At home with Uncle Sam

Perhaps it's too many years watching Location, Location, Location (or too few years reading privacy legislation), but there's something a bit odd about the boat ride we're taking today. Join the Island Queen at Bayshore Marina, and then chug off for 90 minutes to snoop around millionaire's island row. See Fisher Island on the left, where Tom Cruise and Sophia Loren have (separate) pads. Look right at Star Island to see the white mansion where Al Pacino filmed Scarface, or look, just there, it's the house where Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher set up home umpteen marriages ago. Sly Stallone's hideaway? That's easy to find.

You don't have to have stars in your eyes to set up house here on Hibiscus Island or along South Beach strand. The marketing king for Coca-Cola can do it, too, not to mention one of the guys who invented Viagra. And look, there's the low, cool place where Al Capone and family used to vacation in the 30s before the Feds finally ruined his holiday plans. But don't get too trapped in history: just hang on to current, prime-prime prices. Start bidding at $6m or so for something titchy and don't stop piling on the loot till you hit $25m. That's one definition of Miami vice.

Now Kirsty, the supremely chatty estate agent, has made such gawping over a hot calculator seem more passably normal, and Piers Morgan recently turned a few days interviewing Portsmouth footballers and their manager who live on a sand spit in Poole harbour into three separate ITV lessons in greed and wow! Some of you, moreover, may have taken a bus tour round Beverly Hills and gasped over the mansions where famous names hunch behind palm trees and red-brick walls.

Come and see where the filthy rich hang out? It's an almost automatic pitch, one we don't ponder over any longer. But pause for a second and put in lost thinking time.

Go down to Kent or up to Yorkshire and do the stately homes of England? Of course: that's our heritage and national trust, no rubbernecking involved. View the chateaux of the Loire? Why not? It's part of French legacy land. But goggling over houses where rich people live, now, today; and peering from boat or coach at the state of their lawns or the colour of their pool? Even waving to see them wave back? These are deeper, far different waters. Nobody in the Blighty Bus business would put on coach trips around Hampstead with free loan of periscopes. Nobody at home would think that quite respectable.

I once set out to walk round the shores of Lake Geneva, in Wisconsin, where the old Chicago beef, booze and grain barons built their summer residences, and found to huge surprise that it was both possible and invited. A public footpath runs for miles right round the edge of the lake, cutting off the swooping gardens from the waterside. It's rather like tramping up the Thames from Bray, cutting a path through Michael Parkinson's patio. There is no privacy here; nor expectation of seclusion. If you buy a home on Lake Geneva, you buy Joe Public with it, watching you in your deckchair as he clumps by. And if you buy a nest on Miami's bays, you expect to find you and your wealth on permanent display. Indeed, that's probably the point of buying here in the first place.

The talk in Miami is all about Fidel and Raul and the pothering hatred of communist socialism that gets the old exiles jumping on Key Biscayne: but you can also see talk turn to bricks and mortar. The hundreds on deck on the Island Queen aren't pavilioned in envy and planning a tax rise, let alone revolution. These are ordinary, hardworking families (in the parlance) dreaming of where they might live if their cruise ship came in, or just watching open-mouthed like the Oscar night crowd at the end of the red carpet. Their dream - black, white, Hispanic, Chinese - is not to pull all this down, but to snag a bit of it for themselves.

Socialism, as Seymour Martin Lipset, the great guru of US political science, once observed, has no roots and no relevance here. It is one aspect of American exceptionalism. Bring on the celebs and consumers and the dreamboats instead.

And the compulsive, dismaying thing as we count the houses over £10m with Piers is that, pile by pile, location by location, we are becoming more American. House prices are our gods for daily worshipping. Hearth and home are where any concept of equality ends. The charge against Blair is that he buried us too far in Uncle Sam's pocket. Gaze across the waters to the Villa Capone and wonder whether, in fact, we've buried ourselves, somewhere between Disney World and property world.

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