Getting caught can have painful consequences

In case you have been in isolation for the last couple of days, Karl Andree, 74 and originally from south London, faces a public flogging in Saudi Arabia.

He was arrested in August last year when police found bottles of homemade wine in his car and jailed for 12 months as having any alcohol, even homebrew, is illegal in the highly conservative nation.

His family has now urged the Government to intervene amid fears the punishment of 350 lashes would kill him.

Now David Cameron has cancelled a multi-million pound prisons contract and written to the Saudi Government to protest about plans to flog the pensioner.

I’m no expert in Middle Eastern law or customs but you’d have to be an introverted, non-reading loner not to know what the Saudi authorities are like.

Let me say it clearly – Mr Andree knew exactly what he was doing and knew what the risks were. After all, he has lived in the Middle East for 25 years.

In another lifetime we lived in a more liberal (just) Middle Eastern state – the UAE.

Westerners who held managerial positions, like wot I did, received an alcohol licence which gave you a monthly allowance.

You couldn’t get your booze at the local supermarket – it was sold by, if I remember correctly, two companies, African and Eastern and Gray Mackenzie.

I am sure my reader will put me straight if I am wrong.

The steel-shuttered shops were discreetly located, with just the company name across the door. No window shopping, no window display, no posters to draw you in - no nothing in fact.

If you didn’t have a licence, you weren’t allowed in. Simples. That licence gave you permission to transport your alcohol from the shop to your home, so technically you were not allowed to take a bottle of wine to a friend’s house or a few cans of the amber nectar to the beach.

But people did it anyway. Because we, yes, I was one of them, knew the possible consequences. No lashes in Dubai but you could certainly get a jail term or be deported.

Saudi has never been as open-minded as some of its Gulf neighbours but every Brit who has gone to work there in the last 30 or 40 years KNOWS the rules about alcohol.

And most will have flaunted them. But there is no doubt that his prison sentence is more than enough punishment – and there is also no doubt that the Saudi authorities will eventually back down over the lashes.

After all, their barbarism is designed to keep the masses under check. Very 14^th century, I know, but the country has always been like that. As Mr Andree knows.

* I''ll leave you with the funniest photo to the week: