Common sense tells us that rich people have always run around the world doing exactly what they like. And that there are few human bonds which money cannot overcome. In one way, we should be grateful to be living in the celebrity culture, which brings us hard evidence of rich people proving this eternal truth.

When I first saw video footage of Madonna in the southern African country Malawi, I thought it was Helena Bonham Carter . . . Madonna was so very thin. However, after that brief hiccup . . . a failing on my part, I freely admit . . . it was pretty clear what was going on. After all, we have seen the footage of Angelina Jolie and Mia Farrow in similar situations. Rich and famous white woman in impoverished country, surrounded by adorable brown or black babiesf it won't be long before they hit the road to the airport, and the kid is punching room service.

As Madonna circumvented Malawi's anti-foreign adoption laws and posed for the cameras, as her new son's father wept a couple of tears, all we had to speculate about was how Madonna was going to dress her new child. Will he live in her London house or her New York house? Will the nannies be kind?

Would any of this have happened if Guy Ritchie's film career was going well?

There must be other ways for celebrities to prove that they are lovely people. David was living in an orphanage, placed there by his father after his mother died in childbirth.

But Malawi is a family-centred society. Surely a mega-millionairess could have slipped a couple of quid to one of David's aunties to have him brought up in the country in which he was born.

In one way, Madonna has done us all a favour. Rich people buy babies from the Third World all the time, in secret.

The assumption that life in the moneyed West is better than life anywhere else seems universal, not just among prosperous Western babybuyers, but . . . and this is the saddest thing . . . even among the impoverished people who are selling their children.

(We will not speak here of the baby traffickers in countries such as Russia, Romania and China who don't trouble themselves with questions about where life might be better for a child, but simply get on with the sale. ) But it does seem kind of peculiar that, somewhere along the line, we have all agreed that being brought up by driven and self-obsessed overachievers is preferable to having your own granny and your own cousins and your own culture. The deciding factor in all of this is money, not just Madonna's money, but the money of Western baby-buyers everywhere.

Life has dealt young David a strange hand. He has one dead mother and now a famous one. If you believe the notion that what children like/need most is normality, anonymity and dull routine, David is going to have a lot to deal with. This is not to say that Madonna is a stupid woman, or crass.

She is simply what the nuns used to call wilful. Now she is being wilful with other people's lives, across continents and cultures . . . and she's not even on tour this time.

There was a period when Irish babies were taken to the United States, with the promise of a more prosperous life in the richest country in the world, while their mothers laboured here in poverty or emigrated to Britain to live out their grief in secret. In later years, when their children came looking for them, they proved very hard to find. Of course, David will never be able to find his mother, and it is unlikely that his father, left behind in one of the world's poorest countries, will even survive until his son grows up.

David, on the other hand, will live the life of an American millionaire's child. It is difficult to decide which one to pity most.