Not for the first time in my life I found myself, at the weekend, trying to steal from a hotel. Oh, don’t make that face. I bet you’ve done it. What was it that you shoved in your weekend holdall, eh — toiletries? Bathrobes? A standard lamp? I could copy out the Old Testament 500 times with the pens and paper that I’ve acquired from hotel rooms. And those Gideon bibles don’t half sell well at car boot sales.* But this time it was drinks that I wanted to steal; a Baileys Irish Cream and a gin and tonic to be precise. I make no apology. Because the hotel, like the Serpent, put temptation before me in the form of an oak-panelled “honesty bar”.

Why do posh hotels mess with your mind like this? Why can’t they have a man in a tight waistcoat just serve you the drinks from a proper bar, then charge you a scandalous amount of money like they’ve always done? It’s a simple system that works perfectly well.

But, oh no. Now boutique hotels must let us know that they “trust” us. That we are such civilised, discerning guests that they know we’ll do the right thing and write down what we have drunk in the big book, even though no one’s any the wiser. This is obviously insane. Nothing taps the inner thief like an unattended hotel bar. It’s like shoving a fat sheep into a cage with a hungry lion and telling Leo to play nicely.

But, just like the railway station newspaper honesty box, the hotel manager takes a gamble. He expects that we will be so flattered by his act of faith that we’ll respond by being super-honourable. Which is weird, because everything else in a hotel, from the framed pictures to the cheap hairdryers, is nailed down. This is sensible because studies show that hotel guests are about as trustworthy as kleptomaniac insurance salesmen. They’ll “souvenir” anything moveable — ashtrays, pillows, toilet rolls, slippers (though God knows why, since it’s like walking with two Ryvitas strapped to your feet).

People who would never dream of thieving from a shop somehow feel fully entitled to do so in a hotel. Once a guest was caught at a Melbourne hotel staggering out with two leather shell-backed chairs. Asked what he was doing, he replied: “I’m taking them home.” So aren’t they deranged to trust us with unpoliced alcohol?

It’s true that presumption of integrity works to a point. But my research, admittedly conducted on my own lush acquaintances, indicates that after the second drink in an honesty bar, which will be large because we pour it ourselves, our moral boundaries start to blur and we’ll decide that since the robbing gits charged us £4 for peanuts from the minibar, morally they “owe” us a bloody mary.

Thus we “forget” to write down the next drink and perhaps even the next and before long we couldn’t fill in the book if we wanted because we can’t remember our room number or our own names. At this point the manager will come and ask us to leave and we will weep and fall over on the Axminster carpet. So, as a concept, it has its flaws. Which is probably why most of those newspaper honesty boxes have mysteriously vanished.

It’s a pity because, mostly, people want to do the right thing. In yesterday’s times2, the psychologis Richrad Wiseman revealed that when he planted 240 wallets on Edinburgh streets nearly half were posted back to the “owners”. The highest number of wallets returned contained a photo of a smiling baby. Great. But the thing is that none of those wallets contained money. If they had, I fear that the result would have been less warming to the heart-cockles.

In Indonesia hundreds of “honesty cafés” have been opened in schools and government offices to make citizens get the honesty habit. It’s been going quite well with no students being caught cheating but disappointingly an investigation found that a school administrator had been taking snacks without paying.

You see, human beings just don’t behave as ethically when they think that no one’s watching. Scientists find that when you paste a picture of a pair of eyes above an honesty box, takings increase threefold. And take the Rooneys’ wedding. Coleen and Wayne announced that they didn’t want gifts and instead asked the guests to their £5 million bash to make a donation to Claire House, a children’s hospice on The Wirral. Eight months later guess how many of the 64 guests had coughed up any money to the hospice? Four. And this from a guest list that included millionaire footballers.

Perhaps we shouldn’t judge them too harshly. After all, how many people go to funerals obeying the bit about “no flowers” but never quite getting round to the other bit about making a donation to charity instead? Maybe it’s the same imperative that makes 10 per cent of supermarket shoppers pilfer one item when using a self-scanning till. It’s as if they have an indignant conversation with themselves: “After all the money I spend at Tesco, can they really begrudge me one chuffin’ pack of Daz?”

But back to the hotel. Well refreshed already, someone decided that, because it’s a hotel and it’d be churlish not to, we’d have one round of drinks on the house and confess to the others as the prices are a rip-off anyway. Then we sat back to enjoy our spoils.

For a while it felt rather thrilling, but then doubts began gathering like crows. Would any of the staff have to pay from their wages? Would this appear on my cosmic footprint? To be frank though, my overriding concern was WILL I GET FOUND OUT? And it was this, ultimately, that made me creep back and fill in the book correctly. Not a sense of honesty but the dread of an embarrassing scene.

This, I know, is pathetic and to hardcore hotel thieves everywhere, I apologise.

*That was a joke. I wish to clarify that I have never and would never steal a Bible or any of God’s works as I believe that this would condemn a person to Hell even more than that other sin which apparently makes you go blind.

Times Recommends

• The ghost of Robin Cook haunts Chilcot’s feast
• The truth shouldn’t need oaths
• Violence: let’s separate the men from the boys