A BOGUS aristocrat who can genuinely be described as an international man of mystery faces jail tomorrow because he refuses to reveal his identity.

For 22 years the intriguing character has styled himself Christopher Edward, Earl of Buckingham. He married under the false name, passed it to his children, laid claim to the Buckingham crest and promised his teenage son that the peerage would one day be his.

As plain Christopher Buckingham he obtained a British passport, driving licence and national insurance number.

Curiously, despite this elaborate deception, he has led an unremarkable life with no evidence of any other suspicious activity. Police are desperate to identify him and released a picture of Buckingham to The Times last night in the hope that the photograph, taken in the 1980s, will jog someone’s memory.

The man in the picture has been living a lie since 1983 when he stole the identity of Christopher Edward Buckingham who died, aged just 8 months, in August 1963. The ploy of stealing the identity of a dead baby was copied from Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Day of the Jackal.

But the impostor added grandeur by purloining a title and printing personalised stationery with a coat of arms and the words “From the Office of Lord Buckingham”. That title has, however, been extinct since 1687 when the 2nd Duke of Buckingham died. The fraud went undetected until January this year when Buckingham’s passport was checked by British immigration officers at Calais. It had been revoked in 2003 after a security trawl by the Passport Agency revealed an exact match with the Register of Deaths.

Buckingham was allowed to board a ferry to Dover but the Kent Police frontier crime unit arrested him when he arrived in Britain. The wellspoken suspect insisted that there had been “a terrible mistake”.

Detective Constable Dave Sprigg said: “He told quite a plausible story — about his birthplace, his parents and childhood up to the point when I asked where he had been educated after primary school and he said he couldn’t remember. I don’t know anybody who cannot remember where they went to school.”

Buckingham, who has worked as an IT security consultant for a Swiss insurance firm since 2001, was freed on police bail. When he returned for a second interview, Constable Sprigg presented him with the birth and death certificates of the real Christopher Buckingham and a coroner’s report from 1963. Constable Sprigg said: “From then on his answers were ‘no comment’.”

Using a false name is not an offence but Buckingham was charged with making a false application for a passport, which carries a maximum jail term of two years. Attempts to discover his real identity have been extensive. His DNA and fingerprints have been checked against criminal records in Britain and Switzerland but produced no matches. The samples have now been sent to Interpol for further checks.

His British bank accounts are in order but strict privacy laws have hampered attempts to make inquiries in Switzerland where police believe Buckingham has a safety deposit box. He is thought to be well-off. He owns a house near Northampton and received compensation after being seriously injured in a car crash in France in 2001.

Officers also traced Audrey Wing, the mother of the real Christopher Buckingham, who is distressed and angry that her dead son’s name has been abused. She said: “It has brought everything back to me. I have been having nightmares about this man.”

Mrs Wing attended Canterbury Crown Court last month when Buckingham pleaded guilty to the passport charge and told the judge he would never reveal his true identity.

Buckingham’s stubborn refusal to tell the truth has caused hurt and intrigue, especially among his children Lindsey, 19, and Edward, 17.

He told his Canadian former wife, Jody, who met him in Bavaria in the 1980s, that he had been educated at Harrow and that his parents, British diplomats, had died in a light aircraft crash in Egypt in 1982.

She said: “It was a bit of whirlwind romance and we got married soon after. Like any couple we had our disagreements but they became worse and worse. It got to the stage where I was asking questions which he simply wouldn’t answer.” They divorced in 1997 and she still does not know who he is.

Constable Sprigg said: “What will happen to him when he comes out? Who is he? Has he any right to live in Britain? He won’t be able to travel because he will no longer get a passport. There must be some really serious reason for him to be so secretive.”

TRUE BLUE

In 1674 Buckingham was dismissed from government for alleged Catholic sympathies. He died in 1687 and the title died with him

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