Deccan Chronicle

The idle rich, celebritie­s destroyed old Europe

- By arrangemen­t with the Spectator Taki

The snows came tumbling down just as the camel-drivers headed back to the Gulf. In fact, they never saw the white outdoor stuff. And a good thing it was, too. The outdoor stuff makes everything look so pretty that the glitzy types might have been tempted to return. God forbid. Let them stick to the indoor white stuff.

The problem with Gstaad is the local council. They remind me of the EU: they’re intransige­nt, short-sighted and stick to a losing game. In Brussels they keep passing more and more laws and regulation­s. In Gstaad, they keep putting up their prices and building more and more apartments. As a gentleman with a close associatio­n to the Spectator told me, “My son doesn’t come here because there are no young women around.” His son is absolutely right. Unless you’re a hooker, or have a very large fortune of your own, Gstaad can be prohibitiv­ely expensive. For some of us who prefer girls not for sale, and are weary of women with large fortunes who are used to pushing people around, this can be a problem. Like my South African friends Arnold and Penelope Taylor, with young sons, they head for Wengen, which is as traditiona­l as Gstaad used to be and with a much lower profile.

Never mind. Now that the Donald is President, everything will change in a jiffy. The local council will tear down all the new apartment buildings that remain empty, prices will be slashed by 90 per cent, and beautiful debs will be imported from Paris, London and New York to service some of our young bucks. Yes, and the interiors of Dubai hotels will soon look like St James’ clubs.

Otherwise, everything’s hunky-dory. There is a multibilli­onaires’ club planned on the Eggli mountain, one that will save its ski lift from being shut down. The mauvaise langues insist that the billionair­es are all Jewish gents who no longer wish to wait for membership of the Eagle Club. Personally, I don’t agree with the naysayers. Yes, the billionair­es are mostly Jewish, but the reason their membership applicatio­ns have been delayed is that the club is full, and that they’re old and don’t ski. (Nor do they look so good.) It has as much to do with being Jewish as I have to do with the Ecclestone family. Absolutely zilch.

Talking about being old, I went skiing for the first time this year and it was a bit like Sylvester Stallone doing a Nutcracker ballet solo: embarrassi­ng and comical. A bad fall brought down the final curtain, but I’m going right back up this week to give it another go. If I miss next week’s deadline, you can contact me at Saanen hospital, the one they shut down after we had all given thousands to keep it open. Such are the joys of the idle rich. And speaking of the idle rich, they were all in Davos recently, men and a few women who have a refreshing lack of interest in appearing to be good people. Well, that is not technicall­y correct. They make all the right noises, but deep down they’re all George Soroses: greedy, self-important transnatio­nalists who see national loyalty as an obstacle to their financial ambitions to control everything and everybody.

World government is what they seek, with themselves pulling the strings, but for the moment Brexit and the Donald are asking for a reshuffle of the stacked deck. So they all make the right noises in Davos and pretend that to love one’s country and one’s heritage are fine. But they’re already back in whatever hole they came from trying to undo history. Can you, dear readers, imagine a worse scenario than to have your future decided by George Soros, Angela Merkel and Angelina Jolie, all three omnipotent in Davos recently, a resort that needs cleaning up more than the Augean stables ever did.

Yup, that’s what Davos Man is all about, a hyper-connected network of billionair­es and Hollywood brain-drained celebritie­s suffering from too many colonic irrigation­s, both still delusional and both still believing in more and more law-making. The EU mentality is their mother and George Soros’ principles their father

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