From Rita Ora to Tom Hanks: how celebrities avoid the Covid rules

Rita Ora has voluntarily paid a £10,000 fine for breaching lockdown rules after hosting her 30th birthday party at a West London restaurant at the weekend. But let’s not cry for angsty Rita. She’s a global pop star with an estimated £30 million net worth. A £10,000 hit probably isn’t going to take the gloss off her Christmas. To put the figure in context, she once spent £1,200 on a pair of lurid green Gucci pantaloons that looked like something a Super Mario Brother had thrown up on. Her bank balance has not been reduced to a smouldering heap.

Obviously there’s been a backlash following reports that Ora and around 30 friends and family assembled at Casa Cruz in Notting Hill on Saturday night. It was quite the guest list too. Cara and Poppy Delevingne were reportedly among those entering by the back entrance and partying until late – and through a visit by the police (who, finding the doors locked, moved on).

As news of the lockdown breach broke Ora rushed to self-flagellate on Instagram. “I’m deeply sorry for breaking the rules and in turn understand that this puts people at risk,” she wrote. Later it was confirmed that she had coughed up the £10,000 – the maximum anyone can be fined for breaching Covid rules.

So that’s it, then? A mea culpa from Ora and on to the next thing? The problem is that the next thing might well be another celebrity treating the greatest public health emergency in a century not as a great equaliser but as another reminder of their immense privilege.

In August, Kylie Jenner took a trip to Paris that she justified as a "business trip"; a couple of months later Kanye West used similar reasoning to hop to London for a fashion show.

Over in Australia, there is an ongoing outcry over the preference shown to the likes of Nicole Kidman and Dannii Minogue, who have been allowed jet in and skip mandatory quarantine at a state-run hotel.  Instead, they’ve received permission to see out the obligatory 14 days at home. Among the excuses trotted out are that this represents a saving to the Australian taxpayer (two weeks isolation costs $2,800 per person in Queensland). And that, in the case of, Danii Minogue, “The quarantine arrangements… mirror – if not [surpass]– the arrangements in hotel quarantine”. But couldn’t we all make this claim?

Then there's the fact that international travel to and from Australia is pretty much impossible for mere mortals - even those who desperately need to see sick family members or, worse, attend funerals. In September, Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk provoked outrage with her decision to allow Hollywood's coronavirus patient zero Tom Hanks back into the state to finish his Elvis movie. “Very few countries are producing movies at the moment,” went her justification. “There are a whole lot of jobs relying on that industry.”

More recently, Sacha Baron Cohen and his Australian wife Isla Fisher were seemingly able to land in Sydney fresh from Los Angeles with very little trouble. Fisher is reportedly voicing a Netflix animation called Back To The Outback, although it's hard to see why that requires her to be in situ.

Whatever the reason, it ignores the fundamental unfairness of celebrities being allowed to criss-cross the globe with seeming impunity.

Lockdowns, after all, only work if everyone feels they are suffering together. When celebs see no reason not to throw birthday bashes or clock up air-miles, the rest of us may reasonably wonder why we shouldn’t be free to likewise disregard the regulations.

Ora’s defence was that the party was “a spur of the moment decision made with the misguided view that we were coming out of lockdown and this would be OK”.  It’s true: just last year I spontaneously invited Poppy and Cara Delevingne to my birthday party (they didn’t make it – I think my directions may have been confusing).

Others have taken to using the passive voice when apologising – implying that a lockdown breach occurred for reasons beyond their control and that they merely happened to be caught up in it, the way normal people get caught in rain.

“My father lives next door to us and we had a plan to go see them and not be near them and that plan was broken and that's our responsibility,” said Josh Brolin as it emerged he had visited his father James Brolin and stepmother Barbra Streisand, despite a state-wide order to social distance in California.

“It's hard to be honest sometimes. It's hard to be honest and say, “Maybe I screwed up.” I knew that was in the air. Not because of the responses, but the responses brought me back to my own truth,” he said on Instagram.

Then there are those who feel they have nobody to answer to but themselves.

“Took a test the other day, and I found out that I have the antibodies,"  Madonna declared on social media over the summer, “So tomorrow, I'm just going to go for a long drive in the car, and I'm going to breathe in the COVID-19 air.”  This was shortly before she flew from the UK to upstate New York, where she attended the birthday party of Steve Klein, of rock band New Found Glory.

It’s tough. Ideally she would have stayed in London. But would you want to be the one to tell Madonna that she can’t leave that house and that, in any event, you’ve hidden her passport?

How do they get away with it? Sometimes, the answer is that they don’t. When Lost/ Ant-Man star Evangeline Lilly told fans in March that she wasn’t quarantining despite the outbreak the pushback was severe. She didn’t help herself by going full libertarian in her social media feed, echoing Donald Trump’s claim that Covid was just a severe “flu”.

“Where we are right now feels a lot too close to Marshall Law for my comfort already, all in the name of a respiratory flu,” she wrote.

“I am also immune compromised at the moment. I have two young kids,” Lilly added. “Some people value their lives over freedom, some people value freedom over their lives. We all make our choices.”

“We all make our choices” feels worryingly close to “everyone for themselves” and she later apologised. Lilly said she was projecting her “own fears into an already fearful and traumatic situation”. Coincidentally that’s how many of us felt watching Ant-Man 2 and the Wasp.

Lilly sounded self-conscious. Yet many celebrities are beyond embarrassment. They’re so used to being treated differently that the idea of suffering with the plebeian masses is an existential leap to far. The rules have never applied to them: why should they now?

Coronavirus never stood a chance of meaningfully reshaping the a-lister world view. The concept of muddling along with the general public is something they simply cannot get their heads around.  Consider that a lack of self-awareness is often a survival mechanism for the super-famous. They might otherwise crumble under the pressure of living constantly in the spotlight.

It can be difficult for the rest of us to understand such a state of mind. But then the true power of celebrity is its ability to distort reality. And if most of us are chafing in our lockdown pods, it is important to remember that celebs have been living in their own bubbles far longer – and that it’s going to take more than a pandemic to burst them.

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