If reports are to be believed, everyone’s favourite oligarch is struggling to get his new superyacht delivered. Tom Isitt can’t help but emit a small, sadistic snigger . . .

I shouldn’t laugh. I really shouldn’t. But I can’t help it. Maybe it’s an envy thing, maybe it’s a sense of moral outrage, maybe it’s because I’m a deeply flawed man. But the news that Roman Abramovich is having trouble with his new boat makes me chuckle . . .

The Magical Backdrop
The superyacht world has been a-buzz and a-gog for several years, as details of Abramovich’s new build have emerged from the Blohm & Voss yard in Germany. They are building him a 560-foot, 13,000-tonne behemoth called ‘Eclipse’. It has two helipads, 11 guest cabins, 70 crew, 6,000 square feet of living space, two swimming pools, several hot tubs, a disco, three tenders and a mini-submarine. This will be the biggest private superyacht ever, and will make the royal families of Saudi, Dubai and Oman feel seriously under-endowed with their pitiful 500-footers. Abramovich already owns several vast superyachts, including Pelorus (pictured), a 377-foot Lurssen, but he wants another, much, much bigger one.

Now is it me, or is there something fundamentally wrong with a dozen or so of the world’s richest men spending hundreds of millions of pounds on proving a point? Really, who cares? Does it really matter that yours is 20 metres shorter than Paul Allen’s or that it’s 30 metres longer than Usmanov’s? These are intelligent men and yet they seem to behave like a bunch of nine year-olds playing Top Trumps.

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