Spare a thought for the poor oligarchs and their ugly homes

In these difficult times with so many in need, it’s hard to focus on every desperate case, but if you can, please spare a thought for our poor oligarchs. This endangered breed is coping with huge amounts of stress with the destructive onslaught in their natural habitats.

In elite enclaves and prime locations all over the world, squatters are moving into large, expensive and empty properties and making outlandish requests, like: “Can we have this empty house for refugees?” It’s shocking to see this breakdown of law and order in Europe.

In London, a property in Belgravia assumed to belong to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminium bigwig, was occupied by protestors who duly hung Ukrainian flags and banners bearing expletives about Putin out the front. This gave us a through-the-keyhole glimpse of how the other half – in this case, the very wealthy Russians in London – live, and it’s not pretty. Literally.

You’d expect, with all those billions in the bank, that the colour scheme might stretch beyond beige – but it seems a dearth of personality and sheer emptiness is the look du jour. These poor people haven’t been exposed to so much as a tight gingham print. Heartbreaking. It makes sense that the interiors of these properties are charmless and devoid of character. It’s a sartorial nod to the international elitism of never really belonging anywhere, the look that is a little sinister in its neat nothingness and contemporary Art Deco lines.

The house is situated in a classic London garden square, one of the gems of Thomas Cubitt’s architectural vision. This property has been host to many a moment in British history and fittingly, its previous occupant was the sycophantic, social-climbing and tasteful Tory MP Chips Channon. In his time, old Chips played host to the establishment in the beautifully designed, classical Parisian dining room. The area these days is inhabited by lots of important embassies, and just off it you will find possibly the poshest Waitrose in the country, to serve all those transient ambassadorial needs.

You’d need to go shopping pretty often to purchase enough Mr Sheen to go round all those mahogany bannisters. From the grainy video taken by the occupying activists, we see the rich person’s aesthetic checklist: slightly dodgy art curiously hung – tick; random uses of glass structures indoors – tick; an epic grand piano that has never been played – tick; shelves full of books that look largely unread – tick. All the classic symbols of having made it in a Nineties Hollywood movie, Richie Rich, for example, would fit right in.

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The inside reflects the ultimate in luxury chic, a total lack of reference, no displays of heritage or culture. It’s the ubiquity of wealth, the type you see frequently with rich women who all buy the same designer outfits and the same surgically enhanced face – you know the one, with the uneven pouty mouth and perma-surprised arched eyebrow. Perhaps the elite share the same interior designer as well as the same injector?

You can see how it happens; being busy mooring your ugly superyacht in one beautiful place or another means there is no time to invest in a home. Perhaps it’s a security measure, to avoid detection and make it seem like it literally could be anyone’s house. Well, not anyone’s, it doesn’t resemble the rubble that’s left of the homes of the residents of Kharkiv, but you get the idea.

The appetite for a sneak peek into the rarefied world of the rich and infamous is a guilty compulsion and one that can only be balanced by recognising the wretched lack of taste displayed. We should all respect the rule of law, it doesn’t change depending on our strength of feeling in current events, but in this instance, opening our hearts and our superior sense of style on a budget – through a mix of charity shop antique finds and IKEA shelves – sets us apart from the gilded cages of the misguided 1 per cent.

Have a heart for the poor oligarchs, or at least direct them towards an interior designer.