I would take pleasure in driving a Chelsea tractor to the shop to buy a pint of milk
My father was a lifelong socialist. He joined the Labour party at the age of 16 and at the time of his death, 70 years later, he was a Labour member of the House of Lords. He was a fairly typical leftwinger in that he preferred the company of the poor to the rich and he regarded conspicuous consumption — particularly that of the nouveau riche — as the eighth deadly sin. However, he did have one capitalist vice: he was obsessed with cars. This may explain why during his most politically active phase, when he was plotting the downfall of the ruling class, he drove a Bentley.
I was supposed to inherit that Bentley. As I sat in the back playing with the electric windows, my father would tell me to treat the upholstery with care as he intended to give me the car on my 21st birthday. Unfortunately, it never happened. The running costs rendered it impractical as a family car and my maternal grandfather refused to let my father store it in his garage. As a result, the car I was given on my 21st birthday was a second-hand Mini van.
After selling the Bentley, my father often fantasised about owning another luxury car. He would spend the weekends pouring over motoring magazines, weighing up the pros and cons of the latest models. But his socialist instincts always got the better of him and he would end up either sticking with what he’d got — an Austin Maxi, for instance — or plumping for the latest Toyota.
I suffer from the same schizophrenia. Having recently become the father of a fourth child, I now need a bigger car and am torn between buying something sensible like a Renault Grand Scenic and going for a ludicrously over-the-top SUV like a Cadillac Escalade.
The sensible option has various things to recommend it. A large MPV is a good deal cheaper to run than a full-size SUV. A diesel engine Ford S-Max, for instance, returns approximately 45mpg, while a petrol engine Land Rover Discovery — the seven-seater version — barely returns 25. Then there’s the looming Congestion Charge hike in central London. During his mayoral campaign, Boris said he would oppose increasing the charge for SUVs to £25, but since getting elected he has remained ominously silent on the issue. I suspect that Dave Cameron’s goons at Central Office will force Boris to rescind on that promise since it runs counter to the Tory party’s new ‘green’ image.
On the other hand, if you think all the environmentalist propaganda about carbon emissions is a load of balls, then what better o signal your dissent than owning a ea tractor? I would take particular ure in driving it to the nearest shop to buy a pint of milk. I could emerge from my eagle’s nest of a cabin chomping a big fat cigar and wearing my favourite T-shirt. It has a picture of a man dozing in an armchair by a log fire above the slogan: ‘Friends of the Hearth — because the less we do, the sooner it will all be over.’
To help with this decision I put in a call to Andrew English, the motoring correspondent of the Telegraph. ‘It’s a choice between a car the size of Surrey and a box on wheels,’ he said. The advantage of big SUVs is that they can glide ‘imperiously’ over speed bumps and absorb London’s terrible road surfaces, but he warned about rising fuel costs. ‘The other day, I filled up a Disco I was test driving and when I tried to pay for it I found I didn’t have enough money in my wallet. That’s never happened to me before. It came to 130 quid!’ After a brief discussion of the Chrysler Grand Voyager — ‘Hey, what could be more cool than the car Tony and Cherie drive around in?’ he joked — he steered me towards the new Ford Galaxy. With all seven seats in operation it has almost as much load space as the Grand Voyager but the diesel version returns about 45mpg in contrast to the Chrysler’s 35mpg. Good residuals, too.
So there it is. Like my father, I dream about driving around in some plutocrat’s barge, but will almost certainly end up behind the wheel of a middle manager’s ‘box on wheels’. Ah well. I daresay that if I parked a Cadillac Escalade outside my house in Acton, it would be nicked within five minutes.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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