Alan Carr has paid £3.5million for a baronial pile in the borders. Neil Mackay says it smacks of the Gilded Age when the rich played and the poor suffered.

I’ve often feared early-onset curmudgeonliness since I crashed-landed into my 50s. 

When I summon the courage to engage in a little introspection, it never fails to shock me that someone who tripped their way through the Second Summer of Love in 1988 now shouts at the TV like a poorly-rehearsed Victor Meldrew tribute act. C’est la vie, I guess, or c’est la mort.

Aside from the varied assortment of extremists, racists and psychopaths who people politics, the targets of my Meldrewian rages tend to be the super-rich vapid idiots who have somehow come to represent the pinnacle of modern culture. 

Let me deploy two words which should be treated as so dangerous they may summon Satan: ‘influencers’ and ‘celebrities’.

When I hear those words, I picture a fresh turd in the gutter sprinkled with glitter. I told you I was becoming curmudgeonly.

Keir Starmer refuses to negotiate on indy. That makes me happy

Murrell Memo: why should Swinney know more about the case than us?

A colleague just called Sarwar a “f**kwit”, what does that say about Labour?

Row over arming the Scottish police shows we’ve forgotten how to debate

Until recently, I had no problem with the comedian Alan Carr. His humour isn’t for me. I’m not a fan of that Mr Saturday Night Showbiz schtick. But he’s welcome to what passes for fame and wealth these days for his talents.

However, he has nudged himself towards the category of super-rich vapidity with his purchase of a Scottish castle. 

Unlike my curmudgeonliness, I’ve no fear of yielding to my class-war instincts. When I first heard of Carr buying up a swathe of Scotland, I felt an immediate spike of discomfort verging on antagonism. 

The more I’ve read about this venture, the more unpleasant it seems. What unsettles me is how much it represents our times. 

We live in an era defined by gaudiness. If there was a symbol to sum up the 2020s it would be Donald Trump rage-tweeting at 2am on a golden toilet. 

Who knows, Carr could install a golden toilet in his west-wing. He has spent £3.25million on what tabloids - breathlessly - describe as the ‘fairytale’ Ayton Castle in the Borders. 

Given celebrities consider every aspect of their lives shamelessly marketable, Carr has entered into a deal with Disney+ worth ‘seven-figures’ - ie millions - to film him renovating the place.

That anyone would want to watch a stand-up comedian refit the lead on his roof is beyond me, but this is perhaps why IQs are falling like shot grouse from the sky everywhere you look.

Seemingly, Carr gets the 700-year-old Barony of Ayton title too. I can think of a few titles to bestow on Carr but my editor would assuredly blue-pencil them.

Carr has entered into a deal with Disney+ worth ‘seven-figures’ to film him renovating the place. (Image: BBC/Studio Lambert)

Carr said: “Some men when they have a midlife crisis buy a Lamborghini or grow a ponytail, but me - I want my very own castle.” I’m afraid I find that comment loathsome.

There are about 5000 Lamborghinis in Britain, a nation of nearly 70million. So the word ‘some men’ is doing a lot of work. The sense of salivating greed which drips from the phrase ‘I want my very own castle’, is - to me at least - repellent.

It all smacks of the Gilded Age - when empty aristocrats spent their lives and fortunes playing with Fabergé eggs in their palaces; when the red carpet was rolled out at the Opera while paupers gawped from the poor-house. Top hats for the few, rags for the many.

In that disgraceful Victorian period, the rich and famous lived lives of unimaginable extravagance, while the rest of humanity slogged if they were lucky, or starved if they weren’t. Sound familiar?

The fact that Carr has tied this all up in a deal with Disney adds a distinctly ‘Scotland as shortbread tin’ vibe. ‘Oh look,’ we peasants are meant to say, ‘here comes a rich man to play in our pretty countryside, aren’t we lucky.’ 

I found one aspect of this story deeply saddening. There are some folk hoping that Carr’s arrival will keep the village of Ayton alive. Like many rural areas, it’s struggling. 

What the hell does that say about the society we’ve created? That a community’s last hope is for some rich celebrity to save them? That’s foul. 

Maybe Carr can save them, but why aren’t we saving them? The rest of Scotland? Our government?

Other locals fear that they’ll be denied access to the estate for walking. It just underscores how huge tracts of Scotland are owned by very rich people. Just 421 people own 50% of all the privately-owned land in Scotland, and 2588 people own 70%.

I once thought of Carr as merely a TV clown providing disposable laughs for the masses. Now I feel there is maybe some malevolence in him. 

He cannot be a stupid man. He must know that his boasts and braggadocio sit very uneasy in the current social climate. 

I’m not saying he shouldn’t spend his money on what pleases him, but must he do it in so gauche and selfish a fashion?

Anyone who has volunteered at food-banks or worked with the homeless - which I have - will surely feel the cognitive dissonance. Are we meant to find this cool? Should we resist comparisons to hungry children and rough-sleepers?

Does this make me a killjoy? If so, good. If killing joy equates with repulsion at the rich ostentatiously bathing in gold while poverty abounds then find me Joy and I’ll kill it.

I cannot smile and coo over the antics of multi-millionaire celebrities sating their vast egos in money and then crowing about it. My grandparents and great-grandparents who sweated and slaved for industrial barons and lords of the manor in fields and factories would rise up from their graves and haunt me if I did - and I’d deserve their contempt.

It’s incidents like this which remind me that I’m increasingly a man out of time: that this period which we’re living through accords in no way with my personal morality or view of humanity.

I don’t put the deformations of this era down to my fellow human beings but to the politicians who run our nations, who have broken our communities, told us to be grateful for poverty wages, and shaped a society where only wealth matters. 

One day it will all come tumbling down, as it has before, and then I may finally exorcise the curmudgeonly ghost of Victor Meldrew who will not stop haunting me.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics

© Herald Scotland