Madonna should be touching back down in the US any time now, after her widely-reported three-week, four-centre winter getaway with her boyfriend Ahlamalik Williams and her five children, who were also joined by her personal photographer Ricardo Gomes.

Despite strict travel bans around the world, Madonna, Ahlamalik and her four adopted Malawian children flew from LA to London on Christmas Eve, where they spent four days and picked up her son Rocco (from her marriage to Guy Richie), before continuing on to Malawi (via Egypt) and Kenya.

Like other celebrities we've been reading about recently, Madonna has presumably been justifying the trip by classifying it as work that can not be done from home, which means it falls into the 'essential travel' category, which stands even in lockdown.

Plus, since November, 'high value' business travellers arriving into the UK have been exempt from the 10-day quarantine everyone else arriving from countries including the US must undergo, which includes 'certain performing arts professionals' but the point of the exemption is for people who are contributing something to the UK economy through their work so it's a bit hard to see how that applies.

Unlike many of those saronged celebrities we've seen in Dubai and the Maldives on Instagram, Madonna was at least visiting a hospital she helped set up in Malawi and officially opening a dance school at the Jacaranda School for Orphans, which had been funded by her charity, Raising Malawi, although I'm not quite sure how the Kenyan safari fits into all that.

But its hard not to balk given how many times Madonna has bypassed Covid guidelines since the pandemic began, in the name of, well, it being her birthday party, for example, or one of her buddies'.

And while it's not often Kanye West and Tony Blair are mentioned in the same breath, they both hit the headlines in the autumn having been accused of breaching the UK’s quarantine laws (14 days back then).

West, who was spotted in Los Angeles and then just a couple of days later at a Bottega Veneta fashion show at Sadler’s Wells in London with his seven-year-old daughter North, was then seen going into The Dorchester on Park Lane, coming out of fashion designer Michiko Koshino’s sushi restaurant Michiko Sushino in Queen’s Park and shopping at Dover Street Market in Mayfair.

Back then we pondered that West could have been exempt from quarantine on the grounds of him being a representative of a foreign country as an active US presidential candidate (he and his daughter wore those ‘Vote Kanye’ sweatshirts out a couple of times, after all). Police never pursued him, nor did he respond to the accusations.

It was then reported in The Sunday Telegraph that Blair was spotted emerging from lunch at Harry’s Bar in Mayfair just ten days after returning from a trip to Washington DC, where he’d gone to attend an event in which Israel signed an agreement establishing formal relations with Bahrain and the UAE, which he had played a part in negotiating.

Exemptions can be granted to diplomatic staff at international bodies and formal representatives but Blair is now a private citizen so no longer eligible. It’s alleged he appealed to Whitehall officials for special dispensation from quarantine, but it is not clear whether he received the formal exemption letter. A spokesperson for Mr Blair described the ceremony as a diplomatic conference and that he had been advised to follow rules regarding the attendance of international conferences, which they say he did.

But aren’t we used to all this by now? While it probably still seems like yesterday to the residents of Rock, Cornwall, it feels like a lifetime ago to the rest of us that Gordon Ramsay was first in the dog house with, well, everyone who lives there year-round, for moving his entire family down to Cornwall to live in one of his several holiday homes for lockdown, despite the government’s plea for everyone to stay in their actual homes.

Over in Australia, we heard about a number of celebrities entering the country being granted exemption from having to spend the compulsory 14-day quarantine in a state-approved hotel, including Nicole Kidman and her husband Keith Urban, who were allowed to head straight to their AUS$6.5 Million Southern Highlands Estate to self-isolate there. After a public outcry, Kidman’s publicist said they had paid for their own security and were isolating as per law.

So what is the message here? Certain people will always find a way to not quite break the law if it means doing what they want to do. But the simple fact is, the more they do that, the longer it will take to knock this thing on the head. So for now, we just need to stay at home.

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