Britain’s greatest spy?

Christine Granville was not her real name. Instead it was an alias given to Britain’s first female spy – and Winston Churchill’s favourite – during the Second World War. She wrote she decided to keep the name “I have made for myself and of which I am rather proud”.

Born Krystyna Skarbek in Warsaw, she fled to the UK after the Nazis invaded Poland and embarked on an extraordinary career with British Intelligence, inspiring the character of Vesper Lynd in Ian Fleming’s Bond novel Casino Royale. The real-life person smuggled the proof that Hitler planned to invade the Soviet Union across Europe, rescued French Resistance fighters, persuaded an entire German garrison to defect to the Allies, and saved countless lives.

Skarbek is said to have been one of Britain’s most effective wartime agents. Sadly, after the conflict was over, she held a string of menial jobs, ended up in a cheap London hotel run by the Polish Relief Society and was murdered in 1952. A Blue Plaque will now see both her names remembered. How could we have ever forgotten such a person, such a life?