James Simpson explains the significance of evidence from the key undercover policeman  in the Spycops inquiry – and the injustice to activists it reveals

The Undercover Policing Inquiry into the Spycops scandal has for the last two months focussed on one officer above all else: Robert ‘Bob’ Lambert, MBE. Under his nom de guerre ‘Bob Robinson’, Lambert went to battle environmental activists, animal rights campaigners and hunt saboteurs, with some trips to report on Wapping printworkers mass pickets for good measure. With the backing of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) hierarchy, and the security services, Lambert went behind enemy lines to wage war on campaigns opposing corporate powers like Unilever (BDS list anyone?) and McDonalds (ditto!), on anti-fur and vivisection campaigns, and on activists trying to stop posh people gallivanting around the countryside ripping apart animals for sport. 

In doing so, he became emblematic to many of the transition of the SDS into the structured, conditioned, and eventually codified bundles of repeat abuse for which the unit became infamous, seeing behaviours begun in this generation handed down throughout the following decades from spycop to spycop, like a family’s secret flan recipe.

The Spycops scandal erupted fifteen years ago when environmental activists in Nottingham uncovered Mark Kennedy. Kennedy, who had been deployed undercover for seven years as part of the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), a successor to the SDS, unwittingly unveiled other officers who were undercover in that movement. From then the secrets of these units kept spilling out, largely due to the work of researchers and activists spied on (see the Undercover Research Group, Police Spies Out of Lives, and Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance websites as their work continues). 

By 2014, Teresa May, then Home Secretary, was forced to call a public inquiry, as former SDS officer turned whistleblower, Peter Francis, revealed that the Stephen Lawrence Family Justice Campaign had been a target for the undercover police officers. Ten years, two chairs and £90 million and rising later, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UPCI) has reached a crucial phase – the era of the 1980s, fifteen years after the unit’s 1968 inception – where it would detail the actions of the SDS in Thatcher’s Britain. And with it, finally, bring Lambert to give evidence at the hearing – a process which would eventually last seven long days. This had been preceded by six weeks of his alter ego’s (more his insistence than mine) former comrades and colleagues, friends and lovers, and an offspring, responding to the vast amount of disclosure of his reporting during his time as Bob Robinson, and the unveiling of his witness statement. 

Restriction orders 

The last time I wrote for the Counterfire website on the Spycops Inquiry at the start of November it was discussing the vast amount of Reporting Restriction Orders (RROs) that had just been suddenly announced that challenged the very notion of a public inquiry. What I did not know at the time of writing was that most of the RROs that had arisen (and there is a vast number) were due to the secret reporting and claims made by Lambert during his deployment. The hotly challenged claims made in them had led non-state, non-police core participants to request privacy orders to protect themselves. 

The essence of the UPCI’s response to these requests in introducing RROs made the hearings much less public and harder to follow away from the public gallery, and harder to coherently report on. This despite the prolonged protestations of the core participants they were meant to protect and has resulted in much less publicity for Lambert than he arguably deserves, not to mention his victims’ own testimony. 

One of, if not the, biggest victims of the SDS and NPOIU, as well as a core investigatory tenet of the UPCI, are the women who were deceived into long-term sexual relationships with undercover officers using their false personas and identities. From the summer of 1984 to the spring of 1989, the married Lambert had four such relationships, one resulting in a child – a child he would abandon at the end of his deployment. Lambert admits all these relationships. He also admits that none of these women would have consented to enter into this form of intimacy, or any if they had known who he really was. These seem to be the only points he can agree upon regarding his relationships with these women during his deployment. 

He denies that being undercover mentally gave him carte blanche to have sex with young women during his deployment and claims that he never went into the field seeking these relationships. He testified that management had guided him to form ‘close friendships’ with activists, and this had led him to the impossible position where his persona, employing peak cognitive dissonance, had forced him time and again into circumstances beyond his control. Within a month of deployment, he had embarked on his first sexual relationship with a young woman given the cypher ‘CTS’, which ended when she went to university abroad a few weeks later. The material fact that Lambert was in a relationship so swiftly with somebody that Martin Lowe, an anarcho-pacifist London Greenpeace member who befriended them both, describes as entering her first serious sexual relationship, points to a more predatory and targeted abuse. 

