A night at London's newest and most expensive hotel

The Italian man at the table beside us has just ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne.

His leggy date isn't the slightest bit impressed as she fidgets with a designer bag and adjusts one of several sparkling bangles on her wrist. She's bored.

"Could I look at the wine list?" I ask. And there it is: Dom Perignon at £280 (AU$428) a bottle. Nothing odd about that, perhaps, in this part of town, but then after a couple of sips the man orders a bottle of white Burgundy for around the same price.

My wife and I reckon his bill for dinner alone will come to around £900.

Benvenuti to the brand new Bulgari Hotel in London's Knightsbridge, the most expensive place to stay in Britain  where the cheapest room comes in at around £690 - and that's before you've even had a cup of cocoa, never mind the almost obligatory dispensing of £5 notes to grovelling staff as they press the lift buttons on your behalf and generally buzz about like pesky wasps. This is conspicuous wealth gone mad.

By comparison, the Ritz costs £402 and the Savoy £414 - and the fact that the Bulgari is practically full every night (including the £14,400 penthouse suite) tells you everything you need to know about those pockets of modern Britain that have been turned into temples of vulgarity, attended by flashy foreigners who pay no taxes here but inflate the price of everything for the rest of us.

Good taste - once something this country did reasonably well - has too often been swallowed up by crass monuments to bling that make a mockery of the Prime Minister's now infamous sentiment that we are all in this together.

The Vulgari, sorry, Bulgari, is just across the road from the One Hyde Park block of flats - some of which sell for tens of millions - built by the brash property developers Nick and Christian Candy.

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Source: The Daily Mail, 3 July 2012