‘A basic rule of government is never look into anything you don’t have to, and never set up an inquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be.’

This was the advice of permanent secretary Sir Humphrey Applebey in the 1980s satirical political sitcom Yes Minister, in response to the Prime Minister explaining his concern about British arms deals to terrorists and his wish to investigate further. Sir Humphrey’s comments feel particularly resonant for those of us involved in the real Public Inquiry into Undercover Policing currently being chaired by Sir John Mitting.

When in 2015 then Home Secretary Theresa May established the public inquiry into the wrongdoing by undercover police officers – colloquially known as ‘spycops’ scandal – she clearly felt she had no choice. The revelations of sexual abuse of women activists by undercover police, the spying on family justice campaigns including the Lawrence family, and the practice of stealing the identities of dead children to create fake persona for the spies proved too shocking a public story for parliamentarians to ignore. Perhaps she and those who advised her to set up this inquiry believed, as Sir Humphrey suggested, that they knew in advance what its findings would be. Perhaps they hoped to control the narrative: agree to all anonymity requests by the police; place great emphasis on the importance of secrecy to protect both police officers’ privacy and the security of the nation; hang individual officers out to dry whilst promoting the importance of undercover policing as a tactic; exploit the inevitable bureaucratic delays and drag it out for years so those who are most invested either give up the fight or die.

Their problem, however, is that for those of us who contributed to this scandal being exposed in the first place we won’t give up. For us, it’s personal.

A few weeks after my boyfriend Mark Cassidy disappeared from my life in Spring 2000, I started to suspect he had been some sort of state spy. I had been involved in a political campaign group in Hackney that he’d joined five years earlier in 1995 called the Colin Roach Centre, an independent group that had exposed police corruption in the early 1990s and promoted trade union, anti-fascist politics. I’ve told my story in the book Deep Deception, written with some of the other women who first discovered and then exposed this appalling secret state abuse. Our experiences, like those of more women who later found out that they too had been victims of these undercover police deployments, followed a pattern. The police call it tradecraft. We call it violation.

These men ingratiated themselves into our lives by mirroring our passions, presenting us with their easy-going alter egos, and cultivating our hopes and dreams of a shared future. For many of us we were robbed of our most fertile years and when they executed their pre-planned exit strategies – usually in the style of a well performed emotional breakdown – we were left devastated and confused. When Mark left his final note on the kitchen table explaining he wasn’t coming back, I needed answers. It was my quest for these answers that ultimately led me to exposing his true identity as police officer Mark Jenner who had been married with children throughout our entire five-year relationship.

The public inquiry has been organised chronologically in tranches. The first tranche, covering deployments into political groups between 1968-1982, ended in February 2023 and was followed by an interim report published in June 2023. We welcomed some of the findings of this report. For example, Inquiry chair Sir John Mitting accepted our arguments about the unreasonable level of intrusion into lives of members of the public and the likelihood that officers had been guilty of trespass when they entered private homes illegally without a warrant. Furthermore, he concluded that by the end of this period – that is, the early 1980s – the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) should have been disbanded: ‘had the use of these means been publicly known at the time, the SDS would have been brought to a rapid end’. For those of us campaigning to draw public attention to these human rights violations by undercover police in order for such abuse to never happen again, this was a real victory. It felt like an important acknowledgment that from its early days in the 1970s, the SDS’s spying could not be justified. And yet it continued for 40 more years.

Given the apparent shared understanding between those running the public inquiry and those participating as non-state witnesses as to the unjustified nature of these spying operations, many of us have been surprised to learn that Tranche 2 hearings are being approached almost as if this interim report had not been written. In other words, the issue of ‘justification’ is back on the table to the extent that Sir John has explained he will make findings of fact regarding serious criminal allegations about members of the public based on police reports from the time. The focus, therefore, appears to be shifting from the actual wrongdoing of the police to the alleged wrongdoing of members of the public based on allegations made by the very officers under investigation.

