I only got a soup-stained tie from my dad. And now I’ve splashed out on a brand-new Merc, I’m afraid my sons won’t do much better

BANG goes a huge chunk of our four sons’ inheritance. How their hearts must have sunk this week, when their irresponsible father signed on the dotted line to buy a spanking new car, straight from the factory — the first brand new vehicle my wife and I will ever have owned.

It’s sitting in the Belgian port of Zeebrugge as I write, waiting to be ferried across the North Sea, and by this time next week it ought to be mine.

It’s not just any run-of-the-mill new car, either. It’s an all-singing, all-dancing 2019 automatic A-class Mercedes-Benz Sport, in fetching metallic blue paint, packed with a million times more computing power than it took to put a man on the moon half a century ago this year.

If the brochures are to be believed, it practically drives itself, parking automatically, calculating when it’s safe to change lane and manoeuvring itself accordingly, reading speed limit signs and responding to voice commands.

Crash

Feeling a bit chilly? Just say: ‘Hey, Mercedes, I’m cold’ — and it will instantly switch on the heating. Apparently, it will even contact the emergency services of its own volition if I have a crash.

Indeed, I’ve turned out to be such a sucker for these electronic bells and whistles that I feel honour-bound to resign my self-appointed life presidency of RANT (Rage Against New Technology), the organisation I founded on this page only six weeks ago.

But don’t worry. Plenty of readers have written to me, volunteering for membership of the RANT board, and I’m sure that a more fitting successor can be found to fill my shoes.

Enough to say that I’ve spent many thousands more than I intended on the self-indulgence of the Merc — which means that Mrs U and I will have many thousands less (if anything at all) to pass on to our progeny when we pop our clogs.

Mind you, I’ve long had mixed feelings about the rights and wrongs of inherited wealth. As a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, I know I should be 100 per cent behind the idea of money cascading down the generations, from grandparents to parents and on to our own children.

But there’s enough of the chippy egalitarian in me to recognise how very unfair it is that, say, the young Duke of Westminster earns more in the course of a good night’s sleep, thanks to his inherited billions, than great swathes of the world’s population take home from years of backbreaking toil.

In fact, the closet Bolshevik in my makeup wonders why our sons should get anything when we die (though to be fair, I ought to point out that they are the least mercenary of boys, who have never shown any sign of itching to get their hands on their dad’s dosh). This is particularly true to the Utley brand, since the sum total of my own inheritance from my late father on his death was one soup- stained tie, emblazoned with the arms of the Cambridge college we both attended.

In my more mean-spirited moments, I reckon that if I didn’t get anything more than that, then why should my sons?

At the same time, I tell myself that if Mrs U and I don’t spend the money we’ve earned, the taxman will only grab even more of it when it’s our turn for the crematorium, having already helped himself to great dollops of our income throughout our working lives.

And it’s an indisputable truth that public authorities will always spend cash far more wastefully than even the most selfindulgent of Merc buyers. Think of the tens of billions squandered on such projects as HS2, aborted garden bridges across the Thames or the eye-wateringly expensive IT schemes for the NHS which came to nothing.

At least my new car should get me from A to B — which HS2 shows no sign of doing for a good while yet, if it ever does at all. And that’s not to mention my heroic contribution to propping up the German car industry and its British suppliers.

But still I feel a twinge of guilt over splashing out on my new toy. After all, it’s the most natural of instincts to want to look after our own flesh and blood.

Equal

I suspect that even Jeremy Corbyn, for all his claptrap about the importance of treating everyone as absolutely equal, would soon change his mind if he had to choose between saving the life of one of his own young or mine.

Meanwhile, almost everyone reading this article has been a huge beneficiary of the hereditary principle. I have. By this, I mean that like the great majority of my readers, I inherited from my parents something too many of us take for granted — and it’s infinitely more valuable than a soup-stained college tie.

Let’s face facts, it is not mainly through hard work or any special virtue of my own that I have access to clean water, free healthcare, home comforts and all the food and drink I need, denied to millions throughout the Third World. No, all these advantages came to me at birth, along with my British citizenship — handed down from parents to children through the generations, according to much the same principle that has given the Duke of Westminster ownership of some of the world’s most expensive real estate.

It may not be fair that even the poorest Briton is hugely better off than the average Bangladeshi peasant, but we meddle at our peril with the idea of passing on wealth from one generation to the next.

Which brings me to this week’s thoughtprovoking news that most Britons die without leaving anything to their families. According to an exhaustive study of wills left in England, six out of ten of us bequeath less than £5,000 — most of which is likely to be needed to pay for a funeral.

Surge

What’s more, say the researchers at the London School of Economics, the proportion of those passing on significant sums when they die went unchanged at about 40 per cent between 1950 and 2016. This strongly suggests today’s young have yet to inherit the wealth accumulated by their elders after the surge in property ownership and house values during the second half of the 20th century.

Various explanations spring to mind — the most obvious of which is that most of my own home- owning generation of babyboomers have yet to die. The fact that we’re living longer also means our savings are being eaten away by such expenses as care home fees (not to mention the occasional rash purchase of a Mercedes-Benz).

Another possible reason is that many who have money to spare pass their cash to their families before they die, setting up trusts and other schemes to avoid the grasp of that grimmest of reapers, the taxman. I can’t say I blame them, as successive chancellors greedily eye their wealth.

Philip Hammond’s latest wheeze is to increase the fees families must pay for the grant of probate, which gives them legal control of an estate. Fixed up to now at a flat rate of £215, it will soon rise according to the value of the estate — although Labour are trying to block it.

This stealth death tax means some 280,000 families a year could have to pay more, with 56,000 facing bills of between £2,500 and the maximum £6,000 — a hefty price for a piece of paper. With no fee charged on estates of less than £50,000, it’s little wonder if many of the rich do everything in their power to leave as little as they can.

As for our own four sons, there will be no family trusts for them, poor lads. The best they can hope for is that their father dies before he can splash out on any more luxuries like the Mercedes. But even then they’ll have to wait, since my one-line will leaves everything I own to Mrs U.

If they’re lucky, there might just possibly be something left over for them from the sale of the house when her turn comes. But they’ll have to play their cards right.

I advise them to be very, very nice to their mum.