Every Monday (well, most of them) we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. Many thanks to Colin Darrington for choosing this cartoon from 1993.

This strip is unusual for an Alex cartoon in that it references a specific contemporary event. The person that Rupert is writing to is Asil Nadir: a Cypriot businessman whose consumer retail company Polly Peck went into administration in 1990. Charges of theft and false accounting were brought against him by the Serious Fraud Office. But whilst awaiting trial on the May bank holiday in 1993 - when the detectives who were watching him were off duty (to save money) - Nadir hopped on a private plane to France, from where he made his way to the Turkish enclave in Cyprus, which had no extradition treaty with the UK.

When this cartoon appeared, Alex’s boss Rupert was himself serving time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure after a spot of bother with the regulatory authorities, so was a natural sympathiser with Mr Nadir. Rupert was using a fellow prisoner to write his letters, not because he was illiterate obviously, but because he was so superior that he insisted on dictating all his correspondence.

The pun on “legit/leg it” was a hard one to make sound natural, as “legit” is a bit of an Arthur Daley word and hardly the sort of expression that a posh person like Rupert would use. The structure of the cartoon, in which Rupert appears to be endorsing justice, fairness and responsibility but in reality is gaming the system, parallels the way fraudsters present themselves to the world. It was neat that the turnaround in the fourth frame was able to be revealed by the single word “Asil”. People wouldn’t get the joke today, but at the time they would have instantly realised who Rupert was referring to. Telegraph editor Max Hastings liked the strip so much that he sent us a “hero-gram” (as it was called by the journalists) of congratulation, which was the ultimate accolade for a Telegraph contributor.

Asil Nadir was one of those non-Brits, like Mohamed Al-Fayed or Evgeny Lebedev, who aspired to the trappings of English wealth, status and sophistication. In 2010, missing his playboy lifestyle in the UK, Nadir voluntarily returned to “clear his name”. Unfortunately (for him), he was found guilty at the Old Bailey in 2012 and sentenced to ten years in prison. Four years later he was deported to Cyprus to serve the remainder of his sentence (to save the British taxpayer the expense of looking after him). Here he spent precisely one night behind bars before being released by the Cypriot authorities. In the UK he gave a new emphasis to the expression “the nadir of one’s career” but back in his homeland he enjoyed hero status. He died in 2025.

Rupert himself served less than a month of his sentence before it was quashed by the Appeal Court. This was partly to reflect the reality that the occasional City person who did end up in prison for financial crimes rarely seemed to stay there very long (even Ernest Saunders was released after ten months). But more pragmatically it was because we couldn’t think of any more jokes about a posh banker being in jail.

If you click on the strip above you can see it in its original 1990s context.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.