Tranche 3 Phase 2, Day 1
2 February 2026

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) resumed for a new set of hearings on Monday 2 February 2026. Designated as ‘Tranche 3 Phase 2’, these hearings examine the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad (1993-2008).

This opening day was devoted to questioning Joe Batty, a trade unionist, socialist and anti-fascist activist who was spied on by undercover police officer HN104 Carlo Soracchi, cover name ‘Carlo Neri’, who was deployed 2000-2006.

Batty has provided a written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000037742].

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.

Batty was questioned by Tim Salisbury, Deputy First Junior Counsel to the Inquiry.

BACKGROUND

Batty grew up in Greater Manchester in the 1970s and was first politicised by the National Front leafleting his school. He and some friends made counter-leaflets to distribute to pupils. He went to some Anti-Nazi League meetings but did not become a member or activist with any group at the time.

As a young adult, he got a supermarket job and joined the GMB, as membership of the union was mandatory at his workplace. This involvement drew him to socialist politics and he became a GMB branch president, representing workers in disputes and negotiating with employers and government officials.

He went to Oxford University’s Ruskin College, and on to the University of Kent for a degree in British labour history and modern politics. While there, he became friends with Dan Gillman, who gave evidence to the Inquiry in November 2025.

The pair held office in the university’s Labour Club and significantly built up its membership. They also organised coach travel to the large demonstration against the British National Party (BNP) in Welling, South London, on 16 October 1993. Batty and Gillman took responsibility for stewarding the people they’d brought to the protest.

In response to the rise in far-right activity, including attacks on local people, they created Kent Anti-Fascist Action Committee:

‘When I was at Ruskin College and at the University of Kent, I studied fascism. It wasn’t something new to me. I understood what it meant.

I also understood the history of fascism in the UK and what it had done over the historical period. So it was natural that I would want to make sure that it didn’t go off the political agenda.’

In 1993, Batty began working in homelessness, first in Cheltenham and then in London. He remained an active trade unionist, and also helped Youth Against Racism in Europe with stewarding of meetings and protests.

Over the next couple of years, fascist activity died down, yet Batty did not reduce his antifascist activity:

‘Myself and Dan and others recognised that history tells us when the far right is no longer successful electorally, it retrenches to violence.

You know what, I hate to say I am right, but that’s literally what they did, with the bombings that Copeland and his cohort – because I don’t believe he acted alone – were involved in.’

NO PLATFORM

At the end of the 1990s, Batty helped to found No Platform. As we’ve heard so many activists do at the Inquiry (with debatable levels of success), Batty explained that it was wrong to think of his group as a formal organisation:

‘There were about a dozen people or so who may have been the mainstays of it, but it really wasn’t a static organisation with cards and the constitution.

So we drew from people who were interested in being involved in one thing and one thing only, and that was stopping the far right having control of communities in the streets.’

These people had a variety of social backgrounds and political perspectives, united by that sole criterion.

We’re shown a police report by Carlo Soracchi [MPS-0003710], dated 1 August 2000:

‘Frank Smith, a member of the Socialist Party away team has helped to form a new anti-fascist organisation entitled No Platform. The group comprises disaffected members of London Anti-Fascist Action and members from the away team…

The aim of the group is to provide a powerful stewarding arm for left wing public order protests and to undertake the targeting of right wing individuals.’

For so few words, this elicits quite a lot of unpacking by Batty. Firstly, it shows that the spycops, even more than the Inquiry, can only think of groups as regimented and hierarchically structured institutions with official membership. This is not how most activist groups work.

Batty flatly rejects the allegation of targeting right-wing individuals. He also questions the use of ‘away team’ as denoting a formal group, saying it’s only become familiar to him recently from seeing the paperwork at the Inquiry. It was a loose term used occasionally to describe event stewards, yet spycops talk like it was some defined loyal gang of hardened hooligans.

Batty adds that there were indeed some people in No Platform who’d done Anti-Fascist Action work, but ‘disaffected members’ is another inaccurate description.

The group was named No Platform after an existing strategic understanding, aiming to deny the far right legitimacy by preventing them from speaking on public platforms or becoming part of the regular discourse.

STOPPING THE FASCISTS GATHERING

Batty gives examples of the work: shutting down gigs of fascist bands, and occupying the ‘redirection points’ where fascists met prior to going to meetings at secret locations.

He says there would be ‘handbags at paces’ – posturing and taunting – but he doesn’t remember any physical violence.

Often the police would see potential conflict and clear the area entirely, which No Platform were happy about as it meant the fascists couldn’t meet up.

He stresses that they wanted to avoid violence as it would be counterproductive in a community they were trying to defend, and to make it clear that the fascists were the troublemakers.

Simply by turning up at the secret meeting point, No Platform made it apparent to the fascists that they had informers in their midst. This sowed distrust and helped the groups to disintegrate.

Batty is emphatic that these tactics prevented the spread of far-right activity. He points out that when anti-fascists stopped being active in Barking and Dagenham there was a groundswell of far-right support and soon afterwards a BNP presence on the local council, leading to a concerted effort by the party to get their leader Nick Griffin elected there.

He adds that the majority of No Platform work was just stewarding events and involved no confrontation at all.

Batty worked with No Platform on about thirty events over the space of five years until he left London around 2005. The work would generally involve being aware of meetings or protests that might be attacked by fascists and making sure that they had proper stewarding to ensure things happened safely.

Soracchi joined the stewarding groups and befriended Batty. Soracchi’s witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000035550] describes Batty as the ‘main organiser’ for both No Platform and the Socialist Party away team. Batty says the latter is absolutely untrue.

As for Batty’s position within No Platform, a Soracchi report [MPS-0010730] says that Gillman has stepped down and Batty is now its ‘leading activist’. Batty again highlights the fundamental misunderstanding in the phrase, and explains that there was no leadership at all, just people who were consistently available, organising together.

The Inquiry showed a spycop report, presumably Soracchi’s [MPS-0005753], about an anti-fascist counter-demonstration in central London on 14 April 2001:

‘Current No Platform tactics are to locate the meeting point for fascists and then to attack them before they get anywhere near the location of the march.’

Batty hasn’t seen the document before. With the Inquiry now rushing, it is no longer providing witnesses with all the relevant documents, and it has started hearing evidence even though the hearing bundles are incomplete, undermining the potential for getting considered answers.

