James Palumbo’s Kensington flat is about as far removed as you can imagine from the Ministry of Sound super-club that made his name and fortune.

The large, double-aspect drawing room is dominated by a grand piano, two huge contemporary sofas, and, on the walls, a series of beguiling watercolours from the 1780s by François-Joseph Bélanger, designer for Marie Antoinette. It is to the Ministry what the Royal Opera House is to Anfield.

Palumbo, 46, pads across to a fridge hidden by a panel in the wall to produce bottles of Evian, his every step tracked by Mr Bounce, his blue whippet, who all the while growls quietly until we’re seated and he can take his place curled up beside his master.

At first glance, with its calm beauty and precision, the apartment chimes nicely with Palumbo’s reputation as a man who’s renowned for being distant, cool and ruthless in his business dealings. There is none of the paraphernalia of daily life to be seen – no newspapers, books, stray remote controls – and if you want further evidence of the Bond-style control freak as sometimes depicted on the business pages, Mr Bounce completes a perfect cameo.

But although the flat is utterly of its owner, the owner is a far more convivial and considerate host than his reputation suggests. The atmosphere is warm, the conversation wide-ranging. Palumbo might have a rapier-sharp business mind that places him in The Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated net worth of £130m, amassed from his building the Ministry of Sound into a global empire, but his intellectual reach goes way beyond discounted cashflows and net asset values.

The apartment, the only one he has lived in as an adult, is the home of an aesthete, a reader, a thinker. There is none of the clichéd accoutrements of commercial success. Indeed, if there’s one thing Palumbo seems to dislike more than any other it’s a cliché.

He doesn’t give interviews, and the only reason he has agreed to talk now is that he has stepped away from his business life to become a novelist. His first book, Tomas – There is Only Money And Sex goes the acronym – is a snorting, wide-ranging, surreal satire set in the future which lampoons the vulgarity of a craven celebrity culture fed by reality TV, and businessmen genuflecting before Russian oligarchs.

The son of Peter Palumbo (created a life peer in 1991 as Baron Palumbo of Walbrook), the property developer, art collector, architecture connoisseur and erstwhile chairman of the Arts Council, James had an upbringing of textbook privilege. He grew up at Buckhurst Park, Windsor – now the UK home of the King of Jordan – and went on to Eton, Oxford and a career as a banker.

Were it not for a high-profile and bitterly fought court case against his father in 1995 over the running of a family trust fund, most people outside the music industry would never have heard of him. The outcome, in James’s favour, cemented an extraordinary estrangement between father and son that has lasted for 25 years. The legal action, Palumbo readily admits, was “by any measure, enormous in its scope, duration, costs”. And those costs were not just financial.

It was a six-year legal battle in which Lord and Lady Palumbo (his father’s second wife, Hayat Mroue, whom James has never met – his own mother, Denia Wigram, died in 1986) were removed as trustees, with control being handed over to a team of legal and financial professionals. Palumbo fils effectively got his father pushed off the board.

It is obvious that the split has had a profound effect on him, but when he talks about it, there is an understatement that seems to come as much from British reserve and a fear of trotting out trite explanations as wanting to mask the facts. He says he can’t place the date when he and his father ceased to see each other – “I was in my early twenties, but I’d have to work it out” – and you feel that this must surely be a little disingenuous.

It is clear that James Palumbo felt insecure in his upbringing and there was a fear of the rug being pulled from under his privileged life. He says that this came from a distrust of his father’s business acumen at a surprisingly young age: “I probably sensed in a fairly animalistic way, but without any physical evidence, that the business side of the family might not endure following my grandfather’s death,” he says. “The reality is, my grandfather’s a business guy, my father’s an artistic guy, I’m a business guy,” is a phrase he repeatedly comes back to, to explain this sense of alienation and mistrust.

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