Rolex, Amex, Durex: The Secret Lives Of Male Gold Diggers

If you’ve ever wondered where all the eligible young men are, we can tell you: ‘entertaining’ women a lot older than you. Bobby Palmer goes on the prowl with the cubs dating their way to the top

- Bobby Palmer

On a blisteringly hot morning in Ibiza, Chris adjusts his sunnies and tucks into a breakfast that costs more than he takes home in a day. The plates are piled high with French toast and eggs; there’s barely enough space on the table for the steaming hot coffee, the jug of freshly pressed orange juice and the main event, a fillet of salmon cooked in rosemary and drizzled with fresh lemon and maitre d’ butter. Chris is dressed casually, a low-neck burnt-orange T-shirt and ripped jeans; he’s relaxed after a week in the sun. His date is less casual; she’s wearing gold jewellery, and her blue-and white designer dress drapes over her pedicured feet and onto the gleaming tiles of the hotel bar. She’s the one who ordered the vodka to go with the juice; a bottle of Belvedere, for which she’s paid just over $470*. ‘I wouldn’t say that she’s an alcoholic,’ Chris later tells me, ‘but she does like to drink in the morning.’ Who is she? She’s his sugar mummy, and she’s bankrolling the whole shebang.

The concept of the gold-digger is nothing new. She’s Anna Nicole Smith, she’s Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire, she’s the woman Kanye rapped about. She gets showered in Birkin and holidays to Barbados; her suitor gets a piece of arm candy well out of his league – and his age range. And yet their male counterparts do exist. They’re not movie plotlines and you won’t find Missy Elliott making music about them, but more men are slowly cottoning on to the fact that they, too, can live the high life. All they need to do is offer up their most desirable assets: youth and good looks.