UCPI Daily Report, 3 Feb 2026: ‘Monica’ evidence

Tranche 3 Phase 2, Day 2
3 February 2026

On Tuesday 3 February 2026, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) questioned ‘Monica’. In the 1990s she was an activist with Reclaim the Streets. Monica was deceived into a long-term sexual relationship by an undercover police officer who infiltrated the group, HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’.

The UCPI is an independent, judge-led inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales. Its main focus is the activity of two units who deployed long-term undercover officers into a variety of political groups: the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS, 1968-2008) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU, 1999-2011). Spycops from these units lived as activists for years at a time, spying on more than 1,000 groups.

Monica’s evidence was given as part of the UCPI’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’ hearings, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008). She has provided a written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000038662].

Monica has been given a high level of anonymity at the Inquiry. Monica is not her real name, and her testimony was broadcast audio-only, without her face being shown.

Monica was questioned by Sarah Hemingway as First Junior Counsel to the Inquiry. The first 15 minutes of her evidence were not published and cannot be reported due to a restriction order. That is, they are kept secret in order to protect the privacy of those people mentioned.

BACKGROUND

Monica was in her mid-20s when she moved to London in the autumn of 1995. Her boyfriend at the time was already involved in the anti-roads movement and its urban arm, Reclaim the Streets (RTS).

These campaigns sought to challenge the dominance of car culture and shift the balance of urban planning and living back to being more people-centred.

Monica had met her boyfriend at a protest against a new road near where she lived. She moved to London with him, and he took her to an RTS meeting. They were a couple until July 1996, and remained close friends afterwards.

Special Demonstration Squad officer Jim Boyling was deployed undercover from June 1995 to September 2000, infiltrating animal rights and environmental groups, predominantly Essex hunt saboteurs, Earth First!, and RTS.

He started coming to RTS meetings around the same time as Monica, his first police report being filed about the group on 21 November 1995.

Boyling was known to some as ‘Grumpy Jim’. Monica says this wasn’t a proper nickname, but it was nonetheless accurate as he seemed less empathetic than the rest of the group:

‘There is a characteristic that is hard to define that stood out among us, that we kind of recognised in that in him.’

Monica thinks that she and her boyfriend would have seemed kind and welcoming to Boyling, a soft touch for an entry point into the group.

Counsel asks several times about monogamy – whether Monica was monogamous with her boyfriend, whether monogamy was commonplace among RTS activists.

It’s not clear what this is about, unless it’s at the behest of spycops who want to imply that not being monogamous means someone was fair game for the relationships that the Met themselves have already condemned as ‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong’.

Monica says that she and her boyfriend were monogamous, and she wasn’t aware of the relationship status or philosophies of others in the group. It wasn’t something that came up as they were just having one meeting a week about political campaigning, attended by a cross-section of society.

Spycops have said that they had to deceive women into relationships in order to fit in with the group, that men who didn’t have a relationship would have been somehow suspicious. Monica dismisses this completely.

Counsel has Monica spell it out; becoming single in July 1996 did not suddenly make her in any way suspicious, and the same was true of her now ex-boyfriend. The spycops’ excuse is a lie.

She does say that coming to the meetings with a partner who was already known to the group helped her integrate more easily. However, this is not what Boyling did. He was already part of the group when he set out to deceive her.

RTS and allied campaigns brought together a diverse range of people who worked with each other in good faith:

‘I think humans want to trust each other. And groups like Reclaim the Streets at the most central part relied on trust, relied on commitment, being on the same page, wanting to have the same discussions, wanting to raise the same issues.’

RECLAIM THE STREETS

Monica talked about the formation and purpose of RTS. There had been protests at rural sites of new road building schemes since the early 1990s.

Twyford Down in Hampshire had seen the first significant camp occupying the land and taking direct action to obstruct the building work of the new M3 motorway route.

RTS began a couple of years later, around the same time as the protest against the building of the M11 Link Road through East London. It had a lot of the same concerns as the protests about rural landscapes, but also about localised air pollution and the way roads divide communities and bring dangers.

RTS organised ‘street parties’ with an urban street blocked off for an afternoon, cars excluded and replaced by music, celebrations and a carnival-like atmosphere. It was, Monica explained, intended to give a glimpse of how urban space could easily become something much more humane than the car culture allows:

‘You take over a space that’s often divided. People are divided by the car, and you create a different place where different things are possible.

There are banners, there is a sandpit, there are decorations, people are connecting to each other, people are talking. That’s an expression of something that’s different, some way of living that’s different.’

All these movements stemmed from a belief that consumerism was unsustainable and capitalism was an engine of destruction and misery.

