But recently moving house has posed something of a challenge to the Chelsea love in my household. We now live a stone’s throw from Brentford’s new stadium. And my boys have decided — perhaps to rile their father — that this is where their loyalty now lies. Local, family-friendly, plucky underdogs come good, and not owned by a KGB asset — I see the attraction.

Last month, I went to see my team get smashed by Real Madrid. The man sitting in front of me spent the whole game making hand gestures at the away fans. He hardly watched the football. It was as though he was only there for the loyalty, that order of belonging that is premised on a strong sense of them and us. He didn’t watch as Real striker Karim Benzema produced a masterclass of finishing. Chelsea was his family, his whole life I imagine. As his face contorted in rage at the celebration of the away fans, I began to reflect on what a terrible club I support.

I have always known we are a rotten lot, corrupted by bad money. Our owner made his billions in the wild east of perestroika. Despite having gone to prison in 1992 for the theft of government property, in 1995 he was allowed to buy half of an oil company for $100 million in a rigged auction. Abramovich has admitted in court that he paid billions of dollars in bribes to acquire Sibneft. Ten years after he bought it, he sold it back to the Russian government for $13 billion.

Abramovich’s co-investor in Sibneft was Boris Berezovsky. Abramovich and Berezovsky fell out, with Abramovich’s friend, Vladimir Putin, siding with Abramovich. Berezovsky survived a number of assassination attempts by Russian agents. Several of his friends and associates, like Alexander Litvinenko, were murdered or died in suspicious circumstances. Berezovsky apparently hanged himself in 2013, though the coroner recorded an open verdict. It’s all very dodgy. And as FSB agents were roaming London, Chelsea were doing very nicely thank you on the pitch. During Abramovich’s time as owner, the club won 18 major trophies. Our rivals accuse Chelsea of having bought all this silverware on the backs of the ripped-off Russian public — and perhaps even a few dead bodies under a flyover somewhere. And they may be right. Our owner is now sanctioned, his assets frozen.

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I wish this was the end of the catalogue of accusations against my terrible team. I might be happy enough to sing about the Pope’s welcome to our Spurs rivals, but the gas noise that Chelsea fans used to greet Tottenham players as they emerged onto the pitch — a reference to the gas chambers — was so disgraceful, I probably should have walked out there and then, never to return. If the Jewish Roman Abramovich did one thing good, it was that he stopped the fans doing this. Mostly stopped.

Surely my boys are right — lovely Brentford would be a better fit, especially for a man of the cloth. So why do I still support them? Out of a sense of loyalty, I suppose. “Once a blue always a blue,” as Chelsea star Mason Mount proudly proclaimed.

Loyalty has long been seen as a virtue. We criticise friends when they are not loyal and praise our dogs for being so. Loyalty names a kind of perseverance in human relations, something without which human society would be based on a succession of short term alliances or contracts. Some may say that it is an outdated virtue, one that is rooted in the relationship of subject to monarch, or vassal to lord — oaths of loyalty having a terribly feudal feel, out of place in a democratic society. That said, the importance of family bonds is still something most of us would subscribe to; loyalty to family members, even those who are embarrassing or morally suspect.

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My mum used to propose a toast on family occasions: “Here’s to us and balls to the rest,” she would say, raising a glass. Feels a bit like the Shelbys now I come to write it down. But it was intended and received as a kind of “welcome home” family hug. It was that kind of sentiment that kept us together. Loyalty is often love in its least attractive form.

That’s something of the moral valence of “Once a blue, always a blue”. Except, if press rumours are to be believed, midfielder Mason Mount might be about to become a Red, with Liverpool leading the pack to secure his signature. And it’s not good timing ahead of the FA Cup final next weekend, when a worn-out Chelsea are, I expect, going to be crushed by Liverpool.

I don’t expect an iota of sympathy, especially not on Merseyside. Back in the Eighties, Chelsea fans would enthusiastically wave £50 notes at visiting Liverpool supporters. As I looked down at my programme, embarrassed, pretending I wasn’t with them, Chelsea would sing “Get a job, get a job, get a job”. Liverpool fans would chorus back: “Thank you very much for paying our dole.” That was 1-0 to them.

