A FEW months ago, a non-descript bill dropped through my letter box from a local building supplies company.

Nothing unusual in that. I’d just had some renovation work done on the house, and it was time to pick up the tabs. However, though my name and address were all correct and proper, the materials – indeed the entire order – had absolutely nothing to do with me. I have to say that sorting it out with the company concerned was a simple matter – as simple, in fact, as a glance at the adjacent entry on the ‘L’ page of the Jersey telephone directory.

I also once found myself in the unenviable position of having to convince the representative of an international credit card company that the Mr Le Breton attempting to tender my card to purchase white goods from a discount store on the Derby ring-road had no connection to yours truly, who at the time was on the end of a phone line basking in the late afternoon sunshine of southern France.

However, my own irritation pales into insignificance alongside the frightening chapter of events that befell the unfortunate Peter Derbyshire, who in 1979 was summoned by Special Branch from his work as a pen-pusher for Lambeth Council to be questioned as the prime suspect in the assassination in Beirut of Ali Hassan Salameh, a Palestinian, who’d been widely implicated in the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics seven years before. The killers, three Mossad agents, had cloned Derbyshire’s British passport and another belonging to a British charity worker to conceal their clandestine activities. As we know from recent events, the same kind of thing has happened again in Dubai.

Stealing someone else’s identity in order to shield your own actions, or dabble in petty pretence is pretty grubby; to use it to commit a crime is particularly reprehensible. The more so because it can be a difficult thing to prove and take a long time to detect. The latest outrage deliberately and casually exposed its British passport-holding victims literally to the firing line, as unsuspecting prey in a vicious cycle of revenge and skulduggery.

Identity theft is big business. The Home Office estimates the cost of fraud by credit card scammers and other identity fraudsters to be in the region of £2 billion a year. In a world where we are increasingly asked to divulge names, addresses and other personal details when purchasing items or services – particularly online – we are ever more vulnerable to having that information abused by the unscrupulous.

Identity is a very precious thing. It is, after all, the essential ‘you’, your psyche and external display. It represents how you behave and how you want to be remembered. People can, however, change identities at will. How many of Hollywood’s most celebrated still strut to the names they carried in their cradles? And look at us. Women, when they marry, customarily – though not necessarily – share the name of their husband. My wife, who is French, chose to change both her family name and country of residence, though curiously a French passport retains a married woman’s birth family name along with their chosen one.

Changing one’s identity can be a painful process, undergone to emerge from suffering, be it physical or political, or to address acute personal conflicts. Perhaps the most extreme form involves gender readjustment. James Morris became Jan and Nigel Philips became Nina. For the individuals themselves, this may serve to right an identity crisis they had been forced to live with. Perversely, solving their own turmoil can, initially at least, serve to confuse those coming to terms with accepting them in a different light.

As a result of globalisation, many national edges are becoming increasingly blurred. Historically, peoples have always been on the move, merging and intermingling. After all, three hundred years ago, North Americans and Australians – as they now consider themselves – didn’t exist.

We now espouse multiple identities, personal, clan, national and religious. We may be Jersiaise, when facing all-comers, including our island neighbours, but we’re Channel Islanders when it’s the archipelago on the line, and British when we line up behind Queen and Country. Wearing uniforms was a primitive device both to establish the identity of a military force, comrades, school or group of employees. It was also a useful device to foster unanimity and remove ‘tall poppies’.

These days, I suppose we would call it ‘branding’. At the same time, we take pains to identify roles our fellow citizens perform – what you do can be as important as who you are. There may indeed be conflict between the identity we create for people and the image they create for themselves. It may explain why politicians, for example, have recently been engaged in image refocusing – a smile here, a tear there.

One of the most cunning pieces of identity fakery was conjured up during the Second World War. In a plot codenamed ‘Operation Mincemeat’ designed to deceive Hitler about the proposed Allied invasion of Sicily, a man’s body was given the identity of a Royal Marine and dropped into the sea off Spain in 1943. ‘The Man who Never Was’ carried fake ‘secret documents’ suggesting the invasion would be staged in Greece, 500 miles away. The Axis powers swallowed the story, and – as they say – the rest is history.

We’ve come a long way from the time when taking a photograph of an individual or tribe was considered to have robbed them of their soul and identity. These days we’ve exchanged much of the mystery for reality. If only we could be sure that what you see is honestly what you get.