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Scumball Rally

Monte Carlo is the sort of slum that rich people build when they lack for nothing except taste and a sense of the collective good

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Odd stuff, money. It doesn’t always do what you think it will do. It’s like water. Not just as it slips through your feelings but as finds the path of least resistance. And it’s not always pretty. Or clear. Or cool.

Monte Carlo is a money puddle. A cash delta. It is as if all the wealth from the rich northern European pasture has run down the Continent and found its way here, to from a sort of mangrove swamp of avarice, before running into the Mediterranean. Maybe swamp is the wrong term. Maybe some of you like swamps. Perhaps sewage outlet would be a better description.

There are two sorts of slum. There are slums that grow out of too little, and slums that grow out too much. Monte Carlo is the sort of slum that rich people build when they lack for nothing except taste and a sense of the collective good. The one thing a poor slum has over a rich one is dignity. What Monte Carlo is the biggest trailer park in the world. An itinerant collection of wasters, drifters and self-delusionists. It’s also an example to the rest of us of what money actually does buy you. And the truth of the rubric is that any place that has the appellation “tax haven” will be a waiting room for purgatory.

It wasn’t always that way. Monte Carlo managed to remain an independent principality caught between Italy and France because neither of its neighbours ever wanted to take it on. It simply wasn’t worth the effort. After a thousand years of not being anywhere or doing anything much, the wheel of fate spun the ball of chance into Monte Carlo’s lucky slot. It got a casino. The south of France became fashionable and invented a new tribe of people who called themselves the Jet Set.

And finally, in a coupling that would have pleased a medieval court, Prince Rainier pulled Grace Kelly. As far as Hollywood was concerned he might well have been short, ugly and boring, but short, ugly and boring was how powerful men were in Hollywood, too. And he was a real prince (who cared if it was only of some Old World Las Vegas?). They agreed he could have Grace mainly because everyone from the Mexican border to Big Sur had already had her.

The new rhinestone royalty produced a family that befitted Monaco. A trailer-trash aristocracy. A princeling who was so characterless he’d get off in a police line-up of one. Princess Caroline, the beautiful public school girl touched with laughable tragedy who ended up marrying a German with more GBH accusations than quarterings on his coat of arms, and the only prince since the Black Death to be accused of pissing in public (he’s suing).

And then, of course, there’s Stephanie. Where do you start? She’s just the Queen of Kitsch, the mother superior of lowbrow, a pin-up princess of pristine trashiness. A real, live, walking, talking, humping and sulking country and western lyric. The Grimaldis – bless every one of them – have gone from being highness to lowness. They are just Les Dukes du Hazzard.

After money, Monte is famous for two things. The Monte Carlo Rally and the Monaco Grand Prix. Now, you might justifiably think this shows a distinct frugality of imagination. Well, it’s no accident. If you have loads to cash but are technically bankrupt in the taste account, then motorcars come as close to culture as you are likely to get. It’s so much easier to boast about a million-pound Bugatti than a Branscusi. “Oh yeah, the Modigliani. I had one once. Marvellous acceleration, lousy road holding.” Cars become the imitation of civilisation in a land where no one does anything, or knows anything. The brief history of the motorcar is the High Renaissance Monte Carlo never had. The fact that Princess Grace died in a car crash is symptomatic. It’s the equivalent in the rest of Europe of having a Titian fall on your head.

Once a year, Monte Carlo plays it down for the Grand Prix. It is, uniquely, a road race. And where every other European city is desperately trying to get rid of motorcars, Monaco lies on its back in the street like a trucker’s prostitute braced for a petrolheads’ gang-bang. The truth is, there’s nothing better to do and even if it knew how, it couldn’t do anything else, anyway.

Naturally, we arrive by helicopter. The drive from Nice airport along the pretty, barren corniche is torturous. A refugee column of rich folk and folk who want to stare at rich folk.

From the little helicopter, we’re whisked round the harbour to our boat. Now, a boat in Monte Carlo sounds glamorous. One of those phrases you throw into the conversation like Ferrari keys: “Oh, we are just popping down to the bateau in Monte.” Actually, in truth, the harbour is an aquatic favela. A hugger-mugger horizontal tenement of ugly, ackward, moulded plastic bathroom fittings bobbing in cess. Both ex and the other sort.

The boats are built as Portakabins for cocaine, metered sex and competitive lying. They grab the harbour wall with desperate straining gangplanks. You see, the thing about these waterborne shag pads is that none of them can swim. You know that if they were to be unkindly set adrift, they’d bob and wave until they drowned. The boats in Monte Carlo aren’t going anywhere. Which is a good thing because the people on them don’t want to go anywhere. Just being here means they’ve arrived.