The SDS Annual Report of 1996/97 [MPS-0728967] describes this in the exaggerated and sneering terms common to spycop documents:

‘Reclaim the Streets is a group of extremists with the potential and the ambition to cause serious disorder and disruption in London and elsewhere in pursuit of their primary belief that the motor car is evil and their subsidiary belief that big business, the establishment et cetera is also evil.’

Monica felt a strong sense of connection and purpose in her activism and moved into a squat in Hackney with like-minded people.

She said RTS was focused on direct action, which she defines as putting yourself in the way of something harmful or creating something good, rather than having an easily ignored protest march asking others to make changes. She says that some of this was illegal, such as subvertising amendments to billboards.

As for causing ‘disorder’, Monica says it’s a matter of perspective:

‘That desire for the street party was to create a different narrative and to create a different experience of what a road could be, and how roads enclosed people and separated people. How hard it is for someone to cross a six-lane road, that kind of thing.

So you could call that public disorder, but you could also call it an expression of something else. In a way it’s a little bit of both.’

Boyling’s witness statement to the Inquiry is in classic spycop format, describing events and adding exaggeration and lies. As well as blockading roads he claims ‘damaging vehicles and smashing windows was common’. It was nothing of the sort.

TARGETING MONICA

Boyling deceived Monica into a relationship in 1997. Between January and October 1996 he spent more and more time with her, going to pubs together after meetings. She believes he was deliberately targeting her, using the ‘mirroring’ technique that other deceived women have described which makes it feel like extraordinary mutual attraction.

‘I think he was probably behaving in ways that he had been trained, and wanting people to feel comfortable and safe with him, so I did. Because it was rare for me to feel comfortable with people.’

Monica’s mother was gravely ill at the time, and died in April 1996.

Like a large proportion of spycops, Boyling had a vehicle to make him useful to the group. He would generously give people lifts home, thus learning everyone’s addresses and eavesdropping on unguarded conversations.

He also came with a typical spycop backstory of a disturbed childhood. It is a tactic that garners sympathy and trust, and in turn makes people open up to the officer more. He told Monica he was adopted but didn’t want to know who his biological parents were.

At the same time, Monica was going to the Newbury tree protests, where more than 30 camps occupied trees along the nine mile route of a new bypass road around the Berkshire town. From January to April 1996, bailiffs worked to remove the protesters. Monica was at a camp when it was evicted, and was charged with obstruction of bailiffs executing a sheriff’s order.

PARTY ON THE MOTORWAY

On 13 July 1996, Reclaim the Streets held a huge street party on the M41, a mile-long stretch of urban motorway in West London.

Thousands of people came and danced to the sound systems in the sunshine. Several people in huge crinoline dresses provided cover for one of them to shelter a person underneath, drilling up the tarmac and symbolically planting a tree.

Both Boyling and Monica had roles in preparation for the event, though as the planning was secret neither knew what the other was doing.

Monica made banners and décor, Boyling had used his van for the recce to check the site, and also driven supplies to the motorway on the day.

Uniformed police had clearly decided to let the event go ahead rather than create confrontation and chaos with so large a moving crowd. Boyling reported on the event [MPS-0246485] and describes the mood in the crowd as ‘jubilant’.

Monica describes a particular moment:

‘There was a woman in a lovely dress and she was playing a cello and singing Amazing Grace and there was this policeman smiling and joining in with her.

It was a really precious moment because it showed how things could shift and showed how commonality could arise, even if it was just a policy of the day. It was something that has always stayed with me. It was very beautiful and meaningful.’

The Inquiry took a break, during which Tom Fowler discussed the hearing with Kate Wilson, author of Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files:

Boyling’s witness statement to the Inquiry describes himself as one of the main organisers of every RTS action from the M41 street party of July 1996 to the Carnival Against Capitalism event in the City of London on 18 June 1999. A Special Branch note of 12 March 1997 says Boyling is ‘a leading figure’ in RTS with contacts throughout Europe.

However, another RTS activist known as ‘Ruth’ has given a witness statement to the Inquiry rubbishing this. Ruth says there was no explicit formal structure within RTS and Boyling was regarded as a bit of an outsider, and he only maintained proximity to the most active organisers through her. Monica essentially confirms Ruth’s description.

This exaggeration of their position and influence, sometimes augmented with exaggeration of the risk they faced, has been a continual feature of spycops at the Inquiry.

PRIVATE SPIES

The road protesters had been subjected to surveillance by private detective agencies. It was intrusive, intimidating and arguably unlawful. In August 1996, Monica took part in an action against one of the agencies, Pinkerton’s in Richmond. This was to be an ‘office occupation’ where activists enter an office and thus disrupt the working day.

