As of last weekend, I wish I’d gone into organised crime when I left school. It never occurred to me as a good career option – making people sleep with the fishes and so forth – but now it does. Because I’d have loads of (laundered) cash and I would be able to fly first class all the time.

Having loads of (laundered) cash hadn’t been an issue before. I had accepted life down the back, with the occasional upgrade to business. Besides, first class had never been sufficiently better than business to justify a life of lucrative but morally reprehensible crime. In fact, a friend of a friend of a friend who has gone into crime actively opts for business class on British Airways because he doesn’t like the smothering you get in first.

Last weekend was different. I experienced a first-class epiphany on a Jet Airways flight from India. Jet is the first airline in the world to introduce “private cabins”. I’m using quotes because, strictly speaking, they’re not private. The sliding plantation-style doors and surrounding walls go up only about 4ft, meaning the cabin crew can peek over the top if they want. But for privacy in the skies, these “cabins” are unrivalled.

I boarded from a steamy monsoon morning in Mumbai, ushered from check-in to seat as if I were concluding a state visit. Economy passengers were physically manhandled out of the way to make my progress swifter, which I loved. Then I took my seat (1A, since you didn’t want to know) and began wondering whether you could still get into organised crime in your mid-thirties. Because there’s no doubt I’ve left it too late to become Justin Timberlake.

I noticed the differences in quick succession. First, the stewardesses are more beautiful in first, which is sexist of me to notice, but surely not a coincidence. Second, you get foie-gras canapés with your drink, not pretzels. Third, the chair has a custom eight-point massage system. And fourth, Al Gore’s excellent An Inconvenient Truth – about how all our carbon consumption is destroying the planet – is one of the films available on my 23in recessed LCD television screen. So, three good things and one stark reminder of how awful it is to take such an obscenely large portion of a Boeing 777 all the way back from India.

Still, lunch was amazing. Everything is served on full-size crockery, with full-size cutlery, in full-size portions on a full-size table à deux. It’s like having a meal in your own private restaurant. After a delicious soup, I had sowewaali macchi tikka, murgh parchcha kebab and dum ka jhinga achari – aka salmon medallions, chicken and curried sea prawns. I could have followed with the rosemary-pesto rack of lamb, but I went for a chicken and cashew curry. It arrived warm rather than hot, which was annoying. If I’d been an organised criminal, I would have complained.

I drank, in the following order, the Krug Grande Cuvée (because it’s much more distinctive than the Dom Pérignon 1999), a top Chassagne-Montrachet and a big, juicy Saint-Julien. Then, because I was really getting into the conspicuous-consumption thing, I tried two of the three ancient malts in the single-malt library.

BECAUSE the doors don’t go all the way to the top, this is not the place to join the mile-high club with grace. Although the bed is big enough for coitus noncontortus, a (beautiful) hostess could peek over at any time – which would be off-putting, unless you’re into exhibitionism. I’m assuming you’re not, so it’s still the toilet or a private jet for you.

For me, none of this was an issue – I’d left my amour at home – so I made do with the next best thing instead. I put on my beautifully tailored complimentary pyjamas, asked my waitress – sorry, stewardess – to convert my presidential seat into a bed (complete with above-and-below quilts and not one but two man-size pillows) and went to sleep.

It was the sleep of babies. Rich babies with enormous silver spoons in their mouths, heavily dosed on Calpol, but babies all the same. I’m 6ft 4in. My legs don’t fold into a 31in seat pitch, so I never sleep in economy. Flat beds in business are, of course, better, but they don’t allow me to fold up into the foetal position I’ve preferred ever since I found a scorpion at the bottom of my sleeping bag one morning in the Kalahari.

On Jet’s 83in-long flat bed, I could do what I damn well wanted. Or what I didn’t want. I mean, who would pay £4,000plus to sleep? I wanted to drink Krug from Mikasa crystal for the whole eight hours. And watch guilt-inducing films using my Bose noise-reduction headphones. And make phone calls to buy and sell whole companies. And watch the world fly by through one of my four, yes, four, windows. I didn’t want to sleep, but I couldn’t help myself. I barely had time to change (in the outsize washroom), powder my nose (with my bag of Bulgari toiletries) and settle back into my seat for a refreshing fruit platter before we were touching down at Heathrow.

And for all those of you who have found it irritating to read about what goes on in front of the many curtains that separate first class from economy, you’ll be delighted to hear that all the VIP pampering that accompanied my flight was undone by the time I’d fought my way through gridlock Heathrow to the Piccadilly Line. And they didn’t let me nick the Bose headphones, either.

IS IT WORTH £4,360? Well, no, of course not. Unless £4,360 is no object, and then, yes, of course it is. It’s not like flying at all. It’s like hanging around in your own bedroom watching films, stuffing your face and not achieving very much at all. Which is the best thing in the world. Anyway, BA charges £3,665 for a first-class ticket to Mumbai, and it doesn’t have “private cabins”.

With the redesign of all three classes on Jet Airways, its chairman announced his intention to make the airline one of the top five in the world in the next 10 years. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be there already. The ergonomic economy seats feel far more spacious and comfortable than BA’s; business class is on a par with the others; and those eight “cabins” up there in first class, as I so selflessly established, are in a league of their own.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to have a little word with a shopkeeper. He’s late with his protection money.

As befits a first-class passenger, Matt Rudd stayed in Mumbai as a guest of the Taj Mahal Palace (00 800 4588 1825, www.tajhotels.com; doubles from £230, B&B)