Day of the jackal’s over!

• A PLOT like that of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal is no more, (Confessions of a jackal: Police spy’s secret life smoking joints with activists, July 25).

This possibility was eventually brought to an end following the case of MP John Stonehouse, who faked his death [in 1974] in order to surface under a new name in Australia.

As a result, it became much harder to obtain birth certificates, with an applicant having to provide full details of a particular birth and early death, as opposed to just leafing through records and alighting on a useful registration.

JM CASTLES, W2