Batty takes issue with the report’s incendiary terms, saying that they would go to disrupt the meet-up by being at the meeting point, but this is a long way from ‘attacking’, something he declares impossible anyway as No Platform would have only had a dozen people at most.

Some of No Platform’s information about fascist activity came from Searchlight, a group that specialised in gathering intelligence about the far-right.

This exchange was done on an informal basis, though Soracchi’s reports [MPS-0009903] characteristically misrepresent it as being much more formal, as if Batty and Smith had organised delegations to some kind of Searchlight briefing meetings, and furthermore [MPS-0010590] were ‘relishing’ the prospect of going to occupy fascist meeting points.

Batty is clear that the work was not something done with glee or as a fun leisure activity:

‘That would make you sound like you were waiting and willing for some sort of action and that we were addicted to fighting with the fascists. I have to tell you, I have never been particularly a great fan of fighting with anybody.’

EXAGGERATION OF VIOLENCE AND DANGER

After Soracchi’s deployment ended, he compiled a timeline of his activity [MPS-0071194]. In it, he described how No Platform would put stickers and posters up in an area where fascists were present, and would then target fascist election canvassers.

Once again, Batty recognises some of the descriptions but rejects Soracchi’s claims of deliberately seeking aggression and violence. This isn’t just a No Platform principle or about trying to avoid arrest and its impacts on employment and personal lives; he points out that it would be counter-productive too:

‘If we were to engage in assaulting candidates, that would then turn into a huge political issue that would, I am sure, garner sympathy for the very people we were campaigning against. So as a tactic, it’s just not right.’

Pressing the point, Counsel shows another Soracchi report that the Inquiry had failed to disclose to Batty in advance, dated 18 June 2001 [MPS-0006121]. It specifies a plan to target the BNP in Bethnal Green. Batty is aghast and dismayed:

‘I don’t know where to begin with this statement. I don’t know where he comes up with this sometimes. I mean, I spent literally hours with Carlo… talking through the political processes as to why violence of this ilk is just counter-productive…

The legitimate process, which I have said time and time again now, is occupying spaces for a defensive purpose to enable the community to feel safe and to enable us to feel safe about going about our business.’

He explains that attacking fascist candidates’ homes would provoke retaliation on their own homes. It would create more fear and violence in the community, the exact thing that they were seeking to dispel.

He points out that part of Soracchi’s backstory was that he’d been involved in the Italian Red Brigades, a group notorious for kidnappings, kneecappings and other serious crime. Batty and others had repeatedly explained to Soracchi that such things have no commonality with the British socialist movement.

Counsel asked about No Platform’s disruption of the BNP’s ‘Red White and Blue festival’ in 2001, a neo-Nazi event held on BNP leader Nick Griffin’s land in Wales [MPS-0006469].

No Platform did not intend to attack the event in any way (apart from anything else, they were outnumbered and they feared the violent neo-Nazi group Combat 18 would be providing security). The plan was simply to picket the entrances, to show that there was opposition to fascism that would be present wherever fascists gathered.

They didn’t manage it because they were turned back by police. Batty is scathing about this acceptance of fascist action with the police stymieing opposition. There were racist attacks and bombings in London, and the BNP spawned National Action, a group that was eventually proscribed under the Terrorism Act, yet the police targeted the antifascists.

The Inquiry took a break, during which Tom Fowler made this video of summary and analysis with Dan Gillman:

Early in his undercover deployment, Soracchi shared a flat in Homerton with another SDS officer, HN77 ‘Jackie Anderson’. Soracchi says that his comrades believed he and ‘Anderson’ were in a relationship, but Batty has no memory of her at all. Anderson was deployed 2000-2005, infiltrating anarchist groups such as the W.O.M.B.L.E.S. and Earth First! (EF!), and worked alongside NPOIU officer Mark Kennedy.

Both EF! and the W.O.M.B.L.E.S. have applied to be included as core participants in this Inquiry, but so far that has been refused. It seems that neither the police nor the Inquiry have been able to contact Anderson at all since the Inquiry began.

FIRST CONTACT

Soracchi’s deployment timeline [MPS-0071194] records that he first made contact with Batty and others on an asylum seekers’ rights march in central London in June 2000.

Batty’s first memory of Soracchi is a social visit to the second flat Soracchi had while undercover, on Narrow Way in Hackney.

Whistleblower spycop HN43 Peter Francis has described how, before being deployed, an officer would be briefed on particular people they wanted to get close to. These people would often be respected activists, targeted because their acceptance of the spycop would make others in the group more likely to be immediately welcoming and trusting.

The briefing would include details of the targeted person’s personal taste outside politics. By pretending to share their interests, likes, and dislikes, the spycop manipulated an instant bond of affinity into existence, encouraging friendship beyond being just another comrade.

Over the course of the Inquiry and in the books written by women deceived into relationships, we’ve seen a lot of evidence that this was standard spycop tradecraft.

Batty says he initially bonded with Soracchi over a shared passion for cycling, and Soracchi had a bike on a trainer treadmill in his flat.

Soracchi was a welcome addition to the social group and their stewarding of events:

‘Having a steward on a demonstration who is, you know, heavy and heavily set, is an asset because you don’t want the group to be attacked. So it’s another barrier between us and trouble.’

We moved on to a report by Soracchi from nearly 18 months later, 26 November 2001 [MPS-0007391], in which he describes a No Platform meeting and names ten people and their formal roles in the organisation.

He is not only, yet again, making it sound much more formal and rigid than it really was, he also lists himself as having been appointed as ‘volunteer to assist with communications’.

Batty is baffled by it, saying that the meeting happened but that the details are wholly false.

THE INDISPENSABLE DRIVER

Batty adds that Soracchi did have a specific responsibility for transport, as he was the only person there with a large, reliable vehicle.

This too is standard spycop tradecraft. Sometimes (as with Soracchi) it was an estate car, but more commonly it was a van. This was SDS practice as early as HN354 Vince Miller ‘Vince Harvey’ who was deployed in 1976, and it continued all the way through to EN12 Mark Kennedy ‘Mark Stone’ (2003-2009). HN2 Andy Coles was so useful with his that he was known among those he spied on as ‘Andy Van’.

Activists were generally not well off, so a dependable functioning vehicle was very useful. The driver would be the one of the first to be told about any plans for which travel was needed. They would pick people up and drop them off, thus learning all the home addresses.

