KEY POINTS:
I'm glad I'm not a trust fund heiress. I mean it. I am far too lazy. If I knew all I had to do was shimmy about town wearing a gold fob chain and I would eventually get handed a bottomless Zurich chequeing account, I would be even
more shamefully indolent than I am now. I'd be an opium addict, or Tori Spelling, or some similar distasteful flavour of messed-up.
That is why I wouldn't leave my children a fortune. Easy for me to say, of course. Not being riddled with lucre, whether to disinherit my children is not a dilemma I have to face.
But what I don't understand is why the super-wealthy delude themselves that they are doing their progeny a favour by setting them up so they never have to work. Work can be a drag, true. But not working is even worse.
I can only conclude that the children of ridiculously loaded parents have more admirable and restrained characters than the rest of us. Faced with millions, their thoughts turn to lobbying against landmines.
Whereas middle-class skippies like me think the rational response to being given a lot of money is to turn into a hedonist.
Some exceptional individuals don't succumb to brattishness but, face it, all of us slug-a-beds benefit from a nudge in the right direction.
Even if you want to work, it is nerve-racking. At least that's what I found when I started out as a journalist: I was so shy I couldn't stand anyone overhearing my telephone interviews.
I'm not the only one who is anti-inheritance. TV chef Nigella Lawson, who is married to wealthy adman Charles Saatchi, has publicly said she would not leave her children her fortune because it would "ruin" them.
Lawson's declaration - "I am determined that my children should have no financial security" - shows she understands the benefits of being young and hungry.
Lawson later had to clarify her statements after being criticised. But I don't think her position is that weird. A friend of mine's mother, with an even more unsentimental view of human nature, took an extreme approach. A wealthy and eccentric woman, she declared she would leave her entire fortune to the child who had amassed the most money at the time of her death. Alexander Chancellor, writing in the Guardian, noted that apart from Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, who vowed her children "would not inherit one penny", most millionaires want to leave their children something. The trendy approach to the problem is the philanthropic one taken by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Buffett, while giving most of his gargantuan wealth to charity, said: "A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing." This is a cute line, but it ignores the bleeding obvious point that it is hard to know exactly how much this is.
Chancellor argues that most people like to work and immense wealth does not turn rich kids into layabouts. Eton-educated Chancellor knows what he's talking about; he would have seen a few sluggish fops during his schooldays.
His father, Sir Christopher Chancellor, former head of Reuters, was worth a bob or two but Chancellor certainly didn't become a sloth, becoming one of the Spectator magazine's most-loved editors.
I suspect the reason more tycoons don't disinherit their children is because they might be ruthless in business but, when it comes to their children they are sops.
It would be too painful.
But then, so is Tori Spelling.
