No. 3 Royal Ascot

Yes, Royal Ascot, the dowager of the flat racing calendar kicks off tomorrow, and one has to ask the question, why?

Why does this joke of a five day event command so much airtime on a publicly owned television channel?

I say joke, because that’s all it is to me or any outsider to the obscenely wealthy racing fraternity. It’s not what it used to be? To me it’s never been anything other than a cattle-market of the grotesquely rich and the fortunately famous.

Royal Ascot isn’t about the horses, or the so-called sport of kings. Even with the quality of the thoroughbreds attending. It may once have been, a very long time ago in what might as well be a galaxy far, far away, but it’s now just a fashion parade. A chance for the landed gentry and all the other parasitic inbred money sponges that make up the minority controlling the wealth of this once fine land to mingle together, get drunk and parade their starchy, sun-dried, first-cousin-never-removed wives around in the stupidest hats one wouldn’t dare imagine.

Ladies Day, for instance. The very title seems to be a celebration of the fact that they actually allow women through the gates, as though nobody’s seen fit to inform the organisers that the fairer sex was actually granted the same voting rights as men 80 years ago. But then you take one look at some of these pampered harridans milling about the Royal enclosure, the sort that hasn’t done a day’s graft in their entire life for fear of chipping a Tiffany diamond encrusted fingernail, and you wonder whether somebody should be leading them up to the starting gate in time for the 3.30 start.

It’s all about tradition, see? The tradition of the greedy and the selfish. Get this:

“Traditionally to be admitted to the Royal Enclosure for the first time one must either be a guest of a member or be sponsored for membership by a member who has attended at least four times”

I hold my breath in anticipation of my sponsorship.

Nowhere else is the class divide brought to the small screen in such glory than at Royal Ascot… The BBC televise it and we foot the bill.The hooray Henrys are required to regale themselves in full morning dress within the Royal Enclosure, whilst the ladies are prohibited from exposing their midriffs and shoulders and must wear a hat. And outside the baying hordes follow suit, although it isn’t required for the proles gathering at the locked gates of the Royal enclosure to do so. And so you see them there on the television; gurning red faces and grey top hats. Champagne glasses clenched in sweaty paws. Queuing up to be interviewed by Clare Baulding, desperate for their fleeting fifteen seconds of fame. The idle rich and the downtrodden peasantry. United in one cause: to drink as much as possible and fill the pockets of the trackside bookies.

Wideboy bankers rub shoulders with lords and ladies. The twenty-first-in-line-to-the-throne-once-removed quaffs Louis XIII de Rémy Martin by the bucket. And they parade themselves across our TV screens with a look of self-satisfaction that makes you want to puncture their drink-swollen faces with a very sharp spike.

Let the rich and the publicity-craving fashionistas; the anorexia and cocaine-riddled ‘it-girls’; the so-called elite of high-society… Let them have their parade. Let them drink themselves towards earlier graves. Let them do all of this and maybe, just maybe, they’ll eventually drown in a tide of their own purulent effluence…

Just don’t fund the showing of this self-indulgent bunfight with my money.