More than one SDS officer deliberately dropped a target off last in order to spend time alone with them and get more information. HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’ did that with ‘Jacqui’, and other officers are also known to have done this as a way of initiating intimate and sexual relationships.

Beyond all this, having a vehicle and being involved in logistics gave spycops a subject to talk about in detail that didn’t require any political understanding.

Batty says Soracchi was diligent about attending meetings, which were then reported on, but less motivated to attend events. As the group was so small, around a dozen pepople at most, Soracchi inevitably helped to influence and steer its direction.

Soracchi’s written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000035550] claims that the groups he spied on were criminal, including committing Actual Bodily Harm and Grievous Bodily Harm. Batty rejects this outright.

Counsel seemingly enjoys collecting rebuttals on the exact same topic and returns to a report of Soracchi’s [MPS-0010730] which claims Batty wants to make No Platform into a secret terrorist organisation:

‘Batty is aware that London No Platform needs a successful public action to attract numbers to the group, but is very much taken by the notion of a small committed cadre carrying out raids ‘in the living rooms’ of the far right.

He is aware that the state might well regard such acts as terrorism and react accordingly, but the recent rise in popularity and street presence of the extreme right wing might, he believes, leave anti-fascists with no other option.’

Batty patiently reiterates to Counsel that not only is it untrue but – as he’d also explained to Soracchi at the time – on a tactical level it would undermine the purpose of the group because such activity invites reaction in kind, including attacks on his and his comrades’ families, something he wanted to avoid at all costs.

‘It is just a nonsense. It looks like he’s justifying his placement within No Platform and within the left wing in general.

I really don’t recognise that statement and I take offence at it being written about me.’

THE COCK TAVERN INCIDENT

Counsel moved on to discuss a series of Soracchi’s reports. The first of these was about disorder at The Cock Tavern on 16 December 2000. It was a venue used by the left wing and the Irish community, and the National Front held a demonstration at it.

Batty describes a callout among left wing and antifascist groups who had a sizeable turnout outside the pub. Temporary steel barriers separated them from the fascists over the road, with police ensuring the two were kept apart.

Batty is clear that this wasn’t some kind of difference of legitimate opinion, but rather one group that was seeking to destroy community cohesion, challenged by another that felt a civic duty to defend the community from hatred and division.

Batty and around ten others went round the back of the fascists, intending to create a noise and make the police feel it was too difficult to keep the fascists isolated and so make them disperse.

He’s clear that they weren’t going to attack in any way as there would be hardened fascist thugs present as well as police. The plan worked.

Soracchi has said he was there, but Batty is pretty sure that’s not true. A spycop report from Soracchi’s information [MPS-0004904] says Batty was ‘satisfied’ with the event because of the ‘attack’ on the fascists. He corrects the version again – ‘attack’ has a number of meanings and implies physical interaction, which wasn’t the plan and did not happen.

The police did arrest a number of antifascists, but none were convicted and one received compensation from the Met for wrongful arrest.

However, the personal details of those arrested were published in far-right journal The Flag. The only way this could have happened was that someone with fascist sympathies at the police station took the information and passed it on.

This is not the first time we have heard evidence of the police passing anti-fascist activists’ details to the far right. Activist Mark Metcalf told the Inquiry how he provided a bail address that was a school, which later appeared in a far-right newspaper even though the only people who could possibly have that address for him were the police.

MORE LIES

Counsel shows another Soracchi report that they failed to disclose to Batty in advance [MPS-0005529]. It’s about No Platform’s response to the BNP standing for election in Beckton, East London, in March 2001. Soracchi reports that No Platform were going to attend the vote count:

‘Activists are intending to single out the British National Party security team for attack.’

Batty is now weary of repeating the same point:

‘I have explained already pretty much ad nauseam that we are not against the electoral system, we are against the far right, and we wouldn’t attack anybody standing in an election.

There was instances of the far-right attacking canvassers in Barking and Dagenham and it was really not a good look.

It doesn’t help the legitimate candidates who are standing to have people who often are supporting them beating people up in front of the count. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not what we would do.’

Batty does recall a separate occasion where antifascist leafleters bumped into BNP canvassers. They had a verbal exchange but nothing physical. And certainly, it was not a premeditated ‘attack’ of the kind that Soracchi repeatedly claimed they were planning.

Moving on to two documents that refer to No Platform in the Bradford Riots of July 2001 [MPS-0006264 and MPS-0029169], Batty explains that while there were people in Bradford using the name of No Platform, they weren’t a branch of a national organisation. There was no ownership of the name, it was used by anyone of roughly the same standpoint.

In March 2001, Batty and several friends went for a couple of sessions at a gym, Batty reviving an earlier interest in boxing. They only went a couple of times and it did not become a habit. Despite this, Soracchi reported on it through his ever-present lens of imagined political violence [MPS-0005536]:

‘The group has been in training for the past four weeks and believes it will be useful in any confrontation with the fascists.’

Soracchi reported [MPS-0527773] that Batty and Dan Gillman had invited him to accompany them to a Socialist Party event in Leuven, Belgium in July 2001, and then go on to Genoa in Italy to join large protests against the G8 summit. Soracchi, unusually, specifically says the group did not intend to get involved in any confrontation in Genoa.

But Batty says that he wouldn’t have been able to go for any reason. It was hard enough to get time off work for the Leuven trip, an extra week would not have been possible for him even if he’d wanted it.

DEFENCE IS NO OFFENCE

The Inquiry showed Soracchi’s quarterly review for the end of 2001 [MPS-0007737] which describes the target group:

‘No Platform was formed in late 2000 and is in effect a coming together of militant anti-fascist street fighters whose common link is the willingness to carry out violent assault on individuals or groups belonging to the extreme right wing.

Although activists are drawn from differing strands of the far left and anarchist tradition, they are united in the belief that violent confrontation is a key strategic element in beating fascism.

To that end, No Platform has on a number of occasions in the past year put that belief into violent action against members of the National Front and also police officers acting to prevent disorder.’

Batty totally rejects this description, both of No Platform and of himself personally:

‘I have already said it previous times. This is always a defensive action. The way it is being worded “street fighters”, “militant”, “attacking”, “far left”. I never considered myself far left. I never considered myself a street fighter. I never considered I was particularly militant…

I don’t understand where this sort of characterisation comes from. Unless you are trying to legitimise an ongoing situation of undercover policing when you can’t actually report on anything of substance.’

