The Peninsula is a new hotel at Hyde Park Corner. It is part of the trend for absurd expense: rooms start at £1,400 a night and express the kind of preening mono-chrome blandness that will be the London of the future. It is a building of great ugliness – I would type the names of planners who allowed it, but on these pages it is incitement to violence. It sits on its six-lane round-about between the Lanesborough hotel and a long peeling red-brick late Victorian terrace that once appeared in a Stephen Poliakoff film about how things always fall apart.

It isn’t really a hotel, I think, staring: it doesn’t have that much identity. It’s an airport lounge, or a cruise ship, or just a mad woman: something that has no tangible connection to its reality, so owes nothing to it. It just landed here, like Frank’s house in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It could plausibly have silos. I think of the houses on the Bishop’s Avenue in north London – -Millionaire’s Row, they call it, though it is a desolate road with more scaffold than life – which are, I think, designed by toddlers with unlimited access to funds. A piece here and there: marble lions at the gate; a chandelier; a supercar. The world as a boardgame with towels, and no one knows what it is for. It just is.

The restaurant is called The Lobby and it is in the lobby. The diner is not admitted to the hotel itself, which is beyond a courtyard housing a Bentley Bentayga and a Rolls-Royce Phantom and kindly young staff who seem overwhelmed by the gloss of paintwork. They look dazzled while the clientele – the hotel has been open only days – look shifty. They are atop the world, so why don’t they feel like it? Is it because we are really in Victoria? Where do you go from the Peninsula anyway? Hammersmith? Out the window? There are people dressed as bellboys like Daphne’s stalker in Some Like It Hot.

In the lobby, architectural styles merge queasily: art deco; classical; rococo; Holiday Inn. A woman wails torch songs from a balcony too high to see. They bought the nose of Concorde, though this is less Citizen Kane’s Xanadu than Trump Tower on the Park. It points from the ceiling in an anteroom, like a catastrophe that went wrong and made itself a new one. The floors are marble. The carpets are yellow. The chairs are orange. There are palm trees and paintings of Hyde Park. None includes the bus stop, which is probably grateful not to be involved.

The food is awful. I eat a Caesar salad, which is supposed to be, if not imperial, then at least joyful. The lettuce is greyish, lumpy; the croutons could have come from a packet. There is nothing wrong with croutons that come from a packet except here. He has a crab cake which I cannot bring myself to taste. It looks purplish, angry. The lamb chops are too thick and pink, with greenish matter, and even if the creamed potato hasn’t been in a microwave, it acts like it. The spaghetti bolognese is OK, but they do it better at the Coffee Cup in Hampstead for a tenner. This food knows nothing of beauty, delicacy or comfort: it’s a grift. I would rather eat the Bentayga. It comes to £257.60 with two glasses of wine.

There is a deadness here that expresses, better than any palace I have known – perhaps the Atlantis in Dubai comes close, but it is in Dubai – the absolute nihilism of wealth culture. At least the counter-reformation gave us Titian. Here I only think: you ruined the world. For this?