Inside, they are designed with all the elegance and savoir-faire of a Swiss proctologist’s waiting room. Perhaps someone can explain to me why boats inevitably have pictures of other boats on their walls? It’s like being at home on land and decorating your living room with framed photographs out of estate agent’s windows. Anyway, never mind, we are here and we are pleased to be here. And forget the satellite stuff. The most important bit of equipment, the fridge, is working overtime. There’s a prostate, emetic dribble of constant champagne.

Boats force intimacy. Whatever you are doing, you are never further six inches from your neighbour. The next floater’s chemical bog is only two sheets of marine plastic from your pillow.

From the sun deck, roof deck thing we can look out over the marina at everyone else looking at us. And everyone else is here. Why motor racing should attract so many people is one of the stupidest mysteries of modern life. Millions and millions of Euro-gawpers arrive to be shuffling pedestrian extras and background atmosphere. They shamble along the lines of moored Port-a-loos whose backs are opened up like dolls’ houses so that we can be seen. Every ship a little tableaux more Dantesque, a glimpse into a faux-glamorous life. Champagne bucket on table, couple of girls in halter-neck bikinis, steward with botulism on a tray, big bowl of maternity flowers and three or four blokes getting beered up in their devil-may-care shorts and T-shirts, advertising other no-brain holidays that stretch over their fat, hairy, pink bellies which have held more than their fair share of the good things in life.

These boats are living billboards for envy – part matey Budweiser ad, part lap-dancing poster, and a good part recruitment flyer for the Workers Revolutionary Party. Frankly, honestly, hand on heart, we look ridiculous. Not just posy and prattish, not just loud and cheap, but flatulently venal. Repellent. Mostly because we are a big lie. We don’t live here. We don’t live like this. We’re ligging. Or renting. Or being bought and used. It’s all a lie.

Monaco isn’t a grand place. It isn’t a racing track and none of it is remotely smart and sophisticated. The whole port has a sense of being a Monty Python epic recreation of a medieval pilgrimage or crusade. There are flags and banners bearing heraldic symbols, hoi polloi sport the livery of their favourite mechanical knights. And it smells like the middle ages of softly decomposing canapés; baking pizzas; ocean-going whores; tan cream; smeary lipstick; baby oil; slippery condoms; clammy G-strings; wrinkled, sodden nylon armpits, frying oil reheated to the consistency of acrid sump sludge. And over it all, the abiding nasal ebb and flow of hot sewage.

Monaco is the lid to its own cavernous, bubbling, torpid septic tank. It’s the stink of consumption and corruption. The sun bakes us into a mellifluous bouillabaisse of stewed fat, flesh gristle and Nike trainers.

I expect you want to know about the birds. Well, there are a lot of them. Ugly, unshaggable ones mostly, holding their German boyfriends’ Ferrari flags, lumpy bumbags bobbing on lumpy bums.

There are slightly prettier ones. Akimbo le bateau: the famed boat girls. Boat, by the way, is an acronym – Bordering On A Tart. The boat girls have two looks. Unavailable and bored. They look unavailable to strangers and bored to people they’ve been introduced to, and whose names they don’t remember.

They lie on the plastic like anorexic shaved seals and like racing cars they have been chosen for their aerodynamic bodywork. These aren’t family saloons or loved, polished classics. They are not reliable or economic, and you wouldn’t take one home to meet the family. All they do is go. They are goers. Except, like racing cars, mostly they don’t go. They promise to go but they break down. You push their starters and nothing happens.

And then there are the blokes. Photocopier salesmen to a man. Drunk, pee-stained, clingingly insecure, baritone, loud and hideous. Even if they aren’t actually photocopier salesmen they have the sounds of photocopier salesmen. And if they are not actually hideous, then they’re larging it with the lads – kit wraps them in hideousness. The lads make up the majority of this sweaty, champagne-breathing rookery.

And even though the place semaphores sex, reeks of sex, yammers, dribbles and bays for sex, you know there’s very little, actual one-to-one, face-to-face, perky, genital, real-time sex going down. And if it does, it’s because there was no way of avoiding it. And, PS: it was very, very unsatisfying.

So, we’re all here for the weekend, sniffing out a bit of slippery and an icebox full of San Miguel. What do we actually do?

Well, not much. In fact, very little. We talk about doing tons. Most of it involving getting out of Monaco. We could go to St Paul de Vence and find a restaurant out in the hills. We could visit the Matisse chapel. Go shopping. Do Jacques Cousteau impressions in the Aquarium. But the truth is, doing anything is a Technicolour nightmare. The only people who can get around in Monaco with ease are the racing drivers, and they can’t get out to do anything either. The town is a labyrinth of crowd control barriers, manned by the sort of policemen that very rich people like. That is, furious head waiters with guns.

If you do decide to make a break for it, the best way is by tender or water taxi. But they can only take you to another bit of shore that you can’t move on. Or another boat that’s very like the one you’re on. So why bother?