He adds that none of them were ever arrested for anything like this, which would be very odd if they really were a group who were running about maiming police officers.

It’s notable that Soracchi, like many spycops before him who made stuff up, says his group has been involved in serious crime yet is unable to provide specific examples.

Jumping ahead to 27 October 2003, Soracchi reported on No Platform’s supposed plans for the protests against the visit of US President George W. Bush [MPS-0029555]:

‘They see the visit as the first opportunity in a very long time for a situation where mass public disorder can develop.

Most of the group are not strangers to protests of this kind and have experience of being able to agitate and aggravate a developing situation.

Joe Batty and Frank Smith are particularly good in these situations.’

No Platform weren’t relevant to Bush’s visit. On the day, Batty and others stewarded the Socialist Party section of the protest. In stark contrast to Soracchi’s fanciful imaginings, it all went off peacefully.

Batty adds that the only times he’s seen real violence on a protest were the Poll Tax protest of March 1990, and the anti-BNP march in Welling in October 1993. He adds that both of these demonstrations were turned into riots by police action.

Finally on this topic, we were shown a document authorising the continuation of Soracchi’s deployment [MPS-0526932]. As one might expect from something that decides whether he could continue in the role he enjoyed, Soracchi employed some extra-special made up exaggeration, referring to ‘leading Antifa activist Joe Batty’.

DECEIVING WOMEN INTO RELATIONSHIPS

Counsel then moved on to what Batty knew of Soracchi deceiving women into relationships.

In 2001, Soracchi initiated a relationship with ‘Lindsey’. Batty knew Lindsey beforehand, and thought of her as personable and intelligent. She was a Socialist Party member but was not involved in No Platform.

He remembers the relationship going on for some time, and that it was certainly known to the wider social group.

He became concerned at Soracchi’s poor treatment of Lindsey towards the end of the relationship. He spoke to Soracchi about it repeatedly and at length at the time – of course, being wholly unaware of the truth. Lindsey is due to give evidence to the Inquiry on 25 February 2026.

In September 2002, Soracchi was stewarding an anti-war march where he met Donna McLean. As with Lindsey, Batty knew McLean, though not especially well. She was a good friend of his comrade Dan Gillman, and they all had jobs in related work. Soracchi instigated a whirlwind romance and, just three months later, at a New Year’s Eve party at McLean’s, they got engaged. In reality, Soracchi was already married.

In 2023, McLean published a book about her experience, Small Town Girl: Love, Lies and the Undercover Police. She is due to give evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry on 24 February 2026.

INCITEMENT TO ARSON

At the same New Year’s party, Soracchi told Batty and several others that a nearby charity shop was actually a front for Roberto Fiore, a notorious Italian fascist widely believed to be involved in the 1980 bombing of Bologna railway station that killed 85 people.

Soracchi suggested firebombing the shop. Several of them – though not Soracchi himself, as far as Batty remembers – took a drunken walk to the location. Batty banged on the window and they lost interest and went back to the party.

A few days later Soracchi gave Batty a lift and drove past the shop, pointing it out.

‘I can remember telling him that there is a philosophical reason why we are not involved in terrorism. It is really simple. It alienates everybody and wins no arguments.

So I am not sure if that part of his legend was he wanted to try and persuade us in a different direction, but it really disappointed me that he never actually picked up on that.’

Nothing further happened with the shop.

The Inquiry took a lunch break, during which Tom Fowler made a summary and analysis video with antifascist and blacklisted trade unionist Dave Smith:

In November 2002, Soracchi and Batty were among a group of five who planned a trip to Florence for the European Social Forum, a conference of anti-capitalist groups. Soracchi reported on it a few weeks beforehand [MPS-0010591], and the timeline created at the end of Soracchi’s deployment [MPS-0071194] describes it in more detail.

Batty remembers a huge march in Florence and Soracchi pointing out that they were passing the home of Dario Fo, Nobel Prize winning playwright, author of Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! and Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Fo was waving to the crowd, and even though he was exactly the kind of person the SDS would view as dangerously subversive and warranting spying on, Soracchi’s write-up for internal police use described the venerable writer as a genius.

Soracchi’s reporting says he stayed in a squat with an anarchist he knew, and reported on ‘an emerging connection between UK and Italian extremists’. Batty doesn’t remember anything that fits this description.

THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED

Soracchi filed a report [MPS-0062785] claiming that Socialist Party activists were closely involved in the campaign for justice for Jean Charles de Menezes. Batty does not remember this being the case at all.

Jean Charles de Menezes was a Brazilian electrician who was shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station in July 2005 after being mistaken for a possible Islamist suicide bomber.

Rather than try to establish and admit the truth, police sought to take the minimum of blame for the killing, and gave off-the-record briefings to journalists.

The public were told that de Menezes was wearing a bulky jacket on a hot day, that his jacket had wires sticking out, that he vaulted the barrier at the tube station, that he ran down the escalator, and ignored police shouts to stop; that he was in the country illegally and that he was a sex offender. Not one of these things was true.

De Menezes was living with his cousin at the time, Patricia da Silva Armani, and she has campaigned for truth and justice ever since. She is due to give evidence to the Inquiry on 12 March 2026.

This became another justice campaign that the police regarded as hostile and sent spycops to spy on. In claiming that his target group was actively included in the campaign, Soracchi knew he was delivering what his managers wanted to hear.

In his witness statement [UCPI0000035550], Soracchi also claims to have been arrested (but not charged) after violence between No Platform and the BNP at Gants Hill. Batty has no memory of the event or arrest, nor can he remember Soracchi ever being involved in any political violence or other criminal activity.

There was one incident of violence but it wasn’t political. Batty and a friend had been out drinking with Soracchi. It was late in the evening and, as Batty phrased it, ‘we were towards the end of our sobriety’ when they were attacked in the street for no apparent reason. There was an altercation but no arrests were made and nothing came of it after.

Batty agrees with Soracchi’s description [MPS-0010097], apart from taking issue with the officer’s drastic underestimate of the level of drinking.

CLOSE FRIENDSHIP

Batty describes how he was close friends with Soracchi for more than four years from late 2000, spending a lot of recreational time together:

‘Steam baths, dinners, meals, going out for drinks. Drinking absinthe. You get the scene. We were going out socialising properly.’

