A robber who held up a British betting shop with his girlfriend's sex toy was jailed for five years on Monday.

Nicki Jex, 27, concealed his partner's "Rampant Rabbit" vibrator in a plastic bag during the raid on a Ladbrokes shop in Leicester, east central England, on December 27 last year.

The city's crown court was told that he pointed the sex aid at a cashier and forced her to hand over more than 600 pounds (883 euros, 1,118 dollars) in cash.

Jex, who lives in the city, pleaded guilty to robbery, which was captured on the shop's closed circuit television cameras.

Sentencing him, Judge Philip Head said: "It's right to record that you did not have a firearm but you pretended you had and intended that those you confronted believed that you did, and it must have been truly terrifying for them at the time."

The court was told that qualified chef and engineer Jex was a drug addict who had a string of previous convictions, while his lawyer said his client was in a "fragile" state of mind because of his battle with narcotics.

"He had some of his girlfriend's items and has taken the final step towards self-destruction by committing this offence. One can be thankful that the item he had wasn't a firearm," Phil Gibbs said in mitigation.

"Frankly, he didn't care less what happened to him at that time. He was falling into the abyss and that's the root cause of drugs."