... but his career is now in ruins

The ease with which he let his "brain be overruled" by sexually available women has today cost Major Ross his job, his livelihood and his wife.

His admission of affairs with two female soldiers forced him to resign his commission in the King's Royal Hussars and caused his wife Francesca to leave Britain for a new life in Brussels. And he has swapped his pretty cottage in the Wiltshire countryside for a flat in Kennington where soon all he will have left of a once glittering army career will be a £85,000 pay-off and a modest pension.

The major says leaving the Hussars was one of the worst things that has ever happened to him. "Removal meant I would be ostracised from the people with whom I had grown up and spent the majority of my adult life. All this has been humiliating."