Not that long ago it was very hard to make big lumps of money. You had to learn Latin, grow a side parting, wear a suit, play squash, do accountancy and get up extremely early in the morning. Friends had to be stabbed in the back and children ignored.

Then along came the Greater London Authority, which, we’re told, was a fountain of cash. It seems that all you had to do to get a huge grant was call Ken’s Kremlin and explain that, as a Muslim polar bear, you were very concerned about the melting ice caps, the slave trade, fair-trade potato crisps and, er, nuclear proliferation, and immediately your piggy bank would burst.

Sadly, though, when Boris took over, the gravy train for lunatics was halted and it looked as though the terminally lazy might have to go back to rubbing scratch cards or applying for a slot on Britain Doesn’t Appear to Have Any Discernible Talent.

There’s more grim news. When the government announced it was thinking of locking up men with beards for 42 days, some people suggested that anyone who was not subsequently charged would be entitled to £3,000 a night for every night beyond 28 days’ detention.

Excellent. You simply grow some facial hair and stroll into terminal 5 with some wires poking out of your shoes, and Bob’s your sugar daddy. You get three meals a day, a smorgasbord of drugs and you walk away after six weeks with £42,000 in your trousers.

Unfortunately, the whole 42-day thing now seems likely to be a dead duck, but don’t despair, because how’s this for a money-making idea? Simply go on a scuba-diving holiday and get lost.

Obviously, you don’t want to be getting, ahem, “separated from the dive boat” in Norway. Or in a gravel pit in Wakefield. It’s best to go to a place where the sea is warm. This will make your “ordeal” quite comfortable. And as an added bonus there will be sharks, which will sound great after you’ve been miraculously rescued and your story is appearing in Hello! magazine.

Don’t worry – in lovely warm water the only sharks you’ll see are so small, they wouldn’t even classify as a hungry man’s starter. When a newspaper talks of “shark-infested waters”, though, we all immediately think of cold-water predators biting Robert Shaw in half.

Now, some housekeeping. Don’t, whatever you do, get yourself lost miles from land in some two-bit Third World backwater where all the rescue-boat captains are on heroin. You stand a pretty good chance of being out there for ever. Australia’s good. They are all used to being eaten, and because of this, the authorities will most likely send a destroyer to the rescue. This will look fantastic on the evening news and will up your saleability immensely.

Oh and do please remember to have something pithy but brave prepared for when they haul you on board. Crying like a girl is no good unless you actually are a girl. Tony Bullimore, the round-the-world sailor, set a pretty good benchmark in this respect. He really had been in trouble, miles from anywhere and freezing cold; he’d even started to eat himself. All absolutely excellent if he’d thought to flog his story. And then, when he’d been rescued by the Aussie navy and, of course, offered counselling, he said: “What would I need that for? I’ve just been saved.” Brilliant.

Next, you must choose who’s coming with you, and here there’s a big rule. No mingers. The girls must be prettier than a Caribbean sunset, partly because Hello! is not going to put someone who looks like Ann Widdecombe on the cover.

The men, on the other hand, should be big and strong so that they can deal with any unfortunate attacks by cannibalistic fishermen or Portuguese men-of-war. But, critically, one must be a concave-chested prat whom you don’t like very much. Because someone has to come home with a half-eaten head, after all.

Things to pack? Well, obviously you’ll need some sandwiches so you have something to eat while you wait for the dive boat to go away. You’ll also need some sun cream, a torch, a portable sat nav system, a harpoon gun and some condoms, in case one of the pretty girls falls for the “Well, since we’re going to die, we might as well” line.

Most important of all, though, you must take a camera with a flash.

Last week we saw some incredibly dramatic photographs of a beautiful and healthy young woman swimming through “shark-infested waters”, at night, after she and some friends had been carried away by “fierce rip tides” off Bali. This is textbook stuff.

The party of three Brits, a Frenchman and a Swede even came up with a fierce-looking dinosaur that had approached them when they did finally make land. It’s called the Komodo dragon and billed as the largest lizard in the world, so we have in our mind a Tyrannosaurus rex, peering through the window of their broken-down Jeep. It all sounds terrifying, and we’ll just gloss over the fact that it prefers carrion to live meat, and that they made it go away by throwing pebbles at it. Honestly, guys, it would have been more lucrative – not that you were going to sell your story, of course – if you’d scarified the Swede. We’d never have known.

Plus, it would have been better if, in the pictures you took as you sat on the island waiting for rescue, you hadn’t all been smiling.

I do hope my simple guide to making a fortune while on a lovely holiday in the Indian Ocean will come in handy this summer. Because the only way you’ll make more money is by sleeping with Wayne Rooney. And I really wouldn’t fancy that.

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