Soracchi arranged for Batty and his partner to visit Bologna where they were met by someone they believed to be a relative of Soracchi’s, though they now realise it was probably a police officer.

Batty describes Soracchi as the instigator of many of the social activities, and the glue that held the friendship group together. Soracchi also helped Batty move to Manchester, and while doing so he stayed at Batty’s parents’ house:

‘My mum, being my mum, really made him welcome. She loved the fact he was Italian, was always going on about food and all this sort of stuff, so she enjoyed his company.’

While Batty was away in Manchester for about four months, he arranged for Soracchi to be able to stay in his London flat. We’re shown the documents making the arrangements with the City of London Corporation, including the receipt of a deposit paid by ‘Carlo Neri’ [MPS-0527068].

On 26 August 2004, while paying the rent on Batty’s London flat, Soracchi filed an entire report on Batty’s marriage titled ‘Joe Batty experiencing marital problems’ [MPS-0036399]. In it, Soracchi says that Batty’s partner, ‘Fawzia’, has not enjoyed living in Manchester and wants to leave:

‘Batty is very pessimistic about the current situation. He feels that his partner has not given the move a chance and is very upset about her behaviour.

“Fawzia” has always been the more dominant part of the relationship, but if Batty is pushed too far he will become extremely intractable, the future does not look rosy for the relationship, even if both were to return to London.’

Batty confirms that there was some discussion about staying in Manchester permanently, but it was nothing like the loggerheads described (and indeed he and Fawzia are still together). He wasn’t in touch with Soracchi at the time, so has no idea where the information would have come from.

He is affronted at Soracchi’s level of invasiveness:

‘He really had no right. And the Met had no right to try and weave a narrative of what is going on in people’s homes with what they are doing in their political life.

I am offended by this, and I am also offended by the fact that I had never seen that. I have not had my police record, I never had anything. So I didn’t know until this was made available very recently that this had been said.

And I think it’s a violation. That’s what it is. I feel violated, and I feel quite viscerally about that.’

INVENTING ABUSE FOR SYMPATHY

Like many spycops, Soracchi had invented a backstory featuring distressing details of abuse in his family.

Doing this serves several purposes. It creates a sense of trust for the person the spycop was telling, and that would likely be reciprocated.

Trusting the officer on confidential matters of activism, but also with intimate personal matters, made the target activist easier to influence and manipulate.

These stories of abuse or childhood hardship also gave the spycop good reason for not introducing people to their family, and for sometimes acting in inexplicable ways or ‘needing time away alone’ (when they are visiting their real family).

This pretence of a troubled mind also leads to people being ready to accept the standard story at the end of a spycop’s deployment, where they feign a mental breakdown and say they’re permanently moving somewhere far away.

Soracchi told Batty and others that after his mother had died, his sister had told him that their father had been sexually abusing her. Soracchi showed Batty a photo of his supposed perpetrator father.

The friendship group were all concerned for Soracchi, and they collected money to help him with incidental costs of the aftermath of his mother’s supposed death:

‘Our friendship was such that towards the end of his time with No Platform I felt I could counsel him when he confided in me about personal issues.

I believed at the time that his sister had been a victim of sexual abuse and that this had surfaced around the period when his mother was either dying or had just passed away.

I remember spending a lot of time talking to him about these issues, offering empathy and support…

A lot of the work that I did with rough sleepers was about trauma, and so I wanted to be there for somebody who has obviously gone through trauma – his mum passing away, which as you know is no easy thing for anybody – and then to find out this revelation at that pretty painful time was something that I thought he wanted to talk about.

So we talked about it. We spent a lot of time talking about it.’

We’re shown a document from 2 January 2006, late in Soracchi’s deployment, where he methodically lists the activists he spies on, the kind of contact he has with them, and how frequent it is [MPS-0704577].

Batty is second on the list, and seems primarily perplexed by the reason for the spying to be happening at all when his activism was open and public.

PERSONAL INTRUSION

On at least ten occasions, Soracchi reported personal details about Batty, including personal and work contact details and domestic living arrangements. He also reported in April 2004 [MPS-0034066] that Batty had lost his job and wages owed when his employer went into liquidation. Batty describes confiding in the man he thought was a trusted friend:

‘What I was expecting had all gone. I had a domestic situation with my mum being unwell. There was a lot of things that happened at the same time. Of course it was deeply personal.

The liquidation by the way was a fraud, and I would rather the police had investigated the fraud than me, but there you go.’

When the Independent Police Complaints Commission was established, Batty and a friend applied for jobs there. Soracchi reported on this in alarmed terms on 29 March 2004 [MPS-0032327]:

‘It is viewed as an opportunity as to really cause damage to the Met Police.’

It’s the same police conflation of accountability with hostility that led them to infiltrate and undermine various justice campaigns.

Batty never even received a reply to his application and laments a missed opportunity.

‘I wanted to use my experience – and I know another person wanted to use their experience – in working with vulnerable adults to ensure that they were also getting justice or were heard. So by inferring that we were doing it for nefarious reasons, it undermines us doing it.’

BETRAYAL AND ONGOING MISTRUST

In concluding, Batty reflects on how his working life with homeless people necessitated a lot of positive working with police. But since learning about the spycops and how he was personally spied on, his feeling towards working with the police have soured:

‘I brought that forward, what had happened, and the experience of what had happened, to my last job, which I worked for eight years with the community of North Kensington that was affected by the Grenfell fire.

And throughout the period that I was involved in that, I really, really, really, struggled to not say to people in their campaign groups, “you really ought to be careful, because the police will be sitting in your meetings, recording the things you do and invading your personal life”.

And that for me was really horrible, and I told them, just as I will say now, that I hope you get justice from your inquiry system, just like I hope that this will provide justice for people.

Because if not, why do people at the bottom end of the scale believe there is ever going to be any justice? And that, for me, it really hurt me. It hurts me now.’

At the end of the hearing, the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, spoke to Batty. His manner was markedly different from the way in which he’s treated other left-wing witnesses. He seemed to regard Batty as something akin to an equal. Perhaps Batty’s mention of being a Freeman of the City of London had some effect.

Mitting asked Batty about his personal history. Batty detailed a long and impressive career working with vulnerable people, particularly rough sleepers. It involved working with numerous agencies, and giving direct help and advice as well as designing management strategies to improve the lives of those affected.

