Simon Carr: Who do we hate more, lawyers or politicians?

Honest fool:"If I gave you £1,000 would you answer two questions?" Lawyer: "Certainly. What's the second question?"

When the president of the Law Society asks ministers to stop lawyer bashing it presents the rest of us with a dilemma. In a spat between lawyers and politicians (both of whom rob graves and dine on human remains), how do we determine the villain?

Why are lawyers hated? If they are hated?

Sheer jealousy. Straightforward envy. Cherie Booth is said to make £250,000 a year. She's a founding partner of a hot human rights enterprise: if that estimate of her earnings is correct, I'll eat my wig. I'll eat hers too. There are people making £250,000 writing for newspapers, and lawyers out-earn journalists four to one.

I don't suffer from the sins of envy and jealousy. I am not a lawyer. Or a politician. I am a parliamentary sketch writer, and as such beyond good or evil.

But for such fabulous earners, lawyers can be very boring (read your mortgage contract recently? One of them wrote that).

They've also created a cartel extracting fees for doing things we could do for ourselves. Look: they charge £1,000 for doing the conveyancing on your house. Educated chimps would do it more quickly, more reliably and for half the amount.

In my experience of litigation – a divorce, an intellectual property case, several libel actions, and that swine who... (whoa, come back!) – the best letters were drafted by me and sent out, unchanged, by my lawyer on his letterhead. It didn't need a legal degree, just an ability to précis and a vicious sense of grievance.

What else? The ability of divorce lawyers to drive a wedge between an amiably separating couple is well known. It's how fees are generated. There's no money in a three-letter correspondence. (I say no money: there's £600.) Having watched a friend go through the full gruelling marathon, it remains amazing that this legal practice is still legal.

We haven't finished. We've hardly started. Lawyers go into politics and debauch the language with their ability to make sentences mean the psychotic opposite of what we understand them to mean. Bill Clinton survived his cross examination by evading an accusation with the words: "That depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

Tony Blair's administration plays a similar game. Andrew Smith, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has been asked for years now why the tax burden is rising. "The tax burden is falling," he replies. He couldn't have said that in a world without lawyers.

Lawyers, not poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. The concept of judicial activism brings provocative cases in front of socially conscious judges to create a system of precedents well in advance of what parliamentarians ever intended. Legislators are bad enough when they're elected. When they're unelected and paid a million a year they can drive you to sinful, not to say judgemental thoughts.

There are those who say lawyers are inessential to society. I'd agree to the extent that they're less essential than parliamentary sketch writers, but they do have some role. "Let's kill all the lawyers!" is, after all, the rallying cry Shakespeare gave to revolutionary maniacs, of people just out for a good time.

But it is also true that graphs exist that chart the relationship between the number of lawyers per head of population against a country's economic well-being. Past a certain point, the relationship becomes inverse. America, it is said, is approaching that point.

There's more; there's much more. But we wouldn't want to be accused of inciting professional hatred. Though, Lord knows, we should do it while we can: it won't be legal for long.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com