SPYING ON the rich is the latest pornography — a voyeur’s game that satisfies our need for fantasy, envy and guilt.

The Sunday Times Rich List figures are as surreal as the pneumatic vital statistics of a porn star. What can Lakshmi Mittal’s £14.8 billion buy that Bernie Ecclestone’s £2,243 million cannot?

Last week a mole revealed the BBC rich list: the secret salaries of the big hitters — Jonathan Ross £720,000, Terry Wogan £800,000 and Jeremy Paxman about £1 million; these were rather more modest earnings but still mouthwatering in a nation where the average weekly pay is £431.

Such wealth porn fuels dreams of Dynasty-like excesses where bejewelled blondes are summoned by private jets to Caribbean hideaways. In the world of the really rich, humdrum domestic routines are suspended, as are the petty concerns that constrain our professional lives.

But while our imagination runs riot with Cartier baubles and endless leisure, playing peeping tom on the rich sparks uglier and more destructive emotions too.

For a start, there’s envy. Surely the rich got that way at our expense? It is because our service charges are so high that the Westminsters and the Cadogans have their property millions. Highly priced vegetables and unhealthy ready meals are the foundations of the Sainsbury fortune. Wogan cons us, too: making us think that he’s our friend, whose ideal morning is spent accompanying us to work.

Envy blends with guilt. Of course, we muse crossly, we could have done that if we’d set our minds to it, passed our GCSEs, settled down earlier . . . There’s nothing like someone else’s luxuries to bring home the consequences of your misspent life.

Some argue that the answer is transparency all round. By knowing what everyone earns, the theory goes, we shall avoid a climate of suspicion and envy. The opposite is true: we should stop spying on the rich because it makes things worse. If we want to be rich, we should work at it. If we don’t, we should concentrate on things that matter more in life, such happiness. Covetousness has rightly been condemned for millennia. It is not just destructive, but pointless. Green-eyed immobility won’t make you rich. It won’t make the rich any poorer. But it sure makes you miserable.