He says this leads him to the conclusion that his employment chances at the Independent Police Complaints Commission were deliberately stymied:

‘I just outlined my CV, as it were, and that makes me a really good candidate for a number of those areas because I understand the milieu of working with people who are vulnerable when they interface with the police or drugs services or the other.

So the fact that I never got a response to being able to be an interface between the community and people who have complaints about the police does show me that somebody definitely sat on it.’

Mitting expresses thanks to Batty, saying that the testimony was especially welcome as the Inquiry has had a huge amount of testimony about the personal impacts on women who were deceived into relationships by spycops, but far less about the people who were close platonic friends. With that, the hearing finished.

Immediately afterwards, Tom Fowler made this summary and reaction video with Zoe Young from Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance:

Carlo soracchi is due to giveevidence to the Inqruity on 2-5 March 2026.

Tranche 3 Phase 2, Day 3
4 February 2026

On the afternoon of Wednesday 4 February 2026, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) heard from a person known at the Inquiry as ‘GRD’. He was a hunt saboteur and London Greenpeace activist who was spied on by undercover officer HN14 Jim Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’ in the 1990s.

GRD has been granted core participant status at the Inquiry, and also a significant degree of anonymity. He is referred to only by the intials, and his evidence was broadcast audio-only, without his face being seen.

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.

GRD was questioned by Don Ramble as Counsel to the Inquiry.

GRD has produced a written statement for the Inquiry [UCPI0000037735], which was read into the evidence.

Additionally, he is a signatory to the Good Easter hunt sab group witness statement, a case that appears to be a miscarriage of justice due to spycop Jim Boyling’s involvement and his evidence being withheld from the subsequent court case.

However, GRD was not present for the events involving Boyling on that day, and Ramble made clear they would not be asking about that statement in this hearing.

In sharp contrast to Roger Geffen’s evidence earlier in the day, GRD’s answers were short and to the point. It was clear that he had little time for the Inquiry asking nonsense questions that sought to justify the deployment of undercover cops.

HUNT SABBING AND VIOLENCE

GRD first met SDS officer Jim Boyling with the East London hunt saboteurs in 1995 when they travelled together in a minibus. They really got to know each other on 17 February 1996 on a large sabotage of the Duke of Beaufort hunt, when they became separated from the rest of their group:

‘It was right at the beginning of the meet. And I don’t think either of us realised how many riders and supporters there were with this particular hunt.

So, we were holding the gate closed for a very long time and the whole field, as it’s referred to, kind of rode over us…

You get spat on, getting hit with whip and sworn at… And that’s the first time I kind of really had any real connection with him.’

GRD didn’t see Boyling again after that incident until more than a year later, in the summer of 1997. Nevertheless, Ramble asks him a series of questions about his activities while sabbing and any possible justifications for police spies targeting the hunt sabs.

GRD got involved in the Harlow hunt sabs in 1992. He started the North London hunt sab group a year or two later and remained involved until 2006. He is clear that the only violence he ever saw while sabbing was by hunters, hunt supporters and the police – especially in Essex:

‘We would generally not sab them. It was too dangerous, too risky…

It’s just too violent, you’d get your vehicle smashed up or the police operation would be so considerable that you’d all be arrested by midday.’

This was was exactly what happened on the day of the Good Easter arrests, 10 February 1996. GRD witnessed the arrest of a fellow core participant at the Inquiry, Brendan Mee, but not the arrests of Ben Leamy, Brendan Delaney and Simon Taylor who were with Boyling that day.

The Inquiry will need to ask Boyling about his role in those arrests and also his offer to act as a witness on behalf of the defendants whose lawyer was Keir Starmer, a name that just keeps coming up in the Inquiry files.

GRD is also asked about links between the hunt sabs and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). The ALF was a clandestine group that broke into farms and laboratories, liberating animals and damaging property. They were seen by the police as the apex of the animal rights movement, and were portrayed as something akin to terrorists.

A document recording Boyling’s initial deployment into the East London hunt sabs said that he ‘will be following an essential and authentic route towards acceptance by ALF activists’.

The targeting strategy document for SDS officer HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’ [MPS-0526929], whose was deployed into hunt sabs slightly later, further refers to Boyling’s deployment as follows:

‘originally earmarked for long-term deployment in the ALF and he has provided first rate intelligence on violent hunt saboteurs based in East London and Essex and indeed valuable assistance to Operation GANT and SO-13 investigation into a series of crude ALF incendiaries in East London.’

GRD says that doesn’t make sense, he doesn’t know any sabs who associated with the ALF and the hunt sabs never used, or planned to use, incendiary devices. He rejects the idea that sending an officer to infiltrate the hunt sabs was justified.

MCLIBEL SUPPORT GROUP

In 1990, McDonald’s brought legal proceedings against London Greenpeace for the claims made in a factsheet titled ‘What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?’ that detailed the company’s appalling environmental, employment, animal welfare and marketing practices.

The ensuing court case took seven years, with the defendants attracting huge support and backfiring badly on McDonald’s. It was revealed that McDonald’s had sent two separate lots of private detectives to infiltrate London Greenpeace who were unaware of one another.

The court did not learn that multiple SDS officers also infiltrated the group, and indeed the factsheet at the core of the court case was co-written by an SDS infiltrator, HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’.

GRD first became involved in the McLibel support campaign in 1995 due to fellow hunt sabs being involved in the McSpotlight website. The McLibel Support Group office ended up being in GRD’s flat at one point. He says it was mostly a storage headache, as storing all the T-shirts and other merchandise took up space.

He met Boyling again while he was running a McLibel Support Campaign stall at the 1997 Glastonbury festival.

‘He was there with Reclaim The Streets and they were on the other side of the Green Futures Field… it had a lot of activism, eco-activism, and animal rights campaigns, veganism, vegetarianism…

Jim used to come over and hang out in the McLibel Support stall, tent as it was, for most of the days, from my memory.’

GRD hadn’t seen Boyling since they were attacked by hunters together in early 1996, but after Glastonbury they continued to bump into each other at squats and events around London.

The last time GRD saw Boyling was in a squat in December 1999. The intense experience they had together as hunt sabs meant that GRD considered Boyling a friend. He trusted him and they would socialise together.

