Don't be fooled: Blunkett is guilty of a serious offence

Until now, most people believed that the process of getting a visa was objective and fair

Mr Blunkett, so said the Prime Minister, leaves office with his integrity intact. And Sir Alan Budd, presenting his report yesterday, went all around the houses to avoid pinning explicit blame on the former home secretary. The evidence of a link between Mr Blunkett's private office and the immigration directorate, he said, was "circumstantial" (because almost no evidence was found and a suspiciously large number of memories failed).

Sir Alan suggested, in fact, that Mr Blunkett's only proven offence was to have denied that his lover's nanny's visa was "fast-tracked" when, in fact, it was. Knowingly or not, the Home Secretary had misrepresented that one fact; he had acknowledged this and fallen decently on his sword.

So that is all right. We humble citizens can rest assured that the Government of our country is in good hands and can prepare to welcome Mr Blunkett back to high office if Labour wins the next election. We may even see him sooner if, as has been mooted, he helps to front the campaign. Astoundingly, two-thirds of Britons are apparently quite happy about this. In their view, Mr Blunkett was a good home secretary and deserves to return.

Many factors may be in play here: Mr Blunkett's blindness, his heroic life-story, the sad reality that he was crossed in love. Above all, perhaps, there seems to be a feeling that the fast-tracking of a nanny's visa was too trivial an offence to cause the downfall of a competent cabinet minister. I beg, most fervently, to differ.

Fast-tracking of a visa from the Home Secretary's office, regardless of who actually wrote the faxes or e-mails, is not a trivial matter. A stamp in one's passport saying "leave to remain indefinitely" is one of the valuable prizes this country has to offer. It confers a status that is second only to citizenship, and entails fewer obligations. There are - or should be - strict conditions attached to how it is granted.

The process is not nearly as transparent as it should be, and it takes too long for applications to be processed. Until now, though, probably most people in this country - myself included - believed the process was generally objective and fair. Now we know different. If you know the right people, you can get your non-EU nanny fast-tracked through the visa system before she has completed the requisite four years of continuous residence in two weeks' flat.

Try telling that to my (American) husband whose citizenship application after we returned from my three-year posting to Moscow was refused. The reason was that, despite more than 15 years' residence in Britain and despite being resident "for tax purposes" during the three Moscow years, he was deemed not to have met the residence requirements for citizenship. We had tried to clarify this before submitting the application (through the normal channels), but no one could advise with any authority. We were obviously asking the wrong people.

In one of his resignation interviews, Mr Blunkett replied as follows to a question about granting favours to friends. So far as the television picture allowed me to judge, he did so without blushing. "I would always do a favour," he said. "I would do a favour without embarrassing or putting at risk propriety in terms of not using my public office for personal gain ... I think a human being who sends people away and says 'No, I'm sorry, I can't help' is not a human being at all."

Remember: this is, or rather was, the Home Secretary speaking; the Home Secretary of a country which rightly prides itself on the low level of corruption in public life and is widely admired abroad as a place where officials are impartial. They may be rude at times, overburdened and inefficient, and their computers may keep crashing, but they are seen as sticklers for the rules and appreciated for applying them equitably. For people from the many countries where grating wheels of officialdom can readily be greased by nepotism, clan-ties, and gifts - from cognac to private school places - the "rules-is-rules" mentality of the dour British official comes as a revelation.

More family anecdotes. A nephew and his girlfriend, southern Italians both, recently came to London to find work and improve their English. They quickly found jobs, and were astonished that they could do this through regular channels and that within a couple of weeks they had formal contracts of employment. (Take a bow, Haagen Dazs and Caffe Nero.) This is private business, of course, but the tone set in one sector tends to seep into another.

Impartiality and incorruptibility among officials are qualities we should value far more highly than we do. Maybe it is because we take them for granted that so many people believe David Blunkett has been hard done by. Think, though, of a Britain in which you had to place a £20 note in your passport before negotiating the green channel at customs, a Britain in which your neighbour could buy passports for his friends and relations, a Britain where every entitlement was actually a favour with a price. This is where the granting of favours for lovers' nannies leads, and it is not somewhere Britain should go.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk