The curse of rich and foolish parents

Is this Britain's most spoilt teenager? shrills the Daily Mail above a picture of Jordan Smith.The evidence certainly suggests he's in the running.

Smith, who celebrates his 17th birthday in May, has already been bought £20,000 worth of presents for it. "I'm buying him a new, customised Vauxhall Corsa," says his mother, "and I've promised him a shopping trip to New York afterwards. I'm also going to build a log cabin next to our house. It will be good for him to have somewhere private for him to hang out." Indeed it will: somewhere he can escape his absurdly over-indulgent mother.

The doting mother is Suzanne Dickenson, 38, a self-made businesswoman, who has already given her son one car, a Clio, which she bought him for his last birthday and which sits, unused, on the drive.

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"It's a shame he's already bored of his Clio," admits Suzanne, "but he loves polishing it. And it wasn't a waste of money because it gave him the freedom to get out of the house even if it was just to sit in it on the driveway with his friends."

Nor is the unused Clio the only vehicle Smith owns. In the garage of the family farmhouse in Groesfaen, Pontyclun, Wales, there is also a £1,500 moped, a £1,200 motorbike, a £5,000 jetski and an assortment of quad bikes. His luxurious bedroom is stuffed with gadgets. According to the Daily Mail, Suzanne has spent an "incredible" £52,100 on him in the last year alone and that doesn't include the forthcoming birthday.

It's enough to make you want to go and hug a hoodie, says David Randall in The Independent on Sunday. Quite. But, as Randall points out, if Britain has more than its share of ludicrously over-indulged teenagers, the "real excess", as ever, is to be found across the Atlantic.

Take Kat, from Palm Springs, whose father hired a cruise liner for her party and gave her a Porsche; or Lacey Myers from Ohio, whose 16th birthday had 300 guests, tigers, elephants and a Ferris wheel (top present was a silver Range Rover from dad). Or Sierra, the 15-year-old daughter of rapper Cee-Lo, who hired models to deliver invitations to her party with the words: "No gift? No party." Oh dear: what a curse it must be to have parents who are rich and foolish.

Stay loyal it's cheaper

Mistresses of City men are facing "a cull", according to Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph. A recent survey suggests that nearly half of analysts, stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers are preparing to let the other woman go. "There's no doubt about it. These are bad times for the good time girls," says Walden.

"Like luxury cars, mistresses require a lot of time and money to be spent on them," says Josh Spero, senior editor of Spear's Wealth Management Survey. "So when it comes to wealthy men cutting back, the other woman is near the top of their list.

"There's no getting away from it. Fidelity now appears the vastly more attractive and cheaper option."

Tabloid money... what 'stimulus' and 'investment' really mean

Local authorities have banned silly words, so why won't central government? asks Fraser Nelson in the News of the World. "Stimulus: should be 'splurge' (it's stimulating nothing except the debt pile). Quantitative easing: either 'printing cash' Zimbabwe-style or 'Mugabe money'. Investment: 'cash-burning' (you're supposed to get a return on investment)."

The G20 meeting in London is a "pointless circus organised by Brown so he can get his picture taken with Barack Obama", says Fergus Shanahan in The Sun. London was plunged into chaos all week to satisfy his vanity. "The £20m bill will be settled by taxpayers, the broken glass swept from the streets and not a single thing will have changed."

"If the worst thing that ever happens to 'Sir' Fred Goodwin is that he gets his Mercedes vandalised and a few bricks lobbed through the windows of one of his houses, then the disgraced ex-RBS boss is getting off lightly," says Tony Parsons in the Daily Mirror. Nobody can condone people taking justice into their own hands, but they do it because "justice is not given to them by the authorities". The working-class woman who worked in Woolworths has seen her employer obliterated while "the likes of Sir Fred have been given millions for failing". It makes our blood boil. If Gordon Brown wants to stop the vigilantes, then give us justice. And get the money back.

"Jacqui Smith has to pay back the tenner her grubby hubby took off taxpayers to watch TV porn," says Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun. "Labour MP Nigel Griffiths is branded a liar by a judge for denying sex romps with a naked brunette in his Commons office. Banks minister Lord Myners is caught fibbing to MPs over Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin's bloated pension. And we haven't even mentioned Tony McNulty. After 12 years of unbridled power, isn't Labour now the 'Party of Sleaze'?"