It’s Friday night at the Sea Lounge. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are having a natter in
the corner.
Three teenage sons of oligarchs are making a spluttering hash of some very
expensive cigars, and Dave, who’s “into land”, is soapboxing me about the
state of this country. By “this country”, he doesn’t mean Monaco, of course,
where we are standing right now. He means Blighty. It’s all new Labour’s
fault (as opposed to greedy property tycoons and unscrupulous bankers), and
he’s worried. Or, at least, he says he’s worried, but I’m guessing this
isn’t breadline worried. He’ll be lucky, he says, if his latest deal breaks
even. At least as a nondom, with a place in Monaco as well as Bayswater, he
doesn’t have to worry about tax. Which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, an
enormous relief.
Toby has been earwigging and can’t resist wading in. “I mean, are you really
affected by the credit crunch? I mean, really?” he asks me, like, really,
really, really? Toby is 26. He owns bits of clubs. He organises big Riviera
parties. He’s a Henry Conway type, but likeable, apart from the fact that he
is unable to grasp that some people might be worrying about their bills.
Before I can answer, we are interrupted by two waiters carrying yet another
metre-long tray of cocktails, this one framed by sparklers.
From this particular beach-front bar, you can see why the spiralling cost of
butter isn’t really a concern.
My name is not Hank and I don’t have a 900% mortgage on a condo in Ohio, but
I’m still pretty twitchy about the credit crunch. When you find out the
mortgage you could only just afford two years ago is now going to cost a
third more, it’s pretty clear something has to give. That and, sniff, the
fact you’ll have to downgrade from fillet to brisket, from Sky HD to FM,
from Montrachet to turps.
If you are in the same leaky boat, I have some cheering news. Not everyone is
battening down the hatches, tightening their belts and abandoning Waitrose
for Tesco. Irksomely, the stonkingly rich seem to be doing just fine.
You would think this might be a good time for the superloaded to be less
brazen in their conspicuous consumption. But they aren’t. At a Grand Prix
party on a superyacht hosted by Revoworld, a club that can provide
supercars, yachts, jets and anything else a bored playboy could dream of to
its 200 or so members, everything is just dandy.
Back at the beach club, Dave-Who’s-Into-Land’s mate, a leathery reincarnation
of Matt Goss, has a very leggy girl gyrating against him. Because he’s
continuing a conversation with someone else while she’s doing it, it looks
like a kind of vertical lap-dance.
This makes me angry. It’s not that I want the gyrating, but how did the
gyrator know to gyrate him and not me? She hasn’t even spoken to any of us.
How can she know, just by looking, that I’m a wage slave and Dave’s mate is
loaded?
“Why,” I ask a disapproving, nongyrating type, “has she done the gyrating with
him and not me?”
“Because he’s wearing a white shirt. And he has a tan. She knows he’s going to
buy her drinks.”
On Saturday, I wear a white shirt, purely to see if this theory holds. It
doesn’t. I remain ungyrated. Over canapés on the yacht, an American guy who
is in computers tells me he’s shocked at how many times he’s been approached
by gyrators in the past couple of days. He is wearing a bad American shirt.
With checks. It’s hard to swallow. Although the canapés aren’t.
I decide to speak to someone else. George Fortune, a Monaco yacht broker (with
a name like that, you could say he was born for it), explains what the
downturn means in the boat world. “In the 1980s, the biggest yachts were
100ft long. Now, they’re 300ft plus. The market is booming. There’s a
drop-off for 70ft and under, but if you want a really big boat, you’ll have
to join the queue.”
The one Revoworld has chartered for the weekend (for a cool £100,000, plus an
undisclosed, but undoubtedly frightening, fee to park it right by the race
track) is actually for sale for £8m. Aha! So the Norwegian owner is selling
his assets? Don’t be silly. He’s upgrading to something that will go with
his nice new 100ft sailing ship.
As the day wears on, the champagne flows, the racing cars race, the leggy
women tower over their cashmered men and I meet Arash. He is a charming
33-year-old second-generation industrialist who, having sold the family
business for £50m, now makes luxury cars.
