Miles Kington: My controversial turn at the Oxford Union

Yes, it was in February this year that I was one of the guest speakers at the Oxford Union, along with Peter Stringfellow, ex-Major Charles Ingram (of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? fame), Theo Paphitis from BBC 2's Dragon's Den and other media riff-raff. Our motion was, roughly, "That this House thinks the Acquisition of Wealth is the Clearest Path to Happiness", and I can't think why there weren't hordes of protesters besieging the building over this inflammatory and flagrantly capitalist bunkum.

I myself had believed devoutly until a week before the debate in the healing powers of wealth creation. Then I got a phone call from the President of the Union who said that there had been a bit of a cock-up over speakers, and they now found that they had more people speaking in favour of wealth than against it, and would I be prepared to change sides at a moment's notice?

Well, I am a man of principle. I just need to be told what the principle is. So I changed sides, confident that the revelation of this confidential phone call would make a good opening to my speech, which indeed it did, and amassed as much evidence as I could that money involves misery, including a memory I had of my one and only visit to Stringfellow's club.

"At the table next to us," I told the enraptured young people, "there was a man by himself who called for his bill towards the end of the evening and gave the waitress his credit card to pay with. She brought it back. She was sorry, she said, but it was invalid. It had expired at midnight. About 10 minutes ago. Couldn't she overlook it? No. It just didn't work any more. It had expired. It was a dead credit card, etc, etc. He had no other way of paying, so the waitress said she was sorry but he would have to have a word with Peter Stringfellow about the bill.

"I shall never forget the look of fear in that man's face at the prospect of having to face Mr Stringfellow," I said. "If that is where the search for wealth takes you, I never want to go down that path."

The other speakers chose different approaches to the art of audience persuasion. On the other side, Mr Stringfellow did not so much make a speech as give a rock-star performance without a backing band, striding 20 feet this way and that down the floor, pointing at the audience dramatically but meaninglessly, like a searchlight looking for visiting celebrities, pausing occasionally to ogle beautiful blondes, and all the while telling us his life story. Mr Paphitis intoned a soft love story to money and told us his life story.

On our side, Mr Ingram got to his feet with a muttered, "Well, I've written a half-hour speech and I'm damned well going to read it," and did so, without mentioning the one thing in the world for which he was famous, i.e. being thrown out of the Army for "cheating" on a TV show. Instead he delivered a lecture on the supremacy of family values and the cosiness of moral superiority, which, as the coughing grew louder, he seemed to declaim slower and slower. At one point I remember Stringfellow shouting: "For God's sake, Charlie, throw away the speech and tell us what you really think!" and the secretary flashed up cards saying FIVE MINUTES TO GO, TWO MINUTES TO GO, YOU ARE FIVE MINUTES OVER, TEN MINUTES OVER, A LYNCHING PARTY IS ARRIVING FOR YOU IN ONE MINUTE... but none of it was any good, and he may still be speaking somewhere for all I know...

"You've never been to my club, have you?" said Stringfellow to me afterwards. "That story about the credit card was made up, wasn't it?"

He was right, of course. Well, the story was true but it had happened at a place called Peppermint Park. How did he know?

"If we had a punter who couldn't pay," he said affably, "we would gently withdraw his Rolex Oyster from his wrist and say he could have it back the next day when he brought the money he owed us."