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I say this through gritted teeth, but I don’t really blame Mount for seeking fame and (greater) fortune on Merseyside, despite all his badge-kissing expressions of Chelsea loyalty. The days when a player like Tony Adams spent all his playing career at one club (19 years, Arsenal) are pretty much gone. For Mount, as for pretty much everyone else these days, the “once a blue” line doesn’t have quite the same gravitational pull as it once did. Capitalism dissolves human relationships. As Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, whenever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal and idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties… and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.”

So I will stick with this ghastly bunch, and won’t be crossing the bridge to Brentford — just as I won’t ever cross the Tiber to Rome, despite the Pope’s sometimes attractive embrace. Loyalty is one of those old-fashioned virtues that cements human relations, even if it means our loyalty to those who don’t really deserve it. Because for every boorish thug or Russian oligarch that wears the same colours as me, I still lie awake at night and dream of Hazard and Drogba and James. Once a blue, always a blue.

To impress the English you must be overly kind to dogs and horses, extremely wealthy, or gushingly enthusiastic about football. Abramovich was at least two of these. Previously unknown outside of Russia, his purchase of Chelsea FC in 2003 made him England’s favourite oligarch.

He stood for all the others. Like them, Abramovich bought Francis Bacons, yachts, and football clubs. He was expensively divorced. He purchased a Kensington townhouse for 90 million pounds, then plotted grandiose subterranean extensions to it. His security detail were told they were not allowed to bring firearms into the West London private schools his shoal of children swam through. His weirdly thin background, like his face, was enigmatic. His trajectory — from penniless orphan, to middling rubber duck salesman, to billionaire tycoon — mirrored the unlikely CVs and fluke-strewn ascents of so many mega-wealthy products of Russia’s insane Nineties. Unlike Abramovich though, many of his old rivals and partners from that time met… abnormal ends.

But so what? Abramovich entered London high society when views of Putin’s Russia were charged with hopeless optimism. Putin, wrote Neal Acheson in 2004, was an “agent of sweeping change”. His reforms might one day make “a relatively law-abiding and governable Russia” a fact, rather than a dream. In the academy, favourable verdicts (grandly blessed by Perry Anderson in 2015) rained down on Russia. It was a vibrant, investor-friendly middle-income country; it was a respectable member of OECD; it was less statist in its control of energy markets than Brazil! Abramovich then, was an envoy from a developing country, not a one-man image-softening operation sent from an anguished, ramshackle, authoritarian state, still held together and animated by the most salient, deathless force in Russian political history — imperial ambition.

These wonky arguments added a watery academic gloss to London’s embrace of Russians like Abramovich. Ever since John Major’s Conservatives introduced ‘Golden Visas’ that fished for millionaire investors in the Nineties, every British government, and London Mayors Johnson and Livingstone, had courted Russian money. A butler class formed to enthusiastically count the cash.

Behind the biscuit tin version of London — Union Jacks on the Mall, Notting Hill selfies, and recumbent deer in Richmond Park — was a bleaker reality. To arrive here from Russia was to find networks of bankers, estate agents, accountants, wealth managers, PR flacks, politicians, and a legal system all eager to take your money, over-educate your children, Harley Street your wife, Isle of Man your taxes, gag journalists, and angelify your reputation.

None of them cared where the money came from. London could bury your secrets for you. “This country’s nothing but an off-shore laundry”, spits Logan Roy in Succession, “for turning evil into hard currency.”

That quiet part was rarely said out loud. The English are a discreet and sentimental people after all. In 2005, Ken Livingstone, at a Westminster address to 1,200 Russian political and business leaders, invoked the “warmth and sympathy” the English felt for their old wartime ally against Hitler. Sympathy was a sound basis for deal-making: “Russians,” he said, “are welcome in this city, both as individuals and for the business that they bring.” Since 1998, according to anti-money laundering groups, around a hundred billion pounds of Russian money has washed through London, and into property and commodities. The welcome was accepted.

