Spy story

The worst traitor of all: How an East End jailbird lied and cheated his way across France, joined the Nazis and condemned 150 resistance fighters to death - and was committed to no cause other than pursuing a life of champagne and women

The showdown was fittingly violent. It was 1946 and the war in Europe had been over for almost a year when armed police surrounded an apartment building in central Paris.

They were acting on a tip-off that a wanted traitor-on-the-run, a renegade British soldier who had sided with the Germans and betrayed hundreds of men and women to the Gestapo, was holed up in a flat there.

The police crept up the stairs, but their heavy tread gave them away and the tall, flame-haired fugitive was waiting at the open door, pistol in hand. He fired, they shot back and their hail of bullets slammed him back across the shabby room and onto the bed, where he bled to death.

It was over at long last — a blood-stained finale for the conman from Hackney, whose double-dealing and murderous collaboration with the Nazis since 1940 led to MI6 declaring him 'the worst British traitor of the war'.

MI5 marked his death with the terse note: 'He has now been liquidated.'