It’s the testimony we’ve long been waiting for. On Monday, at the undercover policing inquiry, the man whose cruel and disgusting deceptions have come to epitomise the “spy cops” scandal will be questioned. Many of us are hoping for answers, not least because his story suggests a closing of ranks across the British establishment. Even if you think you’ve heard it all, some of the details in this column will take your breath away.
Bob Lambert worked for the Metropolitan police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in the 1980s and 1990s, first as an undercover cop infiltrating environmental and animal rights protests, then as operational controller of the squad, supervising other spy cops doing similar work. In the course of his undercover assignments, while posing as a radical activist called Bob Robinson, he deceived four unsuspecting women, innocent of any crime, into starting relationships. He stole his identity from a dead child.
With one of the women, Jacqui, he fathered a child. Two years later, he vanished. She discovered his true identity by chance more than 20 years later, and has yet to recover from the devastating shock. She says she feels “raped by the state”. The person she loved and trusted was a ghost. “I feel like I’ve got no foundations in my life …. your first serious relationship, your first child, the first time you give birth – they’re all significant, but for me they’re gone, ruined … I was not consenting to sleeping with Bob Lambert, I didn’t know who Bob Lambert was.”
When he sat with her as she went through 14 hours of labour, she later wondered, was he being paid overtime? His abandoned son was also traumatised by the discovery of who his father really was. According to another former spy cop, Peter Francis, when Lambert was his manager, he advised Francis to wear a condom when sleeping with activists.
These fake relationships were standard practice in the team of spy cops Lambert ran. The officers used similar seduction techniques, built similar falsehoods about their lives and used similar methods for destroying or abandoning the relationships when they were redeployed. It looks like a refined, state-sanctioned grooming operation. As Helen Steel, another woman deceived by a spy cop, remarked, “there weren’t any genuine moments – they were purely manipulative and abusive. …. it was as if he set out to destroy my sanity.”
We now know that Lambert and other police spies repeatedly lied in court when they were arraigned as “activists” on minor charges, using their fake names to maintain their cover. They withheld crucial evidence from the trials of genuine activists, whom they had stitched up: the courts were not informed of their role. As a result, many environmental campaigners have now had their convictions overturned.
Both in parliament and by another witness to the inquiry, Lambert has been accused of acting as an agent provocateur and planting an incendiary device in a Debenhams department store in Harrow that caused £340,000 worth of damage. Lambert has denied this.
The spy cops, among many other unlawful intrusions, used their relationships to gain access to privileged information: discussions between defendants and their lawyers that are legally confidential. Among the lawyers whose advice was compromised was a young Keir Starmer.
The great majority of the people being spied on were peaceful activists who presented no danger to democracy or human life. Many were involved in campaigning against corporate abuses. Some of the spying, like Lambert’s infiltration of a campaign against McDonald’s, looks like policing on behalf of corporate power. But even that was not the worst of it. Police spies were also used to infiltrate the campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager murdered by racists in 1993, whose case the Met, as a result of institutional racism, failed properly to investigate. Police spies were allegedly deployed to find “dirt” that could be used to smear Stephen’s family. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC, now the Independent Office for Police Conduct) found that Lambert “played a part” in the intelligence gathering by spies inserted into the Lawrence campaign.
None of the spy cops have suffered legal consequences, though activities such as identity theft and entering homes without a warrant are illegal. Their pensions remain intact, they have kept their medals and commendations. On Tuesday at the inquiry, Belinda Harvey, one of the women deceived into an 18-month relationship with Lambert, damned him as a “cruel and manipulative” liar. But the authorities see him differently. In 2008, Lambert received an MBE for services to the police.
After retiring from the police, Lambert reinvented himself as a right-on lecturer on community engagement, Islamophobia and counter-terrorism. He obtained prestigious positions at Exeter, London Metropolitan and St Andrews universities. Astonishingly, he received the London Metropolitan position after being exposed as a police spy. As I have a connection with St Andrews, I joined the campaign calling for the university to take action. But it stonewalled us. Scandalously, in my view, the university’s then principal, Louise Richardson, remarked: “I think hiring people who have had real-world experience in an institution which is teaching counter-terrorism is entirely legitimate … I’m not going to get involved in what people do privately whoever they are.” When the real-world experience a university values consists of deceiving, abusing and destroying innocent lives, you have to wonder what the disqualifications would be. The issue was resolved only when Lambert, as the Stephen Lawrence revelations began to emerge, resigned.
Such closing of ranks seems almost ubiquitous. Richard Walton, the commander accused with Lambert of involvement in spying on the Stephen Lawrence campaign, retired just after the IPCC concluded he would have had a “a case to answer for discreditable conduct”, avoiding potential disciplinary proceedings. Did he shuffle off into obscurity? No. He authored a report by the dark-money junktank Policy Exchange, calling for stricter penalties for environmental protesters. His recommendations were adopted by the government and incorporated into the draconian 2022 Police Act. So while the spy cops face no consequences, peaceful protesters, on his recommendation, now receive massive prison sentences.
We know this went all the way to the top. The SDS, for which the police spies worked, was funded by the Home Office, and fell under the supervision of several home secretaries. Despite being a victim of spying himself, Starmer, in his later role as director of public prosecutions, has been accused of presiding over a major cover-up of spy cop activities. To this day, the police refuse to release the files their spies compiled, like the Stasi, on the innocent people they deceived. It is hard to escape the conclusion that official life in this country is rotten to the core.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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