It was the sinister Captain Segura, in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, who pointed out that citizens divide into two classes — those you can torture and those you can’t. In the same way in this country there are those who have to abide by the rules and those who don’t.

There are those who feel that regulations and tax and laws are for other people — for “the little people” as the American hotelier Leona Helmsley once notoriously said. It is irritating for the rest of us, which is why there was so much glee about the downfall of two British judges in a blackmail case last week.

This was the most titillating of tales, with plenty of two-timing rumpy-pumpy and saucy home videos and a light dusting of cocaine, apparently. Judge J (a woman) had an affair with Judge I (a man) and shared a bed and a cleaner (a woman) with him. When Judge J moved out, the sexy young cleaner moved in, and later turned to blackmail. Since all this was going on between adults, it is not strictly any of our business, hilarious though it may be. (I will never understand why people who are no longer young or beautiful persist in filming themselves in flagrante delicto, as Judge I did more than once. In a judge it shows an unduly relaxed attitude to evidence.) What does concern the public, however, is the fact that these two judges both sit in judgment on immigration. It is their solemn duty to defend the realm from those who seek to enter this country illegally and to send them empty away, yet they both employed just such an illegal immigrant as their cleaner. It is beyond hypocrisy.

Naturally they both testified in court that they did not know that their blackmailing Brazilian nemesis, the “chilli-hot” Roselane Driza, was an “overstayer”, in contemporary cant. But they should have known. Ignorance, as they both must know, is no defence under the law, and it is not difficult to check, as one ought, whether a person is entitled to work here. Hiring an illegal immigrant is a criminal offence, which they must also know; less illustrious employers are regularly prosecuted for it.

Yet both these judges, in senior positions in the contentious and unhappy mess that is immigration law today, felt that the usual rules were not for them. Indeed they would certainly have got away with breaking the law, in their own chosen legal field, had not the terrifying Roselane decided to blackmail them on that very point. Since Roselane was found guilty of blackmailing the woman, but not the man, Judge J’s identity has not been revealed, though no doubt everyone who matters to her knows about it. The goatish Judge I has been outed as Mohammed Ilyas Khan. Both now face a disciplinary inquiry.

I suppose one should be grateful that Britain isn’t remotely Captain Segura’s Havana, and that in this case at least, judges who imagined they belonged to the legislation-proof classes have been shown to be wrong. But one wonders. It seems for instance that the police sometimes see themselves this way. In an impressive piece of investigative journalism last week, Newsnight showed that while most of us suffer the constant annoyance of speed checks and penalties, some policemen consider themselves camera-proof.

The reporters found that the police sometimes use loopholes in the law to avoid being done for speeding. In what was sometimes a rather comic programme, with coppers solemnly discussing whether to prosecute themselves for not admitting which of them was driving a speeding police van, as caught on camera, the nasty feeling was reinforced that there is one law for them and one law for us.

Camera records are sometimes wiped. Prosecutions aren’t always prosecuted. Whining police cars speed terrifyingly up and down inner-city streets. And if some persistent and cynical Newsnight journalists had not pursued various cases for weeks, undeterred by complexity, obfuscation, nit-picking, tedium and all the miseries that investigative journalism is heir to, we would have been none the wiser. Remember the time that Jack Straw’s police chauffeur (when home secretary no less), was somehow excused for speeding?

The rest of us are left feeling confused and resentful; angry that law-makers and law-enforcers can get away with breaking the speed laws while we can’t, and resentful at being tempted, very often, to put the foot down illegally too. The final irony — the final supreme annoyance — is that the argument for speed cameras has suddenly collapsed. Government figures revealed last week that only 5% of accidents are caused by speeding; drivers who let their attention wander cause six times as many accidents.

The rule-proof classes do not have to pay much tax either. They can hire clever accountants to find ways of avoiding tax legally and semi-legally, or else they don’t earn enough to pay tax, or pretend not to. High and low take a relaxed view of tax; only the wretched rule-ridden classes, respectable middle Britain, the petit bourgeois, have to pay their taxes in full. Not for them the Cayman Islands, or the trust funds or the life-time gifts; they live under the discipline of PAYE and Inland Revenue form filling.

While at either end of the social scale the rich and the improvident are not much affected by death duty, the respectable classes have to pay inheritance tax even on their parents’ modest house or flat. When it comes to pensions, citizens divide into two classes in the same way. The rule-ridden have to look to a bleak future on an ever more modest pension; politicians, having raided our pensions, warn us to tighten our belts against an impoverished old age. Meanwhile, they expand their own bellies with ever bigger, ever better, gold-plated, inflation-proof pensions, and put up their salaries for good measure.

There are endless examples of this shameless sense of entitlement among people who denounce it. Tony Blair chose a backdoor form of selective schooling for his children at a faith school, while the latest education bill denies those schools the right to interview. Restrictions are for others. But the sad truth is that many citizens would, if they could, join the ranks of the rule-proof. Nobody can feel quite as pleasantly indignant about the fate of the judges and their illegal cleaner as he or she might like.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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