The meeting point the night before had been announced at an RTS meeting. Monica was a bit surprised to see Boyling there. He asked what the plan was, but nobody could give him a detailed answer because there wasn’t one as such. They were just going to walk into the office. Boyling got very irritated at the lack of a formal plan and stormed out. The extremity of his reaction left Monica anxious and agitated:

‘It really affected me… I took it as a personal rejection, as something wrong, I have not done something that I should be doing, and I am responsible and I have to make this work.’

As she tried to enter the Pinkerton’s building, Monica was grabbed by a female employee who pushed her. Monica pushed back. The police were on the scene immediately and she was arrested for causing Actual Bodily Harm.

At the police station, Monica admitted that the workers hadn’t wanted her in the building, and that she’d touched the woman. She agreed to plead guilty to a charge of using violence to enter premises. It’s something that has affected her employment applications ever since.

Asked about the use of political violence, she gives a considered response:

‘I don’t think you can create positive change with violence. I think the only way we can really change ourselves is if we learn to live in peace, but I think that takes a hell of a lot of effort and commitment as a species to find a way to do that.

But violence exists everywhere in our society. It’s how it operates, in many ways.’

Boyling reported on her arrest [MPS-0246565] and said that her home address was ‘even more squalid than the usual squat’, something Monica vehemently denies. It is another example of the general spycop disdain for activists and their denigrating stereotyping of them. Curiously, Boyling does not report on his attending the meeting that he stormed out of the night before the arrest.

Shortly afterwards, a Special Branch report [MPS-0246569] says Monica is to be co-ordinator of a Newbury protest support action on 20 August, but she refutes this. After her arrest she was too shaken to be organising.

STOP THE PARTY

There was an RTS street party in Brighton on 24 August 1996. This one was met with police violence. Boyling’s report [MPS-0246589] says about 800 people were there (though Monica thinks it was less) and that uniformed police confiscated most of the equipment before the event could begin.

This resulted in activists not having a focal point during the day and there were a number of flashpoints around the city, with 80 people arrested. Monica’s ex-boyfriend was one of them, dragged down the street and sustaining injuries to his back.

Boyling added notes to his reports bluntly explaining that allowing street parties to go ahead created a contained space and minimised disruption to the rest of the city, whereas the Brighton response caused chaos. Monica confirms the truth of this.

It’s a perspective further illustrated by Boyling’s report on the Oxford street party on 31 October 1996 [MPS-0246780], at which police simply directed traffic around it. Boyling describes this in cynical terms:

‘It is literally just a street party, devoid of the necessary element of political significance.

Nevertheless, as with all such previous events, it was hailed a success by most of the London Reclaim the Streets contingent.’

Monica takes issue with this sneering, pointing out that creating an alternative space for people to connect in a joyous way, showing how being car-free was better, was the actual point.

On 28 September 1996 there was a protest in Liverpool titled Reclaim the Future. Lots of activists from the RTS and road-protest milieu were showing support for striking Liverpool dockers.

The dockers’ dispute was initially about the overtime pay of five workers who then picketed the docks. Dockers refused to cross a picket line and were sacked. This sparked a wider strike. It was widely understood to be about something more, the de-unionisation of the docks workforce.

Asked about the groups organising Reclaim the Future, Monica has no answers, as by that time she was living at the Fairmile road protest camp in Devon and wasn’t attending London meetings. She stayed at Fairmile until early 1997.

NEVER MIND THE BALLOTS

On her return, she found there were preparations for a major event called Never Mind the Ballots on 12 April 1997, just over two weeks before the general election. Monica remembers it in Trafalgar Square as a street party atmosphere but now, seeing Boyling’s spycop documents she realises the full extent of plans for the day.

A report from Boyling is shown [MPS-0000279], detailing the intention to occupy an abandoned Department of the Environment building for several days and hold workshops and meetings.

Monica hasn’t seen this document before and did not know the plan. She asks for time to read it and becomes emotional, stopping Counsel to explain that it appears to have been a well thought out plan to get people together and consider what the election is compared to what it could be. There was to be a space for people to really get to grips with who controls politics, and how things could be different. It was much more than something for leisure, it was outreach, it was communication to stimulate thought and change.

RTS had produced ‘Evading Standards’, a free newspaper that spoofed the format of the Evening Standard, to be handed out on the day. Police seized all 20,000 copies to prevent those ideas being shared and arrested three activists. These were wrongful arrests and the police later had to pay compensation, but the harm was done and the police can afford it.

