I want to consult you about a proposed change in the law. But before I do, I’d like to ask you a question or two. What would you do if you were genuinely clairvoyant? If you could really tell the future? The possibilities are endless.

You could make a fortune stock-picking and betting on sporting events. You could win the Nobel Peace Prize (by anticipating world crises and advising how they could be avoided), the various Nobel scientific prizes (by demonstrating in a series of controlled experiments that what we thought we knew about the natural world was wrong), and the Nobel Prize for Literature (by copying future masterpieces and passing them off as your own). You could save lives, avert catastrophes, only call restaurants when you knew that there was a table available. What fun you could have.

And who would you speak to if you could genuinely commune with the dead? Your own dearly loved relatives, of course. But perhaps also Jack Ruby, who might clear up a thing or two about why he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. And given all those nice things that Gordon Brown has to say about Adam Smith, I’d love to find out if the feeling was mutual.

Here are some of the things you wouldn’t do: advertise on the internet, call yourself a celebrity psychic, appear on daytime TV, rent a table at a Psychic Fair just off Stanmore High Street, take a part-time job in Holland & Barrett while receiving clients at home of an evening, live in a caravan park in Totnes, sell your wares in the classified section of the local paper and stand in front of a group in a half-full village hall saying that you’ve had a message from someone called John and asking if anyone knows anybody with that name.

I can’t help feeling that the slightly tatty nature of the “psychic” industry is a bit of a giveaway. There was an outlet near my home that appears to have gone out of business. Surely a well-organised clairvoyant would have been able to avoid such a fate.

Claims to be able to speak to the dead and tell fortunes seem so obviously ridiculous that they are easy to make fun of. At least they are to me. But if you share my view, try expressing it to the next intelligent person you meet. There is a good chance you will be rewarded with an anecdote. A friend had a cousin who consulted a medium living in Watford. She was then able to find his long-lost wedding ring. “There is no way the medium could have known where it was. It was uncanny.” It is pointless telling your friend that it is them who isn’t being canny. Trust me, I’ve tried this. It never ends well.

Psychic readings, Tarot sessions, audiences with clairvoyants and telepathists have all become big business. Last April Selfridges began offering sessions with psychics in their basement (again, working in the basement of a department store isn’t what I’d do with my special powers, but there’s no accounting for taste). The shop wasn’t particularly amused when some sceptics presented their receipts at the customer services desk and attempted to get their money back because the future hadn’t turned out as well as they’d hoped.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defence spent £18,000 on an experiment to see if psychics could identify the contents of a sealed envelope. They couldn’t. Bang goes the chance of using them to find Osama bin Laden. The MoD simply replicated the findings of American intelligence agencies, who spent more than $10 million in a decade on psychics before concluding that their guidance was not assisting the identification of targets or sources of danger. We should have known Saddam Hussein had got rid of his WMD — typical Taurus behaviour.

But if the idiocy of this mainstream toying with psychic nonsense doesn’t bother you, consider this. Much of it is also, at least in this country, illegal.

No, I didn’t know that either. But there is something called the Fradulent Mediums Act 1951, apparently. This law was introduced to replace the Witchcraft Act of 1735 and makes any person eligible for up to two years in prison who “with intent to deceive, purports to act as a spiritualistic medium or to exercise any powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar powers”. If you make it clear that you are just an entertainer you are fine, but I looked in vain for such a disclaimer on psychic advertisements.

The reason neither of us has heard of this law is that it is hardly ever used. Between 1980 and 1995, for instance, there were just five prosecutions, all ending in conviction. I could find you five people offending against the Act in five minutes, using that intrepid detective agency — Google.

So now some of my fellow sceptics are petitioning Downing Street (petitions.pm.gov.uk/mediums) for the Act to be revised so that it can be used. I am deeply sympathetic to their cause. The activities of the pyschic industry have victims. Grieving people are being exploited and the naive enticed to part with cash. Falsely suggesting to the bereaved that you are in communication with a dead relative seems to me a terrible thing to do.

But sympathetic as I am, I will not sign the petition. I am not happy seeing a multimillion-pound fraud trundle on, picking the pockets of the vulnerable. The alternative would be worse, I fear. The appetite among the public for assiduous prosecution approaches zero. The sympathy for Helen Duncan, the old con artist prosecuted under the Witchcraft Act back in the 1940s having earlier been caught regurgitating a cheesecloth undervest and pretending it was ectoplasm, was such that the law had to be changed. Use the new law more frequently and you would have thousands of Duncans on your hands.

I had a friend at university who approached every political problem with the phrase “a fool and his money are easily parted”. He is right; as I, rather reluctantly, think that the Government is right. It proposes repealing the Fraudulent Mediums Act as part of an EU tidying-up exercise. It claims that a new, more general, commercial practices law will be available for use if necessary. But I think without psychic powers we can foresee that this will be the last we hear of the whole thing.

And probably that’s for the best. Probably.

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