You’ve probably seen the footage: the funeral attire, the bitter Birkin, the flats. In the end, Donald and Melania went quietly, slinking off to the thin applause of their families. The arrival of Joe Biden and the disappearance of the former president does, however, raise a question. Who will play the role of the world’s worst despot now? Who is going to fly the flag for seriously bad sofas and gala dinners for 100 ashen “business associates”, now the Trumps have kaftan-ed off to Mar-a-Lago in a whirl of bad juju?
On Tuesday the answer arrived in the form of a sensational video. To say the details of Vladimir Putin’s secret palace were gobstopping is to totally understate the sheer I’m-bored insanity of the lacquered bunker this electrifying little Gollum is said to have built on a peninsula near a resort on the Black Sea.
I like to think I have some level of tolerance for this sort of super-rich foreign madness, having spent years at Tatler interviewing women who decorate their yachts to match their bikinis. But, my God, just look at the drone footage of the estate — it’s 39 times the size of Monaco — and the palace’s extraordinary interiors, recreated from pictures and floorplans by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader.
Navalny nearly died last year after Russian agents smeared novichok on his underpants, but this hasn’t stopped him putting together the video while he was recovering in a Berlin hospital. Watching his two-hour expectoration, in which, cushion by cushion, he reveals the satanic depths of Putin’s obsession with “couches in the Louis XIV style”, you just think: anyone capable of delivering such a sustained rant about soft furnishings after a nerve agent has been applied to their bare knackers deserves undying awe and respect.
The vast palace, says Navalny, is evidence that the president is mentally unwell. Putin has been lost “to sofas” and high-end lavatory brushes and dressing rooms for waiters for some time. There are “dozens” of bog brushes and bog paper holders costing nearly £1,500 (AU$2,600) a set: Putin has spent the “annual pension of the average Russian pensioner” on latrines he “may never enter”. It is true that the palace looks like somewhere Elvis might have been hiding: every nook, every cranny, every one of his echoing restrooms shrieks Real Housewives of the Black Sea.
What began life as a modest $10m villa — a “small house” — has been allowed to billow to a $1bn “pleasure palace” filled with eye-melting furniture and rancid carpets. You look at the sprawling compound — 3 and a half times the size of the local town — and you just think: no matter how much this man now buys, collects or builds, it will never be enough. This isn’t a house but a “whole city”, complete with petrol station, pipelines, three-lane motorway, border control and no-fly zone. It is more than anything anyone could ever want, but when you’ve already done everything, what are you going to do but build a tunnel through the side of a mountain just so you can get a perfect view of the sea while you sip your grim wine?
There is a 260ft bridge simply “to get to the tea house” as well as a subterranean ice rink, a port, a casino, a strip club, and a “long-suffering amphitheatre” that has been constantly rebuilt. This isn’t even the first palace that’s been made here: the original one had to be stripped and redone because of “mould”. If you want to know what lunacy looks like, it is a 68-year-old man completely demolishing a room only to rebuild it and fill it with fruit machines and old-man armchairs, like a Margate pub. What kind of person needs an “aquadiscotheque"? You can just imagine Putin reclining next to its lonely fountains in his silky sports-style swimming tanga while he bores his guests to death by telling them how at his vineyards “classical music is played for the maturing wine”.
How would you like a night out in his dead Daddy Warbucks theatre with its stalls and circle and empty theatre bar, as he lectures you on the exact provenance and quality of the sofa cushions and, I don’t know, how many lemurs were killed to make the fringe? I bet even the performers don’t want to be there, and they’re paid in “diamonds”.
Having everything in life tucked away from other people is rather solemn and sad, isn’t it? Why build a theatre when you can attend one with other people? Why have a church “imported from Greece” when the whole point of worship is human contact?
Mind you: can you imagine if it had been chic and tasteful? What a disappointment that would have been.
Join the conversation
Starmer fixer quits after Labour ‘coup’
Dowing Street chief of staff Sue Gray resigns after three months of ‘dysfunction’.
Read more
New Zealand ship sinks with ex-Royal Navy commander at the helm
Commander Yvonne Gray, the British-born master of MNZS Manawanui, is praised for saving lives by ordering the 75 crew and passengers to abandon ship off Samoa
Read more