaches, and Britain’s super-wealthy are contemplating escape. Many will be pointing their private jets at Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands and a British crown dependency, 14 miles west of the Normandy coast, where the top rate of income tax has been 20 per cent since the 1940s and the corporation tax regime remains rigorously sympathetic. Neither is there any capital gains or inheritance tax.
Never having been to Jersey, any further knowledge I have is mostly gleaned from the 1980s TV series Bergerac, which is currently being remade on the island by UKTV. So, to find out what fleeing British billionaires can expect, I’ve become a temporary Channel Island tax exile.
I have an invitation to eat at the Michelin-starred restaurant Bohemia in St Helier, overseen by acclaimed chef Callum Graham, and a suite in the five-star Club Hotel and Spa luxury boutique hotel directly above, which offers a rasul mud chamber and an indoor saltwater pool plus an array of arcane beauty treatments. Sadly, I only have 24 hours, a schedule that doesn’t allow for the hotel’s “deluxe paraffin wax feet treatment”.
Also sadly, my income is well below the point where I need to drastically minimise tax. Consequently, lunch on the way out from Heathrow Terminal 5 is a Boots meal deal. Forty minutes later, I touch down in Jersey. The first thing to note is the amount and size of supercar showrooms around the airport, even though the island’s top speed limit is 40mph.
Chelsea-based plumbing tycoon Charlie Mullins recently announced his intention to leave the UK, declaring: “I won’t let the socialist government get their hands on any more of my hard-earned money.” If he chooses Jersey, he’ll be able to pick up a Bentley on landing.
According to my cabbie, this surfeit of luxury marques on the island leads to something called “Jersey rash”, the scratched paintwork that inevitably comes from taking a Lamborghini down a narrow country lane. It can also lead to prosaic incidents like the 2022 traffic accident where a Ferrari Enzo worth over £1m pranged and hit a Honda Jazz on the seafront of Victoria Avenue before coming to rest outside Vinny’s cafe.
Jersey hasn’t always been the preserve of the wealthy. My late grandmother visited by coach from Newcastle – an epic migration in the 1950s – and thousands of Britons like her headed south in search of warm weather and the hint of French living, but with reassuringly snail-free restaurant food.
The rows of B&Bs and guesthouses that once catered to them are no more, but coming into St Helier we pass the “English fish and chips” shop. There’s a queue already, but this is not where the tax exiles eat. Bohemia is, in effect, their cafeteria – and, after the briefest of saltwater dips at the hotel, I go downstairs to join them. Below I find a warren of wood-and-leather-panelled rooms and high-concept wine-glass chandeliers. The general effect is that of the dining quarters of a luxury yacht, hidden in a bank vault. Which feels appropriate.
I’m attended to by a team of tight-trousered men. Used to dealing with the most demanding of customers, they give me their utmost attention until it’s clear that I cannot possibly eat or drink anything else. I start with champagne and an amuse-bouche of delicious things balanced on pralines. A series of gastronomically dazzling dishes follow: crab meat twinned with almond panna cotta; a crisp-skinned fillet of pan-fried halibut in a pool of champagne and white asparagus beurre blanc; a perfect homemade bread roll that comes with a cone of seaweed butter, which has now spoiled all other butters for me; and more things so delightful that I slip into a quiet reverie.
The reverie ends when a nearby female diner takes a face-call on her mobile – at the table! For some of the wealthy, then, eating is not a hushed act of homage. I gape as the couple get up to leave and her dining partner tips ostentatiously, as if this excuses the faux pas. Another diner beckons over the maitre d’. Apparently, he is slightly unhappy with the level of service, perhaps the angle of his seaweed butter cone. Is this the burden the wealthy must carry, to always be slightly unhappy? Back in my suite, cocooned from any concerns, I fall asleep grateful that I am not rich.
In the morning, I change my mind. Being rich is great. The pool is all mine, as is the hydro bench, a device that is like being boiled alive without the heat. Lost in bubbles, I find myself laughing out loud. As I laugh, a besuited man comes by with fresh towels and wishes me good morning. By now a convert to the good life, I allow the indulgence of another taxi, and we drive over St Brelade’s headland and down into the spectacular sweep of St Ouen’s Bay.
The surfers are out, and in the high dunes paragliders are lifted without perceptible effort by thermals that allow them to spiral and drift above the sand. In the bay, a Martello tower sits on its own island, faced by the German shoreline defences that, built with slave labour, hint at a darker strand in the island’s recent history. We pass growling Ferraris and Porsches, but the real power is on the long arc of the shoreline, where Atlantic breakers thunder in. Ironically, the things that really make Jersey special are completely tax-free.
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