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Last year, I trawled through all the large executive cars on the market today and concluded that they're all rubbish. Oh, they have things that swivel, and buttons which summon air support, and the LS600h is glorious for cocking a snook at our whisky-sodden Mayor of London, as it glides immunely past the congestion-charge cameras while using a gallon of carbon-juicy fuel every three inches.

But all large cars are as cool as a crusty French loaf. And they're all grey. Turn up anywhere in any one of them, and you will immediately be marked down as a Rotarian. A businessman. A bore. Someone who thinks the 19th hole is on a golf course and the 20th is in his wife.

You ever wondered when you see a 5-Series cruise by, or an Audi, or a Jag or an E-Class or a Lexus, why there's only one person inside? It's because no one likes him very much.

And this is a problem for me because, truth be told, I've known for some time that I need a saloon car. The Lambo, the Merc and my wife's Aston are lovely, but whenever we want to go anywhere with the children, we have to use the school-run Volvo. Which is like clattering around in a diesel-powered wardrobe. Or the Land Rover which, because it's a Land Rover with a TVR engine, works only when there's a wolf in the month.

The solution, of course, is a Range Rover. I love them. Every time I drive one I get all sticky with affection. You know when you try on a jacket you can always tell straight away that it suits you. Well that's how I feel when I'm in a Range Rover. That I'm the teapot and it's the comfy woollen cosy.

The trouble is that we live in a country full of vegetablists, communists, hippies, social workers and various other lunatics who've got it into their thick heads that people in Range Rovers are somehow causing people to have soggy sofas in Tewkesbury. So they glower and leave rude messages under the windscreen wipers. This is very annoying. It makes me cold-prickly when what I want from a big comfy car is to feel warm-fuzzy.

The upshot? Well, as a family, we tend to stay at home most of the time playing computer games because I don't like driving the Volvo, the Land Rover's throttle cable has broken and everything else in the yard only has two seats.

But then I had a brainwave. Car makers may not have the ability to make an interesting, cool, non-businessman saloon today. But that wasn't the case in the past. So I have bought a Mercedes 600 Grosser. This is the car used by Lewis Winthorpe in the film Trading Places. It was also used by Idi Amin, Mao Tse Tung, Leonid Brezhnev and Elvis Presley.

From 1963 to 1981, this was the most expensive, most advanced and most governmental car in the world. When I have fitted flags to the front wings - black eagles on a red background - I shall feel like Mussolini.

Mine is 38 years old, 38 feet long and, because it uses hydraulics rather than electric motors to move the seats, the bootlid, the doors and the windows, I shouldn't be surprised to find it weighs 38 tons. It is a piece of dark-green metallic magnificence.