Ramirez Sanchez, known as Carlos the Jackal

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WITH Sky’s blanket promotional campaign, it’s hard to miss that Eddie Redmayne is starring in a reboot of The Day of the Jackal.

And viewers who rushed to binge the first five episodes last week will have recognised what is becoming a familiar setting for any drama involving spies and double agents.

In one scene Lashana Lynch, playing secret service operative Bianca Pullman, meets a contact on the Regent’s Canal, the perfect place for top-secret discussions with film regularly using the towpath close to Regent’s Park as the backdrop for covert meetings in Apple’s spy drama Slow Horses.

Now we know where MI5 holds its briefings.

The Jackal series reminded me of a planning dispute in Queen’s Grove about “the house where the Jackal first struck”, which was facing the bulldozer in 2008.

The owners of 48 Queen’s Grove, St John’s Wood, wanted to build a modern family home – complete with swimming pool, games room and servants’ quarters – in the leafy street first targeted by Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, 25 years ago.

The house in Queen’s Grove

As president of Marks & Spencer and the British Zionist federation, the home’s owner, Joseph Edward Sieff, was a suitable target for the trigger-happy member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Sieff had been told by Scotland Yard to watch out for booby-trapped mail, but on December 20 1973 he was in the bath when the doorbell rang. A Portuguese butler answered the door to the man in his mid-20s armed with an Italian-made, 9mm Beretta pistol. He forced his way up the steps and shot Sieff in the face from point-blank range.

Sanchez was nick-named Jackal by the press after a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal was found among his possessions.

The build-up to the cold-blooded attack is described in crime writer John Follain’s best-selling biography The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist: Carlos the Jackal.

He wrote: “The man swung open the wrought-iron gate at number 48 Queen’s Grove and walked up the paved path to the porticoed entrance of a mock-Georgian mansion.

“Two imposing columns flanked the entrance, which was topped by a white frieze of a deer resting gracefully outside.”

Sanchez failed in his mission, when his pistol jammed after the first shot and Sieff survived. It was the first in a series of bungled missions.

He was charged with masterminding a series of bombings, kidnappings and hijackings in the 1970s in support of the Palestinian cause and murdering two policemen in Paris, before being jailed for life in 1997.

The 2008 application to demolish the house was approved but the works did not take place.

A renewed application was made last year to demolish it but only behind its historic façade.