The argument seems to be that whilst Sir John accepts that the sexual violation of women activists is not acceptable, the presence of the undercover police officer in a woman’s life might be justified if he judges she was guilty of a serious crime. When agreeing to participate in this inquiry, members of the public did so in order to make sure lessons were learnt, to prevent any repetition of the serious human rights abuses committed by these units and to learn the truth about the officers spying on them and to expose the murky underbelly of the British secret state. No-one signed up for being found guilty of criminal allegations based on the reports written by trained liars who were seeking to justify and continue their own existence as a unit. Knowing these reports were to be shared with Box 500 – that’s M15 to you and me – officers appear to have submitted exaggerated and misleading reports filled with hearsay and gossip about supposedly violent and volatile political activists. If staff at Special Branch and MI5 who sifted through these reports at the time did not feel it appropriate to share these allegations with the Crown Prosecution Service in order to bring charges against those alleged criminals, then how can it be acceptable for an inquiry Chair to pass judgement decades later? It is simply not what this inquiry is meant to be about. To make matters worse, many activists have still not been provided with all the reports written on them, despite being asked questions about the allegations made against them. The same reports have nevertheless been supplied to former police officers two or three years ago. To many activists affected, this feels like an attempted cover up, preventing them from having an equal opportunity to see and comment on the material being used against them.

Starting this July and covering deployments between 1982-1993, Tranche 2 will include evidence from a range of officers guilty of violating the human rights of women activists. For those who have been following this scandal from the outset, it includes some of the more well-known cases such as Bob Lambert, John Dines and Andy Coles: Lambert deceived at least four women into sexual relationships and even fathered a child with one of them. Dines subjected Helen Steel to prolonged emotional and psychological abuse during their relationship; Coles lied about his age (32) when he made his advances towards 19-year-old ‘Jessica’ and is now denying the relationship took place. What these men all have in common – apart from their obvious misogyny – is an arrogance that led them to believe that despite their years undercover they could nevertheless go on to take up public facing roles pontificating about matters of policing, security and intelligence. Lambert lectured on counter-terrorism at London Metropolitan, Exeter and St Andrews Universities, Dines was involved with the Charles Sturt University’s policing programme in New South Wales, Australia, whilst Coles became a Conservative party councillor on Peterborough City Council and deputy police and crime commissioner for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. The idea that these men’s undercover experience, a significant part of which involved violating the bodily autonomy of women activists, qualified them to train or advise others is sickening.

I have been involved in this campaign since 2011, soon after ‘Lisa’ unmasked Mark Kennedy, when eight of us first met with lawyer Harriet Wistrich and we started working to bring our legal challenge against the Metropolitan police. I’ve still received no disclosure as to why Mark Jenner was in my life and I have to wait until 2025 for Tranche 3 (covering the years 1993-2007) before I hear his evidence first hand.

Despite having little faith in the judge who oversees the inquiry, like many others I continue to participate. With those involved in our campaign group Police Spies Out Of Lives, I will keep trying to draw public attention to the misogynistic, human rights abuses perpetrated by these policing units so this cannot happen again to other women.

Instead of that task getting easier, however, new legislation passed in 2021, has made things more difficult. Rushed through parliament during the Covid years, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources [CHIS] (Criminal Conduct) Act, places no limits on what state spies can be authorised to do. Criticism of the Bill by the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights Legislative Scrutiny report from 2020 was ignored; it stated: ‘The lack of limits on the use of Criminal Conduct Authorisations risks the human rights of victims … being violated.’ In its current form, this Act enshrines in law the very wrongdoing and criminality we have been fighting to legislate against. Despite the College of Policing’s guidelines for undercover operatives, there is still no law that specifies sexual relationships between CHIS and members of the public are prohibited. Without this specificity, interpretation of the law can be warped by institutional prejudice and discrimination.

As it stands, state operatives are officially above the law. A society that allows for authorised sexual offences and even torture and murder is one that is brutalised and desensitised to violence and which has no respect for human rights. A key element of our campaign work, therefore, is to call on opposition parliamentarians to commit to reforming this regressive legislation. We welcome all the support we can get to enable this progressive change.