It was late. The three men were talking private equity deals and funds under management. I was dreamily thinking, “If only I was a City reporter, I might understand what they’re on about and get a story.” And then, during a claret-soaked pause, a question was popped that even I could grasp.

“So how much are you leaving then?” All three men sighed and looked anguished, or at any rate as anguished as it is possible for men worth millions upon millions – who have spent all day on the moor swathed in tweed blasting birds out the sky, and who have each consumed four solid cooked meals – to look.

“Oh gawd,” one sighed, as if in pain. “It’s sooo difficult. What about you?”

The middle classes may not talk about money, on the grounds that it is vulgar in some repressed, Betjemanesque way, but in my experience the super-rich talk of little else and are fascinated by the fact that in the next decade or so, thanks to their own energy and financial smarts, their children and grandchildren are going to benefit from probably the greatest intergenerational transfer of wealth the western world has ever witnessed.

So the three men duly proceeded to outline in terms of figure-shrouding delicacy their estate-planning arrangements as they would affect their many children by wives of several vintages. As I could contribute even less to this conversation than I could to the previous topic (we had spent a good half hour on the gripping subject of “carried interest”) I went up to bed with my hot-water bottle, but from what I could gather it was clear that to these men this was the topic of consuming importance. This was the big one.

Let us now leave the three rich guns and eavesdrop over my friend Giles, who is a painter of slender means with two talented young daughters. Every time there is a property crash or a shares slump or a sterling crisis, he rubs his hands and looks cheerful.

“Well, none of it affects me I’m happy to say,” he ventures, and goes off into the surrounding Wiltshire fields to search for flints with a light step, for Giles has no shares, nor cash, nor property to worry about, and certainly no large estate and capital to hand down to his offspring. And therefore Giles is right to feel chirpy.

According to a recent survey by Barclays Wealth of nearly 800 very rich people across the globe, a third agreed it was not a good idea to leave large sums to family members. As Randel Carlock, professor of entrepreneurship and family enterprise at Insead, the French business school, says: “Children in wealthy families can suffer from low self-esteem when they feel that much of their success is due to wealth they have inherited rather than what they have achieved themselves.”

The good news is that the super-rich have totally understood that you mess up if you do not allow your own children to experience the thrill of wealth creation all by themselves. In 2005 Anita Roddick, who died last month, announced that she would not be leaving her £51m fortune to her children. Barron Hilton, the hotel magnate, is reputedly docking the inheritance of his granddaughter Paris by $59m – no wonder she’s turning herself into a global brand.

This is a trend confirmed by PNC wealth management (yet another outfit making money out of helping the rich to stay rich), who have uncovered evidence that those with expectant “dependants” – such a telling term – increasingly attached strings to legacies. According to PNC’s recent survey, 57% of those with $10m in assets to invest put stipulations into their wills – such as that inheritors should complete a college education or hold down a job – before they cash in.

Meanwhile, groups such as Tiger 21 are springing up in places like New York, Florida and the West Coast. Tiger 21 is, and I quote, “the nation’s premier peer-to-peer learning group for high net worth investors. We help members build the skill set to successfully transition from focused entrepreneurs to disciplined managers of wealth”.

Tiger 21 suggests that the rich leave only a tithe or 10% of their fortunes to their children. Given how rich they are, that sounds about right.

The bad news is that the massed ranks of the not so super-rich are not quite so switched on. Although our children will benefit from the huge increase in our property portfolios and the helpful changes to inheritance tax, we are only dwelling on the upside, not the downside, of passing on unearned wealth.

While the super-rich are sending their children to boot camps run by private banks for heirs, and educating them in philanthropy and charitable giving, we are mentally dividing up our houses’ value among our children and protecting them from the realities of earning and spending, as a 16-year-old Polish boy pointed out last week.

He had left his Catholic state school in North Shields and returned to Lodz in disgust. “Maybe it’s because [in Newcastle] they get everything on a plate, because there was no communism there and no real poverty, they don’t need to worry about their future”, said Aleksander Kucharski.

“In Poland parents tell their children about financial problems. But in Britain I think they don’t have them or they tried to hide them, to buy their children everything.”

Master Kucharski’s words sent a chill through my bones. While the rich are keenly aware of the heir today, gone tomorrow syndrome, they also know – better than the propertied middle classes, it seems – that if anything screws up a kid faster than having no money, it’s having too much.

It used to be the case that the only luxury the children of the super-rich didn’t have was the thrill of making their own money. So now they’re cleverly buying that for their children too, while we neglect the whole issue entirely.

I won’t wade into the debate about the smacking ban. It’s not that I think “spanking hurts everyone”, as some do, but when I did once contribute an article about smacking it became very legalistic very quickly. So I pepped it up by bunging in an anecdote about my prep school where I’d been very naughty and greedy and broken into a tuck cupboard to steal Mars bars at dead of night. I managed to get caught by the headmaster, who offered me a choice of punishment: I could miss an exeat weekend or be beaten by him.

Well, as I hadn’t seen my parents for a month and I didn’t think the head would hit a girl very hard, I chose the latter – as I set out in my piece.

It was my daughter who found my photo on a website listing people who publicly enjoyed chastisement. “Rachel Johnson,” it said under a black and white picture of me grinning enthusiastically. “She chose the slipper!”

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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