Monica says that though the election was about to bring a change in the party of government as Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept to victory, it was just a continuation of neo-liberal capitalism, nothing significant was actually changing and crucial issues continued to be ignored.

She knew that Boyling had been one of the three RTS organisers of the day:

‘It makes me want to cry because, as I say in my statement, Boyling was one of the three main organisers of this and I was really proud of him. I had thought he really stepped up.

But obviously he and the police who employed him made this not happen, and I am angry and upset about that in this moment.

It is heartbreaking, and it is so effective, isn’t it, at limiting the debate and controlling the options, because no one is allowed to actually express anything that is different.’

She remembers Boyling mocking one of the other three organisers for being nervous on the morning of the events. She is now disgusted by this. Unlike the others, Boyling wasn’t an activist who believed in what he was doing, taking risks to try to create a better world. Of course he wouldn’t be nervous, because none of it mattered to him.

Monica had a role herself, creating the flags that would have helped direct some of the marchers to the Department of the Environment building.

A central gathering in Trafalgar Square with a sound system was one of the parts of the wider plan that had been permitted to go ahead. Monica was there and describes a typical positive street party mood for much of the day. Later on though, tensions started to rise. They had been penned in by uniformed police. She saw one person throw something at the line of officers.

Then over by the sound system, for the first time in a long while, she saw Boyling. He told her he was worried that the sound system would not be allowed to leave and would be impounded. She reassured him and held his hand.

The system was allowed egress and the crowd began to disperse. Monica was quite buoyant about the afternoon, but met a friend who’d known more about the failed plans who was disappointed. They went to a pub and she saw Boyling there, who seemed pleased to see her.

THE SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP

Numerous spycops have claimed that it was essential to deceive women into relationships in order to gain credibility and not seem like an oddball. It is nonsense and, as Counsel notes, Boyling had been successfully infiltrating RTS for 18 months at this time without sexually violating anyone.

Yet in his witness statement, Boyling says:

‘It is difficult to sustain the image of a single bloke living alone within activists’ groups, where relationships are made and unmade very easily and almost all activists were in a relationship with another known activist.’

This is simply not true. A significant number of activists don’t have relationships with other activists. Many spycops before and after Boyling successfully completed their deployments without deceiving women into relationships.

Monica looks at it from an additional angle, suggesting that if you can’t do spying without violating women’s bodily autonomy and human rights, then you shouldn’t be spying at all.

She says clearly that it is obviously possible to spy on people without having sex with them, and sex should never be used to bolster an undercover identity.

The evening after Trafalgar Square, she left the pub with Boyling. They sat on a wall and she kissed him. She asked to go home with him and he readily agreed. He went to collect his van then drove them to his one-bedroom flat in East Dulwich. They smoked cannabis mixed with tobacco.

This was a very significant moment for Monica. She had been a heavy smoker from the age of 14, and had recently seen her mother die from a smoking-related illness. She had developed severe bronchitis and had managed to give up at the start of the year, but this smoking with Boyling renewed her addiction.

She says in her witness statement [UCPI0000038662] that she deeply resents him for this, and also for laughing at her for the resulting breathlessness when she ran.

Smoking the cannabis was entirely unnecessary. It was fairly common in those social circles but a large proportion did not indulge. This was just Boyling gratuitously enjoying the criminal perks of the job.

MAKING IT CONTINUE

They had sex, and the next morning cemented it into an ongoing relationship. Counsel again asks if his action was somehow socially necessary, and again Monica says it wasn’t. If he had said he didn’t want a relationship or had a girlfriend or given some other reason not to continue, she would have thought badly of him for not telling her the night before, but it wouldn’t have been a big deal.

Boyling claims he was compelled to start the relationship because she’d kissed him in front of other activists and he would have looked suspicious had he not responded positively. Monica says neither part of that is true:

‘I don’t think I would have kissed him in front of other activists if they had been stood around the pub. I think we were alone. He could have just said, “Look, sorry, love” and for me that wouldn’t have been a big problem.’

She adds that the attitudes in the network were actively supportive of people’s right to be themselves and make their own choices outside of social coercion.

The two of them lived in very different parts of London, so she kept a toothbrush and clothes at his flat:

‘We had an intimate relationship for six months between April and October 1997 and during that period I considered him my boyfriend, as it would have been, and that I saw him regularly.

I went back to his flat after Reclaim the Streets meetings. If I wasn’t going anywhere else or leaving London for any other reason, then I spent time with him.’

Counsel interjects to say that Boyling’s various accounts have been inconsistent, but at its shortest he says the relationship lasted for a few weeks in the summer. In his witness statement [UCPI0000036294] he claims Monica only stayed at his flat on a few occasions, and they probably only had sex about a dozen times. He claims Monica was seeing other people at the time, something she flatly denies.