GRD describes these encounters in his written statement:

‘We were a little bitchy about other activists and like to take the mickey out of them, but not to their face. We had a laugh together like mates.’

Looking back on this he finds it depressing and feels betrayed. He also points out that this piss-taking could be weaponised as a means of sowing division.

Boyling claims he had no inside knowledge of the McLibel matter, but GRD says that’s untrue. After Glastonbury 1997 he would have had access to all the materials which were often scattered around GRD’s flat:

‘I was uploading daily material onto the McSpotlight website… So I’d have stuff all over the place. I’d have correspondence, and I would have you know other stuff associated with the campaign.’

LONDON GREENPEACE

London Greenpeace (a small group unrelated to Greenpeace International) campaigned on a broad range of environmental and social justice issues. GRD describes himself as a key London Greenpeace activist and he ended up running the office, because he lived very nearby.

We are shown an intelligence report by Boyling [MPS-040634] dated 31 October 1997, which refers to a meeting to ‘relaunch’ of London Greenpeace.

GRD says that Boyling would have been aware that London Greenpeace was restarting from the conversations they had at Glastonbury festival in 1997. The ‘source comment’ from Boyling on the report ironically notes that the relaunch will include all the old members ‘though presumably not the private detectives’.

This seems to be the only one of Boyling’s reports that references GRD, something he found surprising. He would have thought he’d be mentioned more, given his long-term involvement with Boyling.

EARTH FIRST! AND GENETIC MODIFICATION

In 1998 Jim Boyling and others gathered at GRD’s squat in King’s Cross to discuss the feasibility of liberating ‘Dolly’, the world’s first genetically modified sheep.

Looking back, GRD says he thinks Jim was trying to get him on board for future plans he might have had. In his reporting, Boyling describes GRD as a hunt sab organiser in North London, and a McLibel and occasional Earth First! activist.

GRD says only the first two are correct. He was also active in the Genetic Engineering Network (GEN) between 1997 and 2002. There was some crossover between GEN and Earth First! Nevertheless, his only connection to Earth First! was through things that Jim Boyling organised.

Around the same time as the meeting about Dolly the sheep, GRD recalls that Boyling asked him to drive Boyling to collect some Reclaim the Streets posters from the printers. When he got home his flat had been burgled. A camera and some two-way radios used for hunt sabbing were taken, along with some pictures, some cash, and GRD’s turntables.

‘There was only one person knew that I was going to be out all day, and that was Jim.’

Another action Boyling was involved in organising was the first ever destruction of a field of genetically modified crops in Ireland. Ramble tells GRD that the Inquiry is not interested in what happened in Ireland as it falls outside of the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference, which are limited to events in England and Wales. However, this is certainly an interesting and significant action nonetheless.

In his written statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000036294], Boyling says he destroyed a genetically modified crop in Ireland when he had no other option than to participate or being exposed.

GRD says this is not true, and that the action in Ireland would not have happened if Boyling had not done the planning and logistics, both in the UK before travelling and in Ireland, pushing the group to do it.

GRD is very clear that Boyling would have found it very easy to back out of the genetics action, even once they were in Ireland. The UK group wasn’t even meant to carry out the action, and there were too many people in the van so it would have been easier, logistically, to have fewer people.

RECLAIM THE STREETS

Although GRD attended a great number of Reclaim The Streets (RTS) public events, he only attended two of the group’s meetings.

Boyling, in contrast, claims to have been involved in the core organising group. He insists he walked a fine line, as an undercover officer, taking part in meetings without suggesting or proposing any specific action. GRD says this is completely false and contradicts his experience of Boyling.

Boyling approached GRD in 1999 and asked if he could hold an important meeting at GRD’s flat. It was about driving vehicles into the city of London for the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism to be held on 18 June 1999.

There were four people present, Boyling, GRD and two others, and Boyling set out his plan, which was to use cars to block two roads. This was entirely Boyling’s idea, and no one else in the meeting had been involved in coming up with it.

After the meeting they got in a vehicle and drove the routes the cars would take. Boyling encouraged them all to wear hi-vis jackets and walk the routes regularly to memorise them.

Boyling said he had purchased four cars and four pay-as-you-go-phones with enough credit for use on the day. He handed them all a phone.

The night before ‘J18’, each of the drivers stayed in new and unknown locations organised for them by Boyling in order to prevent police following them on the day. They were directed by Boyling to park the cars at specific car parks prior to driving them to the action.

On the day, GRD and another activist blocked the road by crashing the cars together at one end of the street, while Boyling and one other did the same at the other end of the street.

GRD is very clear he would have never been involved in the car action if he had not been approached by Boyling. He wasn’t really involved in Reclaim The Streets at the time. He says once he had completed his mission of crashing the cars, he spent the rest of J18 partying.

The Inquiry played footage of the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism, featuring the cars Boyling organised to block the road.

Ramble listed titbits of events that happened on the day, most of which GRD only heard about afterwards, and there were lots of happy memories for those of us in the public gallery.

Ramble then put it to GRD that is was justified to deploy Boyling into the groups organising J18. GRD replies that Boyling himself was integral to the organising of J18.

On 21 June 1999, Boyling filed a report titled ‘Debrief – Stop The City – June 18’ [MPS-0302210] which says the organisers were pleased with the outcome. GRD says he can’t say he was an organiser, but it was very good day.

It is very frustrating that none of the people who did organise the event have been asked to give oral evidence by the Inquiry.

‘JASON BISHOP’ AND MAYDAY 2000

GRD is also asked about another SDS officer, HN3 ‘Jason Bishop’, who was deployed 1998-2005.

GRD says he met him in the Reclaim the Streets office, and saw him around at RTS parties and activist events. Bishop also borrowed GRD’s van twice.

Most significantly, on 1 May 2000, Bishop was arrested in GRD’s van. He was stopped while transporting manure and seeds on his way to the Reclaim The Streets ‘guerrilla gardening’ event in Parliament Square.

The van was seized by police, and GRD describes getting it back:

‘I just packed my kit in it, loaded it up and then drove off to Hampshire… driving down the motorway, [the wheels] just felt odd and a bit weird…

The vehicle was in a very good condition when lent to HN3. It is possible the wheels were loosened during its time in the Met Police pound.

The experience left me distressed as I thought I was not going to be able to turn up for my first big event with the new lighting company… it was a very well maintained Mercedes panel van. It’s not usual for a considerable amount of the wheel nuts to be loose all at the same time.’

