The jet-set junkies

The Kensington dinner parties of Baroness Michelle Lutken de Massy were famed for the "house speciality" dessert: enormous servings of cocaine.

And as the recent inquest into the 41-year-old, London-based socialite's death revealed, cocaine wasn't the only drug on the menu.

The former model's body was found lying on the floor of her luxury Kensington flat next to a bloodied heroin syringe. De Massy was just another of the jet-set junkies who seem to have adopted London as their home.

Our capital, it seems, has become the fashionable new Happy Valley of Europe, like Kenya in the 1930s when a crowd of badly behaved, well-connected Europeans settled in Africa and indulged themselves in drugs, drink and adultery, culminating in the famous Jock Delves Broughton murder case, as featured in the film White Mischief. De Massy, a former member of the Monaco royal family - she was married to Prince Rainier's nephew, Baron Christian de Massy - never recovered from the death, in 1999, of her former lover, Constantine Niarchos.

The 37-year-old playboy, known as "Another line" Niarchos, was the son of the Greek shipping tycoon Stavros. De Massy had discovered Niarchos's body sprawled on the thick Zoffany carpet of his Grosvenor Square flat in Mayfair with eyes glazed and blood spurting from his nose. He had reportedly taken enough cocaine to kill 25 men.

And last summer, once again in Mayfair, Princess Leila Pahlavi, the 31-year-old daughter of the Shah of Iran, was found dead from a cocktail of cocaine and other narcotics in the £500-a-night, four-room hotel suite in which she had stayed for two years.

Like Michelle de Massy - who would usually wear a solid gold straw necklace to feed her coke habit - she had chosen to live in London after spending much of her life jetting between New York and Europe, modelling clothes for top fashion designers, clubbing at Tramp and lunching at The Ivy and San Lorenzo.

So what is it about London today - over New York, Paris and LA - that acts as such a magnet for the troubled Eurocrowd? Rich, self-indulgent, upper-class European tax fugitives (almost all have "non-domicile" tax status), heiresses, dubious playboy bankers, shadowy restaurant owners, former models and party hangers-on are all intoxicated by the temptations of London's swinging Euro Mischief scene.

Their extraordinary behaviour can make our homegrown louche toffs seem quite tame. Prince Ludwig Rudolph of Hanover, for example, the younger brother of the fiery-tempered Prince Ernst - now married to Princess Caroline of Monaco - lived in London until he killed himself some years ago with his hunting rifle after he discovered his wife dead from a cocaine overdose. And a leading member of the upper-class Danish jet set told me that when they run out of cocaine at a dinner party - usually at about 3am - the form is to ring round their sleeping friends until somebody is found who will get out of bed, put a couple of grams in an envelope and send it over in an empty black London cab, telling the driver it is an important "business letter".

Another revealed how her cocaine dealer actually lives in Chelsea. He does his local rounds at about 7pm. "It's quite funny because over the past year I've seen him upgrading from delivering on an old bicycle, then a Vespa, then a four-wheel drive, and now he's just bought a top-of-the-range new BMW."

But it is our rich Greek visitors who are usually the worst behaved. They have a particular talent for being unable to cope with an appetite for hard drugs. When a Londonbased member of one of the wealthy shipping dynasties develops a serious drug problem, the disgraced individual is usually shipped off quietly from the squalor of their expensive family trustacquired Notting Hill flat to a clinic such as the Meadows in Arizona.

De Massy's most recent rehab visit - she had been to 13 of them - was the Princess Grace hospital in Monaco. London is not admired for its Zagat choice of fashionable addiction treatment centres. Both de Massy and Princess Leila had expensive stints at the Priory Clinic at Roehampton, famous for its celebrity and wastrel toff clients. The princess refused to check into the Florence Nightingale Hospital in London because she claimed that its facilities weren't up to the hotel standards she was used to.

One impeccably behaved Anglophile, Matthew Mellon, scion of the great East Coast American banking family, and married to Tamara Yeardye, CEO of Jimmy Choo shoes, says that the city's attraction for the fast-set with self-destructive tendencies is that it still respects class structures. "If you have a European title, real or phoney, a well-cut blue blazer with shiny gold buttons, a place on Eaton Square and a Ferrari, you can be considered 'successful' in London," he says. "You often hear these people who don't seem to do a lot saying they have a 'duty' towards the 'affairs' of their family back home, which probably means they work from a laptop in their house in Chelsea, or a tiny office in Mayfair, and it's just their excuse for not being able to stick a real job at an American bank." London, it seems, is a city where people can get away with behaving badly, usually without being asked what they do, where they work, how much they earn, and how they finance their lifestyle.

Also freely available here is the other commodity so craved by the Euro set: Instant Status Gratification. This can be provided by Luca del Bono, a well-spoken Italian who went to Oxford Brookes University and is a founding partner of Quintessentially, along with Old Etonian Ben Elliot, beau of Jade Jagger. Their VIP "lifestyle-organising" company gives instant "access" to London's most exclusive bars, restaurant tables, clubs and, importantly, detox spas and gyms.

Nearly half their members - who pay a £400 annual fee - are now European, or have European addresses, with the numbers rising. "A lot of the Euro crowd appear more British than the British," says Elliot, a veteran of the social scene and nephew of Camilla Parker Bowles. "They try to dress up like respectable British types, but they party much harder. Most of the restaurants and clubs of London are now propped up by this crowd."

Del Bono, meanwhile, used to hang out in Oxford with a junior member of the Agnelli dynasty. "The marvellous thing about London to this crowd is that you can go out without worrying about being kidnapped," he explains. "As an Agnelli in Italy, you can't go anywhere without bodyguards. Anything you do is reported on. The amount of discretion here, enabling you to do exactly what you want, is very tempting for them."

New York is no good because nobody will take you seriously if you don't have a proper job. LA is out because you can only pretend to be a "producer" for so long, and besides, there are almost no nightclubs. Paris - like Rome - is too provincial. And whereas the old-style jet set would fly out for dinner at the Dracula Club in St Moritz, or to the Palace Hotel in Gstaad at weekends to see friends because they didn't know that many people in London, this new breed increasingly stays put and parties in packs. Drugs are so freely available they don't need to leave Chelsea, let alone Britain, to get the quality and quantity they require. At one fashionable Chelsea restaurant, I recently witnessed packets of cocaine being happily supplied to the table by the ma"tre d'.

It may all sound vaguely glamorous, but the jet-set junkie lifestyle is often far removed from the clichÈd "heiress found dead" headlines. The truth is often more lonely and sad. De Massy would travel around London (well, between Kensington and Knightsbridge) on the top of the Number 10 bus, often staring out of the window like a zombie. She blew her own £200,000 inheritance - her father was a Norwegian businessman - years before on cocaine and expensive clothes for her husband. Although she would occasionally go out with a group of friends to a restaurant such as Nobu or Daphne's, she was more likely to be found at 3pm propping up the bar at the rather less fashionable chain restaurant, Palms, off Kensington High Street, with a cigarette in hand and gargling vodka with anybody who would listen.

And while it is true that she and her husband were given a gram of pure cocaine, wrapped in silver paper, as a wedding present from one thoughtful guest, her days as an international cocaine hostess were long over. De Massy had bought her £750,000 firstfloor flat in Phillimore Gardens, Kensington, with the help of money from a Swedish millionaire exboyfriend. He had been helping her out with an allowance ever since. Shortly before her death, he had suggested that she needed to start providing for herself, and it was as a result of this that she began to rely more heavily on hardcore drugs. No cash in your last-season Fendi handbag is something a jet-set junkie just can't face.