“Why bother?” I ask, because I’m pretty sure that if I had £50m, I wouldn’t. I
had enough trouble extending the patio.
“It’s a prestige thing,” he replies, which strikes me as ridiculous, but I’m
not as keen on cars as he is. He’s not bothered by the credit crunch -
of course he isn’t - although he is slightly miffed that the deposit
on his £900,000 Bugatti Veyron has risen from £200,000 to £206,000 thanks to
the stronger euro. But, as he points out, people with money have other
people to ring-fence their cash.
Our partying is modest compared with some of the other efforts in the harbour.
I find myself admiring the 12 young Italian things having a civilised silver-service
dinner on the slightly bigger, slightly plusher boat next to us. Two days,
and already I have yacht envy.
Across the quay, three of India’s richest businessmen have moored their
super-super-superyachts (aka ferries) side by side. The one in the middle,
with the glass elevator and the infinity pool that turns into a helicopter
pad, has four Rolls-Royce Phantoms parked in a line outside. Because one is
never enough. Another has a flowered entrance with pirouetting models to
welcome guests. Another has a Porsche wrapped in a giant ribbon waiting
outside, so I’m guessing one of the gyrators has struck gold.
Saturday night and Jimmy’z, Monte Carlo’s famously cheesy club that rich
people love because rich people have terrible, terrible taste in clubs, has
the cheek to charge £43 for a Diet Coke. A bottle of Absolut, ordinary
tenner-in-Tesco Absolut, is £700. Even so, the queue of cars to get in
(nobody appears capable of walking very far in Monaco) is round the block.
The heavens open on Sunday, making this the first wet grand prix since 1997.
This seems to be the only blot on this money-soaked landscape, and for me,
it means an early departure. (No matter how rich you are, the helicopter
transfer to Nice doesn’t work in the rain.) Before I climb down a rope
ladder hung on the stern, just as Lewis Hamilton races to victory round the
bow, I find myself speaking to Simon, who was in hedges. He’s moved out from
London – his Monaco residency should come through in a few weeks.
Tonight, he has a £24,000 table at Amber Lounge, but he claims that’s good
value: they’ll be throwing in unlimited Cristal.
“What about the credit crunch?” I ask clunkily. “I thought you guys were
supposed to be jumping off buildings?” He replies in percentages: “Twenty
last year. Fourteen so far this year. We’re having a great time.”
You can tell from Simon’s Cheshire grin that he won’t be jumping off anything
any time soon. I couldn’t bear to ask him his age, because he looked about
11. He has nothing but sunshine and gyrating ahead of him.
Has he anything to say to the rest of us, those who didn’t get out while the
going was good?
“Unlucky,” he says. “But I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
I should have thrown him off the yacht.
If you have €7,500 (£5,900) for the joining fee and €15,000-€150,000 a
year for Revoworld membership, go to revoworldglobal.com. Don’t worry about
the rest of us, we’ll be fine
CREDIT CRUNCH? WHAT CREDIT CRUNCH?
Aditya Mittal put in an offer of £200m for an eight-bed house in Kensington -
and was rebuffed. Last month, Roman Abramovich bought a Francis Bacon
Triptych for £43.6m and a Lucian Freud piece for £17m. Guess he’s not
switching to Tesco. In 2001, DB Bistro Moderne in New York put the world’s
most expensive burger on its menu. It cost $27. Today, it costs $150 and
comes with 20g truffles. In January, Poland Spring heiress Lauren Davis
married Andres Santo Domingo in Columbia. The bride had two dresses designed
by Olivier Theyskens. The first cost £100,000 and took 1,200 hours to make.
The second, covered in white feathers, was cut with scissors at 2am by
Theyskens himself, so Lauren could dance unhindered by her train. So that’s
eBay out, then. This year, The Sunday Times Rich List recorded a 14.7%
increase in the fortunes of Britain’s wealthiest 1,000 individuals.
