Trump is one. Ian Fleming’s wife was another. And maybe Meghan Markle, too. They’re self-obsessed, self-important, self-admiring and self-serving. If only they had some self-awareness. Harry Mount nails the everyday narcissist

They’re everywhere – and you can spot them in a second. That man you sat next to at the dinner party who never asked you a single question but launched into anecdote upon anecdote. Whose eyes glazed over within a microsecond of you saying anything other than a question about his triumphs in life. He’s one.

The colleague at work who goes mental when you dare to suggest she spelt “necessary” wrong. She’s one. Narcissists see all disagreement as hostile opposition (Meghan Markle, anyone?). And they always have to have the last word to prove they’re right.

The “friend” who never has people round, and only ever comes round to your house. And never helps. He’s one. A raging narcissist did invite me round to dinner once, it’s true. But when I got to her house she was still in the bath – she told me to cook the dinner and put her children to bed while she got ready.

Like cockroaches, they can thrive in any conditions on earth, and in any sphere, high or low. From Donald Trump bending world affairs to his ego’s demands, to that irritating ex-girlfriend. The one who put her dirty coffee cups into the sink rather than the dishwasher – and went completely nuts after you said that placing the cup in the dishwasher employed the same hand-and-arm movement as putting it in the sink.

You know that person who squashes your jolly conversation with a single word – without actually taking it over, as a grandiose specimen would? Well, he’s a covert narcissist. He can’t sit on the fringes of conversation and is too empty-headed to dominate it – but still he must transfer attention away from you with a blast of negativity.

So you say, “I’ve just seen the most fantastic film!”

Narcissist: “No one ever takes me to the cinema.”

The late Auberon Waugh once said, “All nasty people end up miserable.” And the same applies to narcissists. They are usually nasty – nastiness is the inevitable by-product of their overwhelming selfishness and desperation to manipulate others. It’s just that some of them are better at concealing that selfish core than others.

They often end up alone, too, once their friends, lovers and colleagues eventually work out their narcissism and realise all exchanges will only be one-way traffic.

The writer A.N. Wilson told me once, “We should feel sorry for narcissists. It’s a terrible condition to suffer from.” I fear there’s little the poor lambs can do about it. Being a narcissist is like having blue eyes or big ears. Self-obsession is incurable. Narcissism is a terminal illness, too. It may not actually kill you but no one in history has ever been cured of the condition. Like very slow forms of cancer, you die with narcissism, not of it.

For all the energy narcissism can produce, it also brings self-destruction. Take the journalist who refuses to have his copy edited by his editor and shouts at him when he does. Narcissist journalists are particularly prone to being wilfully obscure on the page in their desire to show off their intelligence – and their disregard for the pleasure of the reader. When I was working on the Daily Telegraph, I once had to tell a narcissist journalist not to open his piece with a long passage in German. He was so wrapped up in himself he was astounded to hear that not all Telegraph readers spoke German.

At the Oldie magazine, where I work, the worst journalists give advice rather than take it. They hate their articles being placed late in the magazine’s running order. They can’t accept libel rulings or corrections. One megalomaniac even wrote, at the top of his error-strewn raw copy, “No changes.”

Narcissists can be talented and amusing but their narcissism cripples them. As Antonia Fraser said of Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann Fleming, “She was very funny and vital, with piercing brown eyes, but her true interest was herself.”

Very often the narcissist will pull off the ultimate in stupid hissy fits – they resign in a huff, sure their employer can’t survive without them and will beg them to stay. In fact, the employer invariably gets along very well indeed without the narcissist. The more practical narcissist might come back, begging on their knees to be reinstated, if the job or relationship is paramount to their self-regard. Almost always, it’s too late. Anyone who’s escaped from a narcissist – in work or in relationships – thanks their lucky stars they got away from them.

Stinginess counsellors – yes, there are such things – say there’s an age after which the condition of being tight-fisted only gets worse. Take the classic stingy male – late sixties, the sole-earner, controller of the household purse-strings. At that age it’s too late. From then on the condition will intensify.

It’s the same with narcissism – it only gets worse. The successful narcissist goes increasingly mad with self-importance. The unsuccessful one goes increasingly mad with anger.

Narcissists in their 20s are just about able to hold down an office job because their youthful lack of confidence restrains their arrogance. As their nerves disappear with age, shyness gives way to full-blown arrogance, meaning they can’t possibly work for someone above them and rub along with so-called “equals”. They suffer from what is grandly called “oppositional defiant disorder” – erm, in other words, they don’t like being told what to do. All work is beneath them unless it directly advances them personally, which narrows down the range of possible jobs quite drastically.

Because of this out-of-control folie de grandeur, most narcissists are unemployable by their 50s. It means very few narcissists end up happy in old age, unless they’ve managed to maintain the fantastic levels of success they feel they’re due. Otherwise, the massive gap between their ambitions and their achievements produces misery in themselves and hatred for others. The fringe benefit for the rest of us is that narcissists become more and more isolated from the world, when they don’t get what they want from it. I can’t wait for the bliss of a narcissist-free old age!

Harry Mount is editor of the Oldie and author of How England Made the English (Penguin).

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