Sometimes there's simply no alternative to class hatred. The rich are rich because they are bastards, and that's all there is to it.

Nicholas Van Hoogstraten is one such bastard. He made his money "from property" -- one of those euphemisms that usually means that someone did bugger all to merit their fortune except to buy cheap and sell expensive. In Van Hoogstraten's case, he did a bit more than that. He served four years in jail, for example, for obtaining money with menaces and an arson attack on a rabbi's house in Brighton.

He's also had to put up with "nothing but trouble" from the tenants of all the properties that he's bought and sold. Fortunately for him, he's now left with "only about 250 of the real scumbags, which is not bad considering we used to have a couple of thousand".

He got his start in life on the back of inherited wealth -- that and a stamp business he started at the age of nine. Not that he's ever shown much gratitude to his parents (his father was a shipping agent, his grandfather a major shareholder in the British East India Company). In 1988, he removed all the carpets and curtains from their home because he reckoned they owed him money. He's also boasted that his mother "used to get a clip round the ear from me when she asked for it . . . She wouldn't invest in me. I had to bash her around to get £100 out of her. What kind of an idiot was that?"

Van Hoogstraten told the Daily Mail recently that: "I've never resorted to violence with women since I've grown up. But I've never had to." He doesn't think much of women: "I don't regard [them] as important details in my life. They are very far down the list." Their main purpose, he believes, is to breed. Even so, he didn't have his first child -- one of five by some of his various mistresses -- until he was 40. "Before that I made women get rid of them," he says.

None of his children will inherit any of his wealth, which is estimated at £40-50 million. Instead, Van Hoogstraten is engaged on the sort of funerary monument that would not have disgraced the pharaohs. In open countryside near Lewes, in Sussex, he is building Hamilton Palace, the biggest, costliest private residence constructed in Britain this century. He expects it to consume most of his private fortune.

It is, in short, a mausoleum for the man himself and his priceless collection of furniture and paintings (including one of the very few Holbeins not owned by a public gallery). The main floor is more than 600 feet long; the ceilings and floors consist of foot-thick reinforced concrete. It is being built to last for as long as the pyramids.

When it is finished, the single entrance will be sealed, locking up all his treasures in perpetuity. "I can't think of anything more disgusting than having scum traipsing around in here, poking at things with their filthy hands," he has commented. A self-perpetuating offshore trust will provide the money to ensure that long after he is dead and buried, the property he accumulated in his lifetime will remain unseen and buried too. "It's a way of taking it with you," he says.

The one loophole in Van Hoogstraten's megalomanic vanity is that some latterday grave robbers might find a way to liberate the treasures that he now seeks to remove from human appreciation. But given his track record, it is not inconceivable that he could simply decide to heap the whole lot on some monstrous funeral pyre in order to keep the "scum" from coming near it. The right of rich bastards to do what they want with their riches means that it would not be possible to prevent him.

The point at which Van Hoogstraten's ludicrous obsession might have been halted has already passed. When Wealden district council granted planning permission for Hamilton Palace in 1987, it noted that it broke county planning guidelines but justified doing so on the basis that the chance to have someone build something on such a scale was so rare. In other words, they broke the rules because the person who wanted to build it was rich enough to do so on such a monumental scale.

Of course, Nicholas Van Hoogstraten might well still be a bastard even if he wasn't rich, so you can only take class hatred so far. The point is that it is partly because he is a bastard that he became rich in the first place; and, once having acquired those riches, his possession of them enables him to be a far bigger bastard than any poor person could ever be.

Memo to Chris Smith: Can you do something to stop rich bastards preventing scum like us from having sight of our shared heritage? And memo to Gordon Brown: At the very least, can you do something to remove the tax advantages for rich bastards who want to leave their art and other treasures in the hands of an offshore trust?