A Study Of New Money, by Lord Parker Penne

The recent events at Chelsea Football Club may seem to have little to do with Wycombe Wanderers Football Club but from my wry perch in Peach House, Marsh Gibbon, one thing leaps out like a Bengal Tiger: you cannot expect class from New Money.

My ancestors may have raped their way round the holy lands in the name of our Lord, but each time they slapped down a Saracen woman and gave her a lesson in Anglo-Norman lovemaking they were creating a history and a heritage that has lasted nigh on one thousand years. My friends, I ooze class and I ooze charm. I know the value of money and I know the value of not knowing the value of money. In short, I am an aristo, an artist and, according to certain largely inaccurate police reports, an arsonist.

That’s by the by, in anyone’s book. What I’m getting at is that New Money has no class, New Money is merely hair gel for the nouveau set. Lottery winners, dot com entrepreneurs, yapping city boys who went to ghastly comprehensives, all the spivs and winkers in their bowler hats crawling over London Town in rattling vans, these people have nothing on the likes of me and my fallen friends in what used to be the House of Lords. In short, they sicken me.

And that brings me neatly back to Chelsea Football Club and Wycombe Wanderers Football Club. Owned and run by Roman Abramovic and Steve Hayes respectively, these two southern English football institutions are rapidly being destroyed as we know them because New Money is controlling the two men, whispering in their ears twenty four hours a day. New Money wants to shout from the rooftops “I deserve respect, I deserve recognition,” and they are willing to do its bidding, without a moment’s hesitation.

The Russian sucked money from his people and now impossibly pursues football as aesthetically pleasing as the Vladivostok mines are ugly. The Englishman made his bones by loaning people money and gobbling the interest and now he wants to plan an exit strategy at Wycombe Wanderers Football Club where he gets out scot free! Any one of my peers knows that you write off money that is spent on entertainment, be it a Capability Brown garden or a duck pond filled with milk, but this lesson is only learned over a long period of time, something that New Money will never grasp.

My Great Grandfather spent four million pounds on a stud racehorse that was rumoured to be able to understand Latin. It could not. When he discovered he had been duped he did not get angry, he merely slaughtered the horse and invited the Penne family in for a traditional dinner. Had he been one of the classless New Money breed the event would have agitated him so much he would probably have ended up commissioning a statue of himself in every county in England, just to deflect away any mockery.

Vast wealth should be used for a collective dream, not a selfish surge for personal glory. Money should be spent on a stunning vision, not pooled for an “enabling agreement”. Did we have an “enabling agreement” when we constructed Peach House? No, we used slave labour and the mentally ill. That is what made England the finest country in the world. New Money is destroying this heritage and if my tear ducts were not in a Petri dish in Holland, then I would cry.

26.09.2007. 21:05

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