It really is pathetic of him to try to weasel out of it by downplaying it and truncating the dates. It’s the fact that he deceived her and abused her that’s the problem. Even if his version were wholly true, it doesn’t absolve him of anything.

BOYLING’S WANTON CRUELTY

Many women deceived into relationships by spycops have said that the officer acted as if they were their perfect partner. But Boyling, once his mirroring had ensnared Monica’s affections, did not maintain such a pretence. She describes a nasty side to his treatment of her.

As already mentioned, despite the fact that she had bronchial issues, he laughed at her for her level of physical fitness. She worried about people talking behind her back, and he mocked her for it. She speculated about alien lifeforms coming to help human civilisation and he not only ridiculed but shouted at her for it.

They drove up in his van to the 1997 Earth First! summer gathering in Strathclyde. En route they stopped for the night in the Lake District. Monica woke up cold and told him, but Boyling – toasty warm in his expensive Snugpak sleeping bag – just turned over and left her to it.

Once at the gathering, Monica went to a women’s-only meeting where there was a man in the space which created some debate. Afterward, she discussed it with her supposed boyfriend, Boyling, who, it now appears, deliberately antagonised her:

‘I went back to the van and was talking to him about this, because it had been quite intense. And he just was mocking me about the need to have women’s only spaces, because this man being there had disrupted the space…

I kept trying to explain, earnestly explain, what that meant. Like, from my lived experience in that moment. And he kept just mocking it and going, “should have men’s only spaces”…

You know when you are really trying to explain something to somebody that means a lot to you and they don’t listen and they don’t hear, and actually they keep taking their position in a degrading way?…

I think he was playing with me, in truth, now. I look back at that, I think he was playing with me.’

She says that after finding out the truth about who he was, she had trepidation at the prospect of seeing his police reports about her. He had manipulated her affections but his cruelties at the time had shown he also felt disdain, and the stark reality was something she dreaded:

‘I had been afraid of knowing what he really thought of me, a lot, because I think he had contempt for me. There might have been other things there, but there was contempt.

And there was a sense of me being lesser than him and a bit of an idiot and inferior, because he is this high-profile ever-so-good Metropolitan Police officer.’

ACTIVISM TOGETHER

In her witness statement, Monica says that she and Boyling discussed RTS activities with each other as a couple. She describes him as focused on what was the right direction to take in the movement; he was motivated to organise, take part in actions, and willing to take risks.

About a month after they got together, Boyling filed a report on a court appearance of Monica’s [MPS-0000365]. She had been part of a group who’d visited the home of the Transport Secretary and dug up some grass. She says it was just ‘a publicity stunt’. A similar action had been done before without convictions, so she was surprised that digging up turf and putting it back counted as the offence of criminal damage.

Another month afterward, on 21 June 1997, there was an RTS street party in Bristol. Boyling reported on that [MPS-0000417] and names Monica as one of those attending.

The report includes her Special Branch Registry File number, meaning that she had a ‘live’ file; she had already been reported on a number of times and was considered worthy of ongoing monitoring.

The following week, the couple attended Glastonbury Festival together. Boyling’s witness statement says that Monica slept separately in her own tent, but she says they stayed together in his van.

Again, it appears that Boyling thinks if he can slightly tone down minor details it will somehow make him look like less of a manipulative abuser.

He did lend her a tent later that summer, when she was planning to go to Buddhafield festival in the hope of finding the spiritual strength to overcome her tobacco addiction.

A fortnight after Glastonbury, the couple travelled up to the previously mentioned Earth First! Summer gathering in Strathclyde, held 9-15 July 1997.

In his witness statement, Boyling says he doesn’t remember attending the gathering and says his reporting on it was from second or third hand information. In most of his reports on events he lists ‘Jim Sutton’ as attending, but has not done so for this one.

Monica is certain they were there together. She remembers the sleeping bag incident en route and the women’s workshop argument with great clarity. She suggests that Boyling is seeking to understate his activity and, as he isn’t mentioned in the list of those attending, is trying to get out of it.

Her perspective is reinforced by the fact that the Inquiry has a copy of his managers’ authorisation to travel to the event [MPS-0527813].

Monica was involved in organising ‘Strike Oil’, part of 100 days of action against the oil industry in the run-up to the crucial Kyoto climate change summit where world leaders would try to agree a plan for cutting carbon emissions. Boyling filed a report about it on 3 September 1997 [MPS-000519] and again on 9 September.