Predatory

The predatory nature of Lambert’s targeting of young women who were all in their early 20s, around a decade younger than Lambert (who was 32 at the start of his deployment in 1984), is something he disputes, although does admit that they were useful to his cover as a sort of happy by-product of their unions with him. Nor does he accept that he was in any way using these women for his own sexual gratification. No, he resides in a nether region, where Bob Robinson, an entirely separate entity from Bob Lambert, was engaged in a mutual exchange of ‘comfort’ with the women he deceived. He felt that they were better off for having known him at the time and he was confident that he had not left any emotional scars. 

The week preceding Lambert taking the stand saw ‘Jacqui’ and Belinda Harvey take the stand to give evidence. Jacqui, an unabashed hunt saboteur and animal rights activist, had a relationship for two years immediately after CTS. Belinda Harvey had one for the final eighteen months of his deployment. Both women gave engaging and direct evidence (although due to RROs only Belinda’s was live-streamed). Full of emotion and dignity, that contrasted sharply with the prevarications and avoidance of the seven days Lambert would later take. 

Jacqui had a child with Lambert. A child he would later tell Belinda Harvey and others that she lied and manipulated him into having. Belinda Harvey was not an animal-rights activist, or any sort of activist, at the time training to be an accountant working for an energy provider and happened upon Lambert at a house party. The courses of both of their lives were inextricably changed by the interference of the SDS officer, who under the supervision of his management was told to ‘manage the situation’, upon the discovery of the pregnancy. Managers of the SDS at the time will be giving evidence in January 2025, and some of Lambert’s recollections of these interactions may well be challenged further by his then superiors. Fundamentally, Lambert, despite his denials, can be said to have done little other than use these women to enhance his cover and to provide him ‘comfort’ during his deployment. 

Provocateur

One of the extended parts of the last six weeks has been the role of Lambert as an agent provocateur, although this may be putting it too lightly in his case. Both Jacqui and Belinda Harvey gave witness testimony alongside multiple other witnesses, that Lambert had foreknowledge, and was one of four Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activists that planned and planted improvised incendiary devices (IID) in different Debenham’s stores as part of an anti-fur campaign (timed devices to go off in the middle of the night, setting off the sprinkler systems and ruining the fur coats). As a result of sprinkler malfunction, a total of £9m damage was caused. Caroline Lucas used her parliamentary privilege in 2012 to name Lambert as a suspect in the planting of the device at the Harrow branch. 

Geoff Shepherd and Andrew Clarke, both of whom spent years in jail for their part in planting devices at the Romford and Luton stores, claim that Lambert was integral and a driving force behind the planning, as well as the person who planted the Harrow IID (although Shepherd was the only one that gave hearing evidence). Paul Gravett gave evidence, admitting for the first time that he was meant to plant IIDs at the same time in the Debenham’s in Reading, but transport delays meant he ended up throwing his devices in the Thames, also states Lambert was the main protagonist and planted the Harrow device. 

Simon Turmaine, Belinda Harvey’s former housemate, who never was an activist, wrote a witness statement before he sadly passed away, that Lambert told him that he had planted the Harrow device. Another activist gave evidence that she was invited to take part but declined and that Lambert had foreknowledge of the event and was the only person that could have been the planter of the IID in Harrow. Operation Herne, an internal Metropolitan Police Service investigation into Spycops, that is now mostly public, interviewed Mike Chitty, an undercover officer in the SDS infiltrating similar groups to Lambert in South London. In his interview with Herne, he stated that Lambert was involved in the planning and execution of the action. Sadly, Chitty now lives in Spain and has not been compelled to give evidence. 

