Bob Lambert’s Second Day at the Public Inquiry

Notorious spycop Bob Lambert is giving evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry every day this week.

We’ll publish detailed reports later, but in the meantime we’re doing quick overviews of the key points every day. Here’s the one for Monday 2 December.

On Tuesday 3 December, Bob Lambert returned to the Inquiry to give more evidence.

The morning’s hearing was streamed on YouTube (and the BBC’s iPlayer). There was a section immediately after lunch which wasn’t, but the remainder of the afternoon is also available on YouTube.

Lambert faced some tough questions from David Barr KC, and we have some observations about how he responded.

Lambert seems to be a man who is used to being in control of a situation, and has developed a range of techniques over the years to help him ‘manage’ and manipulate people.

In Barr he may have met his match: someone who is not into being ‘managed’ and has come up with some tactics of his own. Those targeted by the spycops reported being happy to see Barr go after Lambert ‘like a terrier’. He was noticeably terse with this witness and his pathetic attempts to evade questions.

Some of Lambert’s favoured tactics include:

• speaking extremely slowly, in what may well be an attempt to bore listeners into losing the will to live

• simply repeating the words of the question, going round in a circle, and not actually providing any answers

• using phrases like ‘I don’t recall’, ‘I have no recollection’ and ‘I can’t assist’

• responding positively about the question and telling Barr that ‘Yes, I can answer that…’ but then actually not doing so

• deflecting the question by saying something completely unrelated to it

• choosing what he is prepared to say – usually prefacing this with ‘What I can say is…’

• saying something like ‘I can tell you more about that, if you want me to’ – in the style of someone who’s really hoping the answer won’t be ‘yes please’

• saying he doesn’t want to name anyone because ‘it’s so important to be certain’

• pretending to be a bit deaf and asking Barr to repeat the question, to give him more time to work out how to reply to it

There are probably plenty more; that’s just a few examples.

One highly effective method of evading any question in the Undercover Policing Inquiry is of course to make what’s called a ‘blurt’. This is the legal term for a witness inadvertently saying something that is meant to be kept private – in this case because the Inquiry has put Restriction Orders in place, that are supposed to protect ‘national security’ the ‘public interest’, or in rarer cases, the anonymity, privacy, safety and/or human rights of those involved.

Lambert made his first such ‘blurt’ early on in his evidence on Monday afternoon, in a move that many said smacked of intention – there was nothing inadvertent about it.

Whenever this happens, it completely derails the Inquiry for a while. The live-stream is switched off, usually for far longer than necessary (leaving everyone who’s not in the room in the dark as all they see is a message on screen telling them the hearing is ‘suspended’) and the Chair usually ‘rises’ (another legal term meaning he gets up and leaves the room for a 5-10 minute break).

He did the same thing even more blatantly on Tuesday, when to universal disgust, he chose to weaponise his own son’s anonymity. The activist Lambert had a son with, and the son himself, have both been granted anonymity at the Inquiry. They are known as ‘Jacqui’ and ‘TBS’.

There was no question in any of the witnesses’ minds about his intention here. Lambert was being asked a series of questions about whether the police discussed informing ‘TBS’ about his true parentage. He was asked if he thought TBS was entitled to know the truth about his parentage, and said he had ‘never been asked this before’. It was clear he did not have his answer prepared.

Witnesses say his speech became more erratic than usual, and he made ‘funny noises and no sense’, immediately before turning with a big smile and after a pause, very clearly saying ‘we did discuss…’ and announcing TBS’s real name out loud to the entire room.

‘TBS’ and his mother ‘Jacqui’, did not find out Lambert’s true identity from him, or the Metropolitan Police, but from the media and from other victims of the spycops’ operations.

There is very little sign of the articulate, charismatic, persuasive Bob that so many previous witnesses have described. However we saw flashes of this more animated version of himself just once: he came across as very keen to talk about the conduct of one former colleague, and blame him for all sorts of things (sexist reporting, bad tradecraft and other mistakes).

This was Mike Chitty, a man who we know Lambert came to blows with on at least one occasion. Chitty sued the police for the post traumatic stress he suffered as a result of his deployment. By this time Lambert was an SDS manager, extremely loyal to the unit and tasked with dealing with this disgruntled ‘dissident’ former spy.

As detailed in the book ‘Undercover’, Lambert spent 18 months pretending to befriend Chitty while at the same time writing a confidential report about him. It is clear that there is absolutely no love lost between these two men, and it’s a pity that Chitty is not planning to engage with this Inquiry.

At the age of 73, Lambert seems keen to play the part of a doddery, frail, aged man, whose faculties are lacking. As the Undercover Research Group have helpfully pointed out, he is still fit and very active, regularly taking part in his local park run and achieving good timings. in the 30-odd 5k runs he’s done this year.

We note that Mitting is much older, but does not appear to be impressed with the man’s character. He intervened at one point, wanting to pin down exactly who in the Met was involved in dealing with Jacqui’s discovery. We can only hope that he won’t be taken for a fool.

On his part, David Barr has been increasingly efficient at dealing with Lambert’s feigns, and snappily suggesting that he write names down whenever he acts unwilling to say them out loud. He’s used Lambert’s own words against him many times, and seems to relish reading them out loud from reports and from old interviews conducted with Lambert for Operaton Herne, the Met’s internal spycops investigatoin in 2013.

He asked some incisive questions, for example, about the source of TBS’s child maintenance payments. Lambert was obviously unwilling to admit that he used police ‘expenses’ to make relatively small payments to the mother of his son.

Barr was not pulling any punches with his most direct questions, such as: Why didn’t you just stop having sex with members of the public? Couldn’t you control yourself? Did you ever question, seven months into your deployment with two sexual relationships and one pregnancy, whether you should continue to be an undercover police officer?

It was noted that despite saying this was his ‘first opportunity to apologise’ to both ‘CTS’ and his first wife, Lambert has failed to actually do so. It’s disingenuous to pretend that he couldn’t possibly have reached out and apologised to them at any point before this, in the thirteen years since his identity was uncovered by activists.

He’s admitted to having had unprotected sex with an overlapping series of much younger women (whilst cheating on his wife), all of whom he accepts would not have consented had they known he was a police officer.

He smirked as he spoke about the way he was able to influence ‘Jacqui’ and her activism. It’s clear that he considered her ‘valuable’ to his mission, but despite claiming to care about her well-being, has consistently disregarded or ‘’forgotten’ many important details about her life and experiences.

At the same time he likes to claim that he was never ‘sexist’ or ‘misogynist’ during his stint in the SDS. His disdain and disrespect for women shines brightly throughout almost everything he says. It’s clear that he comes from a police culture of deeply ingrained institutional sexism, and will never shake off his loyalty to it.

That loyalty was most evident when he was asked to specify which managers were part to which conversations, and who knew about his transgressions, his sexual relationships, ‘Jacqui’s’ pregnancy and ‘TBS’s’ birth.

Almost every single word he has said was carefully considered and calculated, and no-one, not even Barr, believed that it was a coincidence when he finally consented to name those managers, and all the names he dropped were of officers who are deceased. He insisted no living manager had any idea what was going on.

We wait with interest to see what he will say next, on Wednesday 4 December.