The report describes Monica and Jay Jordan as the organisers, which she accepts. Jordan knew of her relationship with Boyling and was surprised by it, telling the Inquiry:

‘”Monica” was a brilliant, politically intellectual, sharp person and Boyling gave the impression of not being interested in politics.’

She thinks perhaps Jordan was more perceptive than she:

‘One of the things that I took at face value of Jim was his being a vegan. I’m quite easily duped and quite naive. I take people at face value. So that had quite a big impact, he’s vegan, he’s “hunt sab Jim”, so he must be in the same place.’

She doesn’t disagree with Jordan’s description of her, but does say that her political abilities didn’t extend to great practical skills, which was something she learned in the Strike Oil process. In the end, the action didn’t go ahead as planned.

The Inquiry took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this summary and analysis video with Jay Jordan:

ENDING THE RELATIONSHIP

In October 1997, six months into her relationship with Boyling, Monica ended it.

‘I think his snidey behaviour, sometimes his way of treating me, was probably having an effect as well, which I think was probably intentional of him.’

A while afterwards, they had a phone call where Boyling was crying and saying that, despite having previously wanted to split up, he was now missing her.

After the split, they met up and she told him about an activist she liked and had sex with. Boyling chose to react by emotionally blackmailing Monica for sex.

‘Anyone who knows him, how he presented, he used to look up with his eyes, his little doe eye things, and he kind of said that would it be all right for him if we had sex. And I didn’t really want to, but because he did, I did.

Because that’s the kind of unconscious aspect of my personality, I tend to do what I think other people want me to do.’

Asked how she felt afterwards, she is very definite:

‘I didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel good. It didn’t feel right.’

She had always sensed a kind of vulnerability in Boyling. It might be him mirroring her feelings back at her, but she suggests that it may be something else instead:

‘I pick things up without knowing. So I think maybe I did pick up on the vulnerability of living a complete lie and betraying everyone that you knew…

It must be incredibly hard to be playing such a game. To not only play the game of being a really well-thought Metropolitan Police officer, who everyone thinks is amazing, but you are also lying to all the people around [you] in order to deceive them.

It’s not a game I could play. It is quite a full-on game, it must feel quite lonely on some level, never to be able to be your real authentic self, whatever that is, with anyone around you. So maybe I picked up on that.’

DISENGAGING FROM RTS

On 24 October 1997, Boyling reported on RTS [MPS-0000601] saying that the Strike Oil plan had been dropped, there was low morale, and a split between the ‘core group’ and the wider attendees of weekly meetings.

Monica doesn’t see it in those terms, saying that any creative group contains clusters of people who bond over shared intent and experience, but this doesn’t necessarily make factions who oppose one another.

Monica says that the huge street party on the M41 in July 1996 had garnered a new influx of attendees at the weekly RTS meetings. There was a common desire to turn this groundswell of enthusiasm into action, but a number of different ideas about how to do it.

It is common among spycops to report in terms of hierarchies, command structures and ranks, describing people competitively jockeying for status and control, even when nothing of the sort is happening. It’s like they take the police’s institutional model and project it on to all groups, unaware that things can actually be done differently.

A week later, on 31 October 1997, Boyling reported [MPS-0000638] that some RTS activists were going up to the site of the planned Birmingham Northern Relief Road (now called the M6 Toll). This would have been somewhat premature as the contract for building hadn’t yet been awarded to any company, and the route wasn’t going to be cleared until 1999.

Monica says it wasn’t a formulated plan, just an idea discussed. She had grown up in the area, she and her father used to walk their dog there:

‘It was a rare space of nature and that road was going through it. So I used to, in my mind and my passion, used to fantasise about protecting that space.’

Her mother had recently died. Monica was struggling with life in London, and contemplating moving back to the area and spending time with her father.

Boyling wrote of the activists discussing the visit:

‘It’s widely presumed that they just want to spend the winter up a tree.’

Monica is disgusted by the arrogance and inhumanity:

‘When I look at it, I think it’s part of my passion being expressed to someone I thought was a close person to me, then being recycled into the sneery intelligence report…

They are in a position where they know things and they also totally believe themselves to be superior to us, hence the term “wearies“, and hence the way they look at us in degrading inferior ways, like the ‘squalid squats’ and all this kind of stuff.’

Also on 31 October 1997, Monica was part of a protest at an open-cast coal mine in Derbyshire. The Inquiry refers to it as Stonebroom, but this is an error in Boyling’s reporting; the site was Doe Hill Quarry, near Tibshelf. Several of those attending wrote reports for Earth First! journal Do Or Die.

