Dominic Prince

Being married to Rose, one of the greatest cooks in the country, is an especially pleasurable thing. No meal is ever dull. Breakfast can be a variety of treats from toast to scrambled eggs to a fried venison liver. Lunch is usually a sausage, perhaps some lentils or something leftover from the evening before. Dinner kicks off around 6 p.m. with a cocktail or two followed by wine. In winter we are great consumers of game, partridge, hare and pheasant. Thick creamy curries, poached fish, beef dripping with red blood. Great hunks of homemade bread lashed with butter and topped with a piece of artisan cheese. There are always leftovers.

I don’t know about you, but I get infuriated by insurance. I don’t know about you, but I get infuriated by insurance. Motor insurance, household insurance, pet insurance. Some, like cover for your car, you have to have by law. Other stuff, like cover for your cat or the contents of your house, you don’t. A great deal of insurance is unnecessary and costly. Is it worth insuring an old banger comprehensively? No. Is it worth insuring paintings? Probably not: nicked pictures have little re-sale value and your average burglar wouldn’t know a Van Gogh from your great-aunt’s holiday daub anyway. Each year when the premiums are due, I shudder at the relentless upward march of renewal costs.

The credit crunch has had some unlikely repercussions. Tim Blixeth, a US lumber billionaire, was recently trying to sell his Caribbean island. With little interest shown in the $75 million asking price, Blixeth is now trying to barter it. He has suggested that a Gulfstream jet or a snazzy New York apartment might just secure the island. On a different scale, I know how he feels. We used to pay £85 an hour to have a man who knew about computers come and sort out the cyber mess in the Prince household. We would often get bills for £500 and that would happen three or four times a year — it was ruinous. Tax deductible, yes, but nevertheless a huge sum of money.

Grouse shooting and grouse moors have historically been the preserve of the British aristocracy. For anyone interested in game, shooting grouse is about as good as it gets. If pheasant shooting is a yacht, grouse shooting is a luxury private liner reserved only for the very rich. Owning a grouse moor is like owning a very expensive, extremely high-maintenance toy — and there are a group of buyers who are making grouse moors one of the most sought-after assets in the land. With only 300 moors in Britain, specialist agents say that there’s a queue of newly wealthy buyers but very few sellers, and consequently prices are heading skyward.

Dominic Prince says that some of the world’s canniest investors have consolidated their fortunes by moving into cash as soon as economic storm clouds started to gather Six weeks before the stock market crash of 1987 Sir James Goldsmith met the Australian financier Robert Holmes à Court. Then at the height of his financial prowess, Holmes à Court was reckoned at the time to be the richest man in Australia, wealthier than either Rupert Murdoch or Kerry Packer. Intrigued, Goldsmith was convinced Holmes à Court must be a genius. After the meeting he began to gather as much information as he could on his business methods. But once he’d assembled the intelligence, something dawned on him that would dramatically reverse his opinion.

Dominic Prince says you’d have to be potty to buy a racehorse as an investment — unless your name happened to be John Magnier or Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum Owning and breeding a thoroughbred racehorse can be a mouth-wateringly profitable enterprise. Sir Percy, winner of last year’s Epsom Derby, cost a piffling 16,000 guineas when he was knocked down to the Pakenham family at auction as a yearling, and costs about the same in training fees each year. To date he has won a little over £1 million in a racing career of just two seasons. Not a bad return on capital, but the risk-reward ratio is huge — and it can safely be said that anyone who buys a racehorse as an investment is potty.