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If Livingstone represented the grasping yet oddly dewy-eyed side of Londongrad’s rise, his successor articulated the jokey cynicism the English felt towards the oligarchs. Boris Johnson was just as enthusiastic about Russian money as Livingstone, but prepared to laugh — like so many other toff-adjacent Brits — at Russian vulgarity too. In 2012 he urged oligarchs to flood London’s courts with libel actions. “If one oligarch feels defamed by another oligarch, it is London’s lawyers who apply the necessary balm to the ego,” he told the CBI’s annual conference that year. “I have no shame in saying to the injured spouses of the world’s billionaires: if you want to take him to the cleaners, take him to the cleaners in London…”

It was like a joke. Except the estranged wives and litigious oligarchs were components of Putin’s increasingly despotic regime. The key figures of Russian state capitalism, who were now building nests in London, had begun the 2000s calling the President Mr Putin. Then they called him Boss. Then — another joke, at least to begin with — Tsar. Abramovich found ways to deal with Putin. Against a backdrop where oligarchs were assassinated, exiled and imprisoned, the Chelsea owner did everything he could in order to keep himself safe.

The pair were close. Just how close was revealed by Abramovich’s successful defence of a landmark high court claim brought by his fellow oligarch and mentor Boris Berezovsky in 2012. “Mr Abramovich enjoyed very good relations with President Putin and others in power at the Kremlin,” the judgement recorded. “It was also clear that Mr Abramovich had privileged access to President Putin, in the sense that he could arrange meetings and discuss matters with him.”

That somebody who had folded so neatly into the scrim of English life — celebrated on Stamford Bridge’s terraces to the tune of the Only Fools And Horses theme, lunching on his yacht with Sir Paul McCartney — was so close to a despot ought to have caused alarm. The press preferred to write about his fleet of supercars, his record-breaking transfer deals, and a floated West End musical about Abramovich’s life. The Premier League’s attitude was summed up by its then chief executive, Richard Scudamore: “Football is not a business but a sport dependent on… speculation… there’ll always be rich men ready to pour more money into clubs just to be part of the game.”

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Abramovich was not on equal terms with Putin, even as he became lauded in London. He was a boyar to Putin’s Tsar. “I don’t think there is a percent of independence in him”, said one analyst who knew Abramovich in the Nineties. He was just like the others. The oligarchs’ power and privilege was theoretical, and utterly dependent on Putin. He could ruin them on a whim, as he did to Boris Berezovsky soon after he came to power. The truth was that the oligarchs were more like hostages than independent actors, more like courtiers than policy-makers, and more driven by venality than belief. Putin made them dependents, and walked them over a plank with a very deep drop.

Perhaps English politicians such as Johnson and Livingstone thought men like Abramovich could be moderated by the West, and could help to remake Russia in its image, as the academics thought was already happening. None chose to see the umbilical cords that ran back to the Kremlin. As the 2000s passed into the 2010s, it looked like the West was becoming as corrupt and irrational and nihilistic as Russia, rather than bringing Russia in line with its rules based system. “It was as if a virus,” wrote Catherine Belton in Putin’s People, “was being injected into it.”

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Now the virus is burning itself out. Two weeks of war have forced British politicians to shift 30 years of oligarch-tickling policy. They would no longer be able to take whatever they wanted. Abramovich has been hit with sanctions ranging from asset freezes to travel bans. Johnson says there will be no “safe havens” for Putin allies, not even in London’s courts. Yesterday’s West End final edition of the Evening Standard: “ROMAN’S EMPIRE IN RUINS.” Discarded copies, with crumpled Abramovich faces staring blankly out from them drifted through Berkeley Square.

Given his wealth and notoriety, Abramovich barely left a paw print on English life. Yes, he increased the bank balance of butler class functionaries; yes he will most probably leave Chelsea, his plaything and ornament, tarnished. But his wallflower shyness and refusal to be interviewed make him a ghost. Just as he reportedly moved through his A-List New Years Eve parties on St Barts barely saying anything, Abramovich’s time in England will be defined by his silences not his actions. He will not be ruined though. So much of his wealth is stored off-shore in secret bank accounts that there will always be a fallback for him.

Londongrad will be rebranded, and its lackeys will find new clients. Money from Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and above all China will need to be laundered. Their tycoons will need crisis PR. Their powerful urges to litigate against each other will need to be satiated. Other Romans are here already. They keep buying football clubs. Not even war will break London’s filthy habits.