Security around the action had been tight: people met at a pre-arranged point, were taken by coach, and the location of the target was only disclosed at the last minute, in person. Boyling’s report sounds impressed, albeit prefixed with an inevitable backhanded swipe:

‘In stark contrast to recent shambolic environmental protests, this was a well-planned and meticulously prepared event.’

Around 200 people occupied the mine, did considerable damage to the mining equipment, and left, all without uniformed police even turning up.

On the coach back to London, Monica sat next to Boyling and fell asleep on him. She asked to stay at his and he agreed. It wasn’t sexual at all, but rather that she felt safe with him and wanted company.

LEAVING, YET SPIED ON ALL THE MORE

Boyling reported on an RTS meeting on 8 December 1997 [MPS-0000730], listing Monica as one of three people who ‘attended but have now been excluded from the group’.

She explains that this is another exaggeration and projection of factionalism. Nobody was excluded, it’s just that there was a section who were up for taking on organisational roles who decided to have separate meetings.

Monica was struggling personally at the time so did not opt to be a part of that. She adds that it was not long after the formation of that group that Boyling deceived ‘Ruth’ into a relationship.

Monica was arrested in early May 1998 as part of a group attempting to squat a former Department of Social Security building in Dalston. As a government location, its alarms were linked to the police, who turned up in large numbers and in a bad mood.

Monica was among those arrested. Two of her comrades were convicted of assaulting police officers, but these convictions were later quashed on appeal when an expert on the Sitex metal screening covering the windows proved that the police’s story, which rested on the squatters impossibly moving the screens, was a lie.

Immediately afterwards, a Special Branch briefing note [MPS-0730815] says RTS activists were seeking locations for future street parties. It lists Monica as one of the North London planning group, gives a lot of personal details including a physical description, and requests further personal intrusive surveillance:

‘As part of Operation Larder, a general lifestyle surveillance of “Monica” would be beneficial. Together with any information concerning her involvement in the planning of the above event, such as the reconnoitring of potential sites and meetings with other environmentalists.’

It appears that, despite becoming less involved in activism, she had become a person of such significant interest that she was assigned her own code name for Special Branch reporting, ‘Perpetual Motion’.

In the summer of 1998, Monica left London and RTS-style activism behind. She had attended a June 1998 street party and felt alienated. Seeking other ways to balance her relationship with herself and do practical good, she turned her focus to meditation and permaculture. Her social circle continued to include a lot of people who had an activist background and had been on many of the same campaigns and protests as her.

Monica is mentioned in two further reports. One, from 1 March 1999 [MPS-0001845], reports that on 23 February activists including Monica had occupied the London offices of Kvaerner, the company that had been awarded the contract for the Birmingham Northern Relief Road.

As that project was especially close to her heart, she had returned to London for the action. The action itself was fairly brief and unremarkable. The report lists her as an organiser, which she doesn’t recall doing at all.

She’s also named as the organiser of a protest for the Justice for Simon Jones campaign, which she wasn’t, she only made a banner.

Again, this is a pattern we’ve seen in reports by other spycops: once an activist is considered to be a key organiser, they have significant roles falsely attributed to them. It’s unclear why this is, unless it’s just a way to for spycops to impress their managers by supplying intelligence on the people that are supposedly the commanders of a movement.

OPENING THE FILE

The Inquiry then brings up Monica’s Special Branch Registry File [MPS-0720800]. An entry dated 2 August 2000 talks about comprehensive enquiries made regarding her, and she’s described as a dedicated and prominent environmental activist.

The file has extensive personal details: her date and place of birth, her parents, and her childhood address. There is a photograph, a physical description, and her current whereabouts. Special Branch have added information from state agencies such as the DVLA, electoral roll, and Police National Computer. The latter lists her sentences for five offences; a caution, two fines, and two conditional discharges.

Monica objects to the phrasing, especially for the first two which were the result of the Newbury Bypass tree protest:

‘I was contextually protecting woodland from being destroyed. So I don’t call that an offence in a way…

I also think that protecting nature or ecology, the living systems of this planet that support all of life, from being destroyed by the voracious need of capitalism to consume all the resources for this unending progress of consumerism, I don’t think that is an offence.’

She also corrects the file’s repetition of her and another person being co-organisers of the Justice for Simon Jones protest. Monica was asked to make a banner and she agreed to do it, that was it.

In her witness statement [UCPI0000038662], Monica expressed her outrage at the fact that the spying extended to her parents:

‘Seeing my dad’s name and job discussed in a Special Branch file has been one of the most impacting things of this whole Inquiry process, and I am very angry about this.

