George Blake has just died in Moscow at the age of 98. Had he been of any other nationality than British, he would not have been allowed to die peacefully in his bed. There has been no other traitor quite so fatal as Blake, not even the notorious Kim Philby. Employed by British intelligence at the peak of the Cold War, he is known to have passed to the Soviets no less than 4,720 pages of secret intelligence. He gave away the identities of anti-communists trying to bring democracy and freedom to central and eastern Europe, then held down in the Soviet bloc. When it was reported that 40 such agents had been arrested, tortured, and sometimes murdered, Blake proudly said that the true figure was more like 400. Discovered, he was sentenced to 42 years in prison. The scandal deepened when he escaped. The part played by the KGB remains murky, but in any case Blake turned up in Moscow and spent the rest of his life boasting about what he had done. In particular, he wrote No Other Choice, a book affirming that crimes committed by communism are no crimes at all. The publishers refused to give him royalties.

By coincidence, at the very moment of Blake’s death, Britain was concluding what has been a long and fraught process of withdrawing from the European Union and so reclaiming sovereignty. Laws made in European courts will now be unenforceable. It so happens that when Blake was denied his royalties, the European Court of Human Rights found that this was a breach of his human rights and the British taxpayer had to pay for it. This was quite enough to explain why so many British voted to leave the European Union.