The one thing we have to do is go to the Grand Prix Ball, which is touted as being one of the premier social events of the sophisticated Euro season. It’s black tie, which on land is a bore but on a boat is ocean-going torture. We all get into the tenders and sequins and penguin suits, and are stared at by the Surreyed ranks of photocopier salesmen and Finnish petrolheads. I have never been so aware of what it might have felt like to be Captain Bligh, set adrift from the Bounty.

The dinner is like every other large corporate bash. Brain-numbing, slow, uncomfortable and organised like a learning difficulties junior school’s nativity play, made that soupçon worse because it’s supposed to be fun. How is it that, with all this money and experience, you can throw a party that not a single human being can enjoy? That sort of negative enthusiasm takes some doing, as would Caprice on video. She introduces the good cause that has invariably been stapled on to this gala event (which tells you something about the quality of the glittering guests). You’ve reached some sort of barrel bottom when you clap to a virtual Caprice. A photographer salesman wins a Harley-Davidson. The Harley contemplates phoning the Samaritans. It’s time to go. It was time to go before I got here.

Next door, Monte’s premier nightclub has a scrum of furious don’t-you-know-who-I-ams and their scrotum-withering rented totty. And there are a lot of young men arguing with moonlighting waiter policemen with wires in their ears trying to park mummy’s Porsche.

We take the tender out to see to a party on a boat, which turns out to be not one boat, but two huge ferries stuck back-to-back like vast mating sea dogs. At a long trestle table, 100 Germans sit and eat Thai-ish school food; our host turns out to be a 40-stone gay Kraut in bespoke cream shorts and jacket with a baseball cap. It’s worth the trip just to see him; in this city of utter hideousness he gets the golden apple.

This party is to promote the dotcom business he sunk a Third World debt into. We arrive just ahead of a load of pole dancers who pretend to be lesbians around the pool. The Germans chew Asian cud and stare. On the dance floor, three sorry hookers simulate sex. It would only take Vincent Price striding out of the dry ice to make this a scene from the Hammer horror movie they didn’t dare show.

It’s so deeply depressing, so comprehensively devoid of any amusement, expectation or glamour, so utterly tacky, witless, empty and sad that I can’t even stand back, wrapped in the pashmina of my hack’s cynicism, and laugh at it. Getting off this boat takes on paramount shove-the-women-off-the-life-raft importance. I couldn’t want to leave more if it hit an iceberg (and I couldn’t wish for an iceberg more). This party is social Ebola. The blonde wants to try another one on another boat. I can’t face it. Not even for the lives of my children.

We return to our floating bidet and Jamie Blandford just happens to be passing. By comparison to the rest of the evening, it’s like a visitation from Aristotle.

Monte Carlo is an attack on the senses, the most violent of which is the noise. Our gangplank is ten feet from the racetrack, which sounds great when you say it, but sounds as if your brains are squirting out of your ears like toothpaste when you live it. We spend all day with yellow plastic McNuggets in our ears, every so often raising an eyebrow or shrugging a shoulder by way of conversation.

It’s a hurricane of sound. If the racing cars aren’t practicing then there’s something called Formula Three, or go-karts, or racing Porsches. And when they are all done, the local mummy’s boys get into their Ferraris and zoom and pretend. It’s as pathetic as taking your own football to a Cup Final. And if it’s not them, it’s the synchronised knockabout street sweepers.

The aptly named pits are a self-contained city of Portakabin cafés and motor homes. They perambulate around the world as the modern equivalent of the circus. Today, naughty boys and girls from nice suburban families run away to join Formula One. The money that it must take to make these little plastic cars go round and round is staggering. Embarrassing. And I’m not someone who naturally spies conspicuous consumption and then thinks of staving black babies or Third World disease. But motor racing is bulimic consumption on a psychotic level. I took over the side of the jetty and lo, there is what pays for most of it. Millions and millions of fag butts. The bay is one huge ashtray. The confetti of a great cancerous wedding.

Waiting for the race to begin, we are entertained by the Swiss Red Arrows. I know that sounds like a joke. Little crimson turboprop trainers buzz and dive-bomb Monte Carlo and on every sun deck every photocopier salesman shouts, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” high-fives his mates and collapses into self-congratulatory giggles. Switzerland Blitzkrieg-ing Monaco is funny. One fat tax avoider declaring war on another, dropping anti-personal interest rates. But Switzerland and Monaco are never going to fight a war. You’ve got to care about something to be prepared to die for it.

As a human being there are many, many things you can feel ashamed of. Things that leave a metallic taste in the mouth, make you promise to do better. Try harder. Reorganise your priorities. And physically or symbolically, every single one of them is here for one weekend a year.

Monte Carlo is a gaudy parable. A speechless Sermon on the Mount. But no one’s listening. And they couldn’t hear even if they were. The noise reached concrete-splitting levels. It’s the roar of selfishness, greed, vanity, avarice, addiction, lust and pointless stupidity. On the giant screen above the slurping ashtray, shimmering in the petrol haze, the start lights are flashing. Red, amber, green. And they’re off.