Dad died in 2022, and fortunately I did not have to make a decision about whether to tell him about this invasion of his privacy, owing to this unwarranted characterisation of me as a threat to the British State…

He would never have imagined that my efforts to make the world a better place had led to such intrusion into his life. I am glad in a way that I have been spared having to tell him that he had been abused and violated in this way.’

Seeing her file, Monica is incredulous at the narrow-minded short-sightedness of its authors:

‘It seems that the way we are supposed to think, to not be considered subversive, is quite limited by the MI5, the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police.

It almost feels like we will be spied on if we stand up for justice, or stand up for how we perceive justice to be, whether that is protecting people from having fascists beating them up or protecting the ecological system from destruction.

For wanting to live in different ways that aren’t just as consumers of a capitalist system that serves very few people and serves the people who spy on us and infiltrate us.

So it is a little bit like “this person could still be dangerous or could still be considered to be subversive, because she cares about a living system of the earth which gives her life”.’

She says that the Extinction Rebellion protests were focused on the right issues, but it was depressing to hear the media refuse to listen to the real purpose. She adds that she couldn’t think of participating in anything like that, knowing the truth about Boyling and spycops.

‘It is heartbreaking to see the level of delusion that the human race is acting, the level of sociopathy, psychopathy and narcissism that runs our world and how our voices are still being silenced…

So I live as simply as I can and as kindly as I can and I do my best, because there is nothing else that I can do. But I still have hope.’

IMPACT OF THE TRUTH

Monica says the discovery of Boyling’s real identity was life changing for her personally.

‘It is a patriarchal entitlement fundamentally, if you really look at it. It is like “men have needs” – which is something I know that he said once – and I, my body, doesn’t have an individual right. My human rights don’t exist because I am a woman.

It is such a violation and it is such a cold, calculated way of using people….

It’s such a negation of self, it is a negation of agency, they knew we would not consent, but it doesn’t matter because it serves their cause.’

She expands on this to say that it was also a collective violation of the activists by the police.

When asked about how it impacted her to have an intimate relationship with Boyling, she takes issue with the term:

‘I didn’t have an intimate relationship with him, really. He had sex with me for whatever reasons he did. I thought I had an intimate relationship with him, but I didn’t. I had something else altogether, but I wasn’t aware of it…

Of course he gave no thought for me. I was irrelevant to his startling career, wasn’t I? I was irrelevant to his commendation. I was irrelevant to how well he was doing in infiltrating this group of wearies.’

As the hearing approached its conclusion, Monica was asked if there was anything else she wanted to add.

She says that she was just the first woman Boyling deceived into a relationship. He then moved on to ‘Ruth’, and then to ‘Rosa’ with whom he had two children. That meant abuse on scale far beyond what he did to Monica. And we’re getting answers now not because the police wanted to come clean but because those they victimised did the detective work:

‘I walked away from this car crash. “Rosa” didn’t. And unless the women who were so traumatised by these men suddenly leaving their lives hadn’t tried to look for them, we wouldn’t be here now.

And, actually, if it wasn’t for the fact that it came to light that the Special Demonstration Squad had spied on the Lawrence family, and the Lawrence family had already been through several abuses by the state that it became such a question, we wouldn’t be here now… before that happened, we didn’t count.’

Monica expresses gratitude for the work of the Inquiry, and for the activists reporting on it. Even though she’s been so profoundly violated by a spycop, she’s still shocked at what she’s seen and heard in the hearings, and at the emotional poverty of the officers who appear unable to feel any remorse or even see those they spied on as fully human:

‘They don’t care about anyone else. They don’t have empathy. That’s how it seems. And these are the people who are controlling us. These are the people who are running society.’

NO EMPATHY, FEW CONSEQUENCES

Boyling is the only officer involved in the spycops scandal to lose their job. A tribunal ruled in 2018 that his behaviour in relation to Rosa amounted to gross misconduct and deserved dismissal.

In July 2023, a second police disciplinary tribunal found that Boyling’s abuse of Monica was also gross misconduct, but not to a sackable degree. The key difference seems to be that he identified fellow spycops to Rosa. His abuse of the women was of secondary importance to the tribunal.

Monica’s legal case to challenge the Crown Prosecution Service’s refusal to prosecute Boyling failed, with judges ruling the CPS had acted properly.

It’s clear that the lack of empathy extends far beyond the spycops.

Monica sets the small-heartedness of the spycops and their defenders within the biggest picture:

‘We live in a vast universe beyond measure and we are conscious, and this society is what we do with it? We could be so much more. We could tend the earth, we could garden. We could live in peace.’

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, praised Monica for having the courage to come and face public questioning and thanked her for doing so.

After the hearing ended, Tom Fowler made a summary and reaction video with two former RTS activists, Zoe and Dave: