Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln, the former Darlington MP, died in Shanghai General Hospital. He was the most preposterous conman ever elected to the House of Commons – although he remains the only British MP to become a member of the German Government.
Hungarian by birth, he wormed his way into the affections of the Liberal Rowntree family of York who backed his candidacy in Darlington in January 1910. He unseated the Conservative MP, Herbert Pike Pease, by twenty-nine votes, and set about defrauding his supporters and annoying foreign governments. When Parliament collapsed in December 1910, scandals and debts prevented him from standing again, and Darlington returned to Pike Pease.
During the First World War, Trebitsch-Lincoln tried to sell false information to both the British and German governments and then, wanted by most of Europe’s police for everything from stolen gold watches to espionage, he fled to the US, where he sold his ludicrously untrue story of life as a double agent to the New York World.
In 1920, he became the Minister for Information in the German Kapp government, and then converted to an obscure sect of Buddhism. In China, he acquired thirteen disciples, but they deserted him when they found him in a compromising position with a young nun.
New research suggests that the Nazis might have poisoned him in Shanghai.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 1990–2011)