The Top Five Crassest Parties Since The Financial Crisis Began

The Christmas party season, the time when executives lavish canapes, booze, and anonymous dark corners on their underlings to help them forget about the vast amounts of money that they make off them, is drawing to a close once more. But if you’re a bailed out bank, maybe you didn’t have one at all. And chances are, those that did go ahead weren’t exactly blinging - a friend at a large national law firm told me a Christmas dinner he went to last week featured whole unpeeled parnips, cut in half lengthways, and served raw. Post-crunch new-puritanism is the next big culinary trend, yeah?

So gather round and let the righteous indignation flow as Bad Idea gives you the top five most offensive recession-baiting parties!

5. Macquerie Bank

Well done to Morgan Stanley for cancelling their Christmas party, or at least doing a good job of keeping quiet about it - a party with TARP funds might have been a bit galling. Not so smart with the ol’ PR was Australia’s Macquerie Bank, who spent up to a million dollars on their Christmas bash just as it looks ready to announce job cuts. Four chartered boats packed with food and booze ferried 1000 guests around Sydney harbour, before rocking up to Cockatoo Island for a gothic-themed party featuring a live set by The Presets, and waitresses with vodka-filled water pistols. Classy!

4. Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS

Scottish banks obviously got the lion’s share of the UK bailout pot, and that must have been a real hard knock to their confidence. What could cheer them up? A Rat Pack musical and Patrick Kielty respectively!

RBS was set to have a big bash in Hampshire, but then secretly moved it to its head office in Edinburgh to try and avoid public outcry, which didn’t really pan out. They spent £300,000 on a banquet, champagne, accomodation in a five-star hotel for everyone, and a theatre trip for the aforementioned musical. I can almost hear the drunken 4/4 handclapping and thigh-slapping; check photos of the lamefest here.

Meanwhile HBOS mirrored the rivals’ tedium with a banquet, champagne, accomodation in a five-star hotel for everyone, but imperceptibly heightened the awfulness by getting Kielty to make a bunch of credit-crunch-related gags. He said at one point, referring to the taxpayer-funded bacchanal beneath him, “Your secret’s safe with me!” Except it wasn’t, because the News of the World found out.

3. Lil Wayne’s Birthday

The Atlantan rapper has had a ridiculous year, selling over a million copies of his record “Tha Carter 3″ in a week, while sounding like an old lady with a cough syrup addiction, and the insanity reached a shameless peak at his birthday party in early October. An ice sculpture holding 30 bottles of Cristal! Another with $100 bills encased in it! A Louis Vuitton briefcase filled with a MILLION DOLLARS as a birthday present from his record label boss and good chum Birdman! Truly he is, in his own words, ”a young money millionaire, tougher than Nigerian hair”.

But for his 10-year-old daughter’s birthday last week, he kept it real and took her for a bowling party, which is just what I had for my 10th birthday. Except T.I. didn’t come to mine. And it wasn’t filmed with high-end professional equipment. But whatev.

2. Roger Jenkins’s Darfur Bash

The man Bad Idea loves to hate for his undisclosed Barclays bonuses, indulged in a little showboating philanthropy last month, with his £10m Darfur benefit last month held at his house.

We noted recently that as the crisis has gone on, corporate philanthropy has got ever more fist-gnawingly embarrassing and misguided, and Jenkins’s party was no exception. Guests including Bono, Michael Caine and Trinny from Trinny and Susannah spent £10,000 a ticket to absolve themselves of sleb guilt for another year, though they didn’t ultimately wash the sheer WTF crassness of a BANQUET FOR DARFUR away. Of course, Rodge was helped enormously by the connections of his Bosnian wife Diana, who organised the bash alongside George Clooney, and exploited her Kid Rock connection to get him to play a set. Well, at least Kid makes a good advert for the very pressing need for humanitarian aid.

1. Palm Jumeirah Opening

But they all dim and lifeless compared with the most sublime middle finger to global financial meltdown yet, the opening of the Palm Jumeirah resort. Lest we forget, this is a resort that is a series of man-made islands forming the shape of a palm tree. A project that tells Mother Nature she’s too damn slow and non-representational when it comes to making land masses, and slaps something that looks like an exotic pubic shaving on the side of the Persian Gulf.

So when it came to announcing the opening of the thing, we couldn’t really expect sobriety or prudency. Instead we had synchronised pyrotechnics designed by the guys who did the Beijing Olympics, a light show that looked like a Klaxons video produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Kylie Minogue getting £2m for singing some songs, LiLo and SaRo being all lipstick lesbiany, and Charlize Theron and Bobby De Niro eating a couple of the 4000 lobsters on offer. It was centered around a hotel that has “17 hectares of water park amusement” and an aquarium for 65,000 fish. It lasted four days, cost £15m, and could be seen from space. ”We wanted to dream, and then live that dream”, said one of the organisers. Wonder if they’re going to live the dream of permanently inflated property prices and a constantly employed migrant workforce?

All makes your set menu at All Bar One seem a little crunched now, doesn’t it? And if you think that’s bad, just wait til next year!

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In solidarity with our recessed friends over in Silicon Valley, Bad Idea is having a break over the festive period. Expect normal blogging service to resume on Jan 5. Merry Christmas!

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | December 23, 2008 11:38AM |