Missing journalist Jamal Khashoggi told me he did not feel safe in Saudi Arabia
The writer told Sky News in March that the UK should not stand for the middle eastern country's lack of political reform.
Monday 8 October 2018 16:54, UK
When I met Jamal Khashoggi back in March he was bristling with indignation as the UK prepared for the visit of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
A lavishly-funded campaign was proclaiming from billboards across London that the prince, known as MBS, was a new kind of Saudi ruler - a reformer who wanted to change his country.
That, Mr Khashoggi told me, was telling only half the story.
As one of his country's best known journalists, Mr Khashoggi wrote in praise of the idea of reform and much of what the Saudi government has been doing.
Measures like letting women drive, bringing back cinemas and going after extremists.
But he could not understand why MBS was also pursuing intellectuals and activists.
That included women whose only crime .
Or academics who dreamt openly of a freer and more open Saudi Arabia.
MBS is reforming his country but it appears to be on the Chinese model.
Economic reform? Yes.
More personal freedom? Up to a point.
But more political reform? Absolutely not.
Don't even go there.
Or else.
And that, said Mr Khashoggi, was something the UK should not stand for.
His people, he said, deserve better.
Mr Khashoggi added: "The British should stop the argument that those countries in the Arab world have their own way of progress.
"No it is not.
"Human rights are universal.
"Freedom is universal.
"We the Arabs, we deserve human rights and liberty as much as anyone as else in the world."
Mr Khashoggi spoke and wrote his mind.
At times during his career that plain-speaking integrity would land him in trouble.
But only under MBS did he feel the need to leave his country and write from exile.
He no longer felt safe, he told me, and feared arrest or worse if he went home.
Fears it turns out that may have been well founded.
MBS has done the unexpected in the past.
He locked up 20 of his country's richest men.
Billionaire princes and playboys were confined to five star barracks in a Ritz Carlton hotel, until they had handed over millions of dollars in assets and pledged unswerving loyalty.
Lebanon's prime minister Saad Hariri also went missing on a visit to Saudi Arabia, emerging to resign temporarily from office.
But assassinating a critic in one of your own consulates is in a different league.
It is a throwback to less sophisticated times.
The sinister unsubtle violence of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi.
The Saudi government needs to come up with a convincing explanation for Jamal Khashoggi's vanishing.
Otherwise its carefully crafted new reforming image will start to unravel.