ou can’t really relax when it’s your daughter’s 18th birthday party and your house is rammed to bursting point with a cocktail of rampaging testosterone and vodka. Certainly you can’t just go to bed, partly because of the worry that everyone is going to get pregnant, but mostly because of the noise. So I didn’t. I stayed up all night, totally forgetting that at 11 o’clock the next morning I was due at the Emirates stadium in the nuclear-free, vegan outreaches of north London. Happily, I had booked a driver. Unhappily, he turned up in the brand-new, second-generation Rolls-Royce Phantom. At first, all was well. Buoyed by a drink-fuelled contentment that nobody had cut their head off or given birth, I slumped into the vast rear seat in a Ready Brek glow of warm fuzziness. However, about 20 minutes later this had begun to wear off. And as we reached London, I started to worry that I might die. Ten minutes after that, I was worried I might not.
There was a rolling tide of nausea in my head that manifested itself in waves of great pain and an all-over veneer of perspiration. I desperately wanted to go to sleep but the driver was unfamiliar with Islington — there isn’t much call for Rolls-Royce test drives there — so I needed to help him find the best route. “Can you drive as fast as possible,” I asked, “into a lamppost?” Eventually we arrived and I discovered something interesting. When you step out of a Rolls-Royce into a mooching herd of football fans, they become united in a certain knowledge that you are an onanist. They voice this opinion loudly and often, and since you are going in the same direction as them, it doesn’t stop. 
I arrived at my host’s box in a blizzard of sweat, sickness and abuse, only to discover that one of the other guests was a motoring writer who once told his readers that my opinion was worthless because I was a multi-millionaire tax exile who lived on the Isle of Man. I’ve wanted for some time to hear him explain why the opinion of a “multi-millionaire” is somehow less relevant than the opinion of, say, a schoolteacher, and how he got it into his head I was a tax exile. But, sadly, when the moment arrived, I was otherwise engaged, trying to stop myself fainting.
The match was dismal. There were no goals. And then I was faced with the problem of getting through the crowds to the waiting Rolls. And here’s a funny thing. As we all walked along, everyone was jolly friendly. There was some good-natured joshing about my support for Chelsea and a few questions about Richard Hammond’s teeth, and all was well . . . Until I stepped into the Rolls, whereupon I suddenly became an onanist again. So there I was, feeling like a skin bag full of sick, in the back of a Phantom that was going nowhere because of a vast horde of Islingtonites who were making hand gestures and chanting. Oh, and one 
thing you might like to know: if you push the button that draws a curtain over the back window, you make everything 10 times worse. I’m not quite sure why, but today you can be a bank robber or a pugilist or a benefits cheat, and that’s fine. You can be a drug addict or a Peeping Tom. But woe betide anyone who is rich. Every day the Daily Mail finds someone on a high salary and mocks them mercilessly. David Cameron’s ability to lead is questioned simply because he’s perceived as being wealthy.
Autocar reckons that because my DVDs have been big sellers, I’m no longer capable of rational thought. A far-left candidate in France’s presidential elections proposed a 100% tax on all earnings above €360,000 (£300,000) a year, and I bet if such a scheme were introduced here, it would receive almost unanimous support. There’s a sense, and it’s completely wrong-headed, of course, that in these difficult economic times anyone who has a bob or two must have stolen it from a charity box or a nurse. And naturally there is no statement of wealth that even gets close to a Rolls- Royce Phantom. Which is why Arsenal’s whisper-quiet peace-and-love brigade turned into an army that would have warmed the heart of even Stalin.
Top tip, then: if you’re going to buy this latest version of the Phantom, for God’s sake stay away from the mob. At first glance the new car seems to be pretty much identical to the old one. At the front the headlamps are slightly different and at the back there’s a chrome strip on the bumper. There are some new wheels as well but, really, it’s just a slight change of wardrobe rather than a full liposuction, boob enhancement and tummy tuck. It’s much the same story on the inside, too. A raft of tiny little cosmetic alterations that caused me to think: “Oh no, I’m going to be sick.” You, on the other hand, will sit there and wonder: “I know the last Phantom was pretty bloody good but surely there was scope for a bit more improvement than this.” Well, there has been improvement. It’s just that you can’t see it. 
Nine years ago, when the Phantom first slithered out of the factory in Goodwood, West Sussex, Rolls-Royce was at great pains to point out that, although the company was owned by BMW, the car shared only 15% of its components with a 7-series. Never mind that one of the components was “the engine”; the manufacturer made a good point: the Phantom didn’t feel, look or drive anything like a Beemer. However, since the Phantom’s launch, BMW has developed a raft of electronic improvements that are now available on an £18,000 1-series. But not its £350,000 Roller. So. What to do? Go to all the trouble and expense of designing new electronics for the Rolls? Or simply use BMW items? That’s what the company has done.
The swivelling headlamps. The 3-D sat nav. The USB port. It’s a forest of BMW technology in there, and you know what? It’s sacrilege and it’s wrong — and I don’t actually care. Because even though there is now a rather worrying Dynamic option for those who wish to take their Rolls-Royce around the Nürburgring, the Phantom still feels, drives and looks like nothing else. It is a sublime experience, like getting into a warm bubble bath and then getting out and finding yourself somewhere else. The quality is unmatched. The 18 cows, for instance, that donate their skin to make the seats in a single car are kept far away from barbed wire fences and anything else that might make them uneasy.
And Rolls has developed a new colouring process in which the dye permeates the entire hide, ensuring it will never crack. You don’t get that attention to detail in even a palace. 
The carpets are thicker than anything you have at home, the wood veneer is peerless, the art deco light fittings are wondrous to behold, the V12 engine makes no noise at all, the ride comfort is straight from the pages of Aladdin and while there are many gizmos, they’re all hidden away. We see this with the gearlever, which may have eight speeds at its disposal but offers you a choice of only forwards, backwards or neither. The new Phantom, then, is an intelligent and discreet step forward for what was — and still is — the only car in the world that completely detaches you from reality. Just remember, though, that if you go to the wrong place in it, it will detach otherwise normal people from their sanity.
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