The rebuking of this disparate group of somewhat unconnected individuals’ evidence was the only part of the evidence where Lambert’s memory somewhat returned. But not entirely: there was the small part where no explanation could be sought for a month’s worth of missing reporting preceding the July 1987 action (the rest of the time Lambert wrote about five to ten reports weekly). There was also a lack of explanation as to why Special Branch took the CCTV tapes from anti-terror squad police before they were ever reported to be seen. As with the sexual relationships between Lambert and the women he deceived, Gravett, Shepherd and Clarke (and the activist that declined to join the action) were in their early 20s and much younger than the SDS officer. This was amongst the most serious of allegations levelled at Lambert where he crosses the line between gathering and creating intelligence but by no means the only. 

Lambert’s lies have been vehemently denied over and over by everybody but him. He has been accused of posting or pretending to post an incendiary device through the letter box of a vacated property belonging to a vivisectionist; of driving activists to smash butcher shop windows and leaving one of them to be arrested; and of helping to write and distribute the famous McLibel leaflet, which resulted in the longest trial in English legal history – the SDS then secretly collaborated with McDonald’s. 

He continually conflated the non-violent direct action of the ALF with the prisoner support of the ALF Support Group. He claimed that every social occasion or gathering was part of conspiratorial plotting by the ALF. Right down to inserting other activist names into meetings or as a driver on hunt saboteur actions to replace his own, Lambert seems to drip feed, misdirect and lie more and more, the longer into his deployment he gets. Tellingly, Albert Beale, Martin Lowe and Dave Morris, who were part of London Greenpeace, longstanding members, but more inclined to environmental issues, all remember Lambert as pushing the group more and more fervently towards animal rights and direct actions right from the first meetings that he attended. 

Misdirected 

They also remember him as a charismatic leader. Insinuating his capability to drive an agenda within a group setting, particularly with activists who were a decade younger. In fact, many of the SDS officers took on positions of responsibility in their target groups, giving them access to membership lists, bank accounts and general influence. And this, for me, goes to another key facet that the Spycops scandal embodies.

By using discretionary power, the police become the first fabricating factor in creating social order. For instance, at the national rallies for Palestine, the power given to police to interpret certain symbols and words as criminal, ensures that arrests are made, and entirely peaceful protest can be reported as having been in some way unlawful, discouraging others from taking part and attempting to set the tone of the agenda. In the 1980s animal-rights activity had real momentum. Lambert joined it, was impervious to any oversight, provoked law-breaking behaviour, and ingratiated himself into the lives of the activists around him. 

He cajoled, led and misdirected, creating and recreating conditions around him that are favourable to the undermining of the movement in which he was cosplaying in. In this, he is just like Trevor Morris in the family-justice campaigns and Anti-Nazi League he infiltrated at a similar time, albeit in a more diluted manner behaviourally. Or John Dines, Andy Coles, ‘Christine Greene’ and ‘Matt Rayner’, who also infiltrated the animal rights, hunt saboteur and environmental movements in the following years. Spycops used personal relationships and their lack of any accountability to undermine movements from within. 

Importantly with Lambert, he never received any questioning or repercussions for his actions. Instead he got a promotion to head of the SDS, awards, and an MBE – and the gratitude of the political and corporate establishment. Through Lambert’s deployment, we see the maturing of Frankenstein’s SDS monster from confused and disparate deviant boy to a lawless, career criminal fully grown – one well-placed and protected within the internal security apparatus of the British state. Held as an exemplary ideal of an SDS officer. A tour de force for all others to follow in his footsteps. Well, until now maybe.

And what was it all for? Who was on the right side of history – the spycops or the campaigners they targeted who were opposing the Vietnam war, apartheid, cruise missiles, foxhunting, blacklisting, global warming, and ‘institutionally racist’ policing, and all the other unacceptable injustices that we must all fight against and overcome?

The Undercover Police Inquiry continues with the evidence from Tranche Two (1980s and early 90s), before continuing with Tranche Three in April. Anybody can attend the public gallery to attend. More information can be found via the anti-spycops campaigns, or at https://www.ucpi.org.uk/hearings/.

Many thanks to Kate Wilson and Dave Morris for fact-checking and keeping me on the right side of the Reporting Restriction Orders