IMPACT

GRD says it was always Boyling who approached him to take part in actions, not the other way around, and he would have never suspected he was a cop.

He was shocked to hear that there was even a suggestion that ‘Jim Sutton’ had been an undercover officer. He didn’t believe it at first – activists can be paranoid – but it turns out they were right.

He had found Boyling convincing because of the human connection they had. He trusted him, and he feels set up and used. He has developed trust issues as a result, and he says it is difficult to put it into words. He feels cheated.

Asked if there is anything else he would like to tell the inquiry, GRD is characteristically succinct:

‘I’m alright, thanks.’

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked GRD for giving evidence and the hearing closed for the day.

Tranche 3 Phase 2, Day 4
4 February 2026

Roger Geffen gave evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI) on the morning of Wednesday 4 February 2026.

Geffen is a long-standing environmental campaigner who was involved in the anti-roads movements and groups like Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets from their inception in the early 1990s, as well as more conventional campaigning for the rights of cyclists and sustainable transport.

His campaigning activities led to him being awarded an MBE for services to cycling. They also led to him being spied on by SDS officer HN14 Andrew James Boyling ‘Jim Sutton’, NPOIU officer EN12 Mark Kennedy ‘Mark Stone’, and probably other undercover officers over the past thirty years.

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 (or ‘spycops’) 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.

INQUIRY CHAOS

The barrister acting for the Inquiry (known as the Counsel to the Inquiry) who questioned Geffen was Lennart Poulsen, who appeared to be very unprepared.

That is not entirely surprising as the Inquiry has gone ahead with these hearings when they have barely processed the evidence. In his Opening Statement to this phase of hearings, David Barr KC (lead Counsel to the Inquiry) noted:

‘Numerous and considerable challenges have led to the preparation of the T3P2 Hearing Bundle taking longer than planned.

We recognise that this has meant that documents have not been circulated to core participants as soon as we would have wished and that the process of circulating documents to core participants and publishing them on our website is taking place over an extended period.’

As is so often the case with public statements by the Inquiry about its work, this actually significantly understates the utter chaos surrounding disclosure, where much of the evidence has not yet been circulated to Core Participants preparing their evidence, and that has evidently also impacted on the ability of the Inquiry’s own barristers to prepare.

Geffen has produced a witness statement [UCPI0000038772] and he also contributed to the Reclaim the Streets (RTS) witness statement [UCPI0000038295]. Both were read into the evidence at the start of the hearing, and you can hear Geffen and other core participants involved in drafting the RTS witness statement talking about that process in episode 47 of the Spycops Info podcast:

Geffen’s evidence began with how he became involved in environmental activism. After leaving university he began working as a classical music record producer. He moved to South East London in the late 1980s and became a cyclist.

London traffic was wildly congested and dangerous at that time and he became involved in the London Cycling Campaign, and later a campaign against plans to build a road through Oxleas Wood, a piece of 8000-year-old ancient woodland close to where he lived.

‘This was an interesting time in environmental politics because the year after I got involved in London Cycling Campaign in 1989, was the year at that climate change really first came into public consciousness when the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, went to the United Nations Summit and declared that, as a scientist, she was convinced of the need to take action on climate change, but her government then announced what they called “the biggest road-building programme since the Romans”.’

Poulsen asks how Geffen became involved in direct action and he answers, explaining that he was influenced by Gandhi:

‘I’d seen the film Gandhi earlier in my teens and the idea was that there are times when you do need to break the law in order for justice to prevail.’

He also explains what direct action meant to him:

‘When the system of democracy and public input and all the rest of it breaks down… you just have to effectively take action directly… to highlight the problem to confront it directly and thus push for a resolution… you look to confront the root causes of the problem directly’

TWYFORD DOWN

One of the first schemes from the government’s 1989 road programme to start construction was the joining up of two sections of the M3 through Twyford Down, a heavily protected area of chalk downland just outside Winchester in southern England.

Protesters had set up a small camp on the route of the road, which Geffen visited in December 1992.

Twyford was a defining experience for Geffen. He began organising minibuses to take people from London to support the campaign and his first ever arrest occurred while taking action there.

He explains how that experience empowered him to take direct action:

‘I realised that the world hadn’t ended… and I felt proud of what I had done.’

He has seen very little reporting about the Twyford Down campaign, however he points out that the Inquiry’s disclosure of police documents indicates a Special Branch Registry File was opened on him in 1993, which coincided with his actions at Twyford Down and the early months of No M11 Link Road campaign.

He points out that neither he nor anyone else involved in this Inquiry has received sight of those Special Branch Registry Files, and it is evident that there is more to be discovered about the extent of the spying than is apparent on the face of the disclosure he has seen.

Geffen therefore poses a number of questions for the Inquiry:

His name was on the Consulting Association’s ‘green list’ (an illegal employment blacklist of environmental campaigners). It is known that a private detective firm, Bray’s, was employed to spy on protesters at Twyford Down – filming and keeping files on those regularly taking part.

Geffen asks the Inquiry to consider what kind of collaboration existed between private companies like Bray’s or the Consulting Association and the Special Demonstration Squad at this time.

Geffen also points out that the Secretary of State applied for an injunction against a large number of activists, seeking to prevent them from trespassing on the worksite at Twyford Down. What role did the SDS play in that process? Or in the proposed civil action, suing protestors for damages, which should theoretically have followed on from the injunction but which the Government never pursued.

Here, Poulsen points out that six activists were jailed for breaking that injunction. Geffen agrees and talks us through the appeal of those injunction breakers against the length of their sentence:

‘It was before Lord Justice Hoffman and he came out with a wonderful quote … that really kind of solidified my own understanding of what I doing.

He talked about “the honourable tradition of civil disobedience in this country” and he added that “those who take part in it may well be vindicated by history”…

It wasn’t my words, but I think that very much crystallises the philosophy that led me to do what I was doing.’

Indeed, the road protesters of the 1990s certainly were vindicated by history. In Geffen’s words:

‘Twyford Down ended up being a noisy defeat for the direct action movement, and Oxleas Wood became one of the first of a large number of quiet victories.’

Two-thirds of the government’s proposed new roads were ultimately dropped, and it is clear that Geffen is still very proud of the role he played in those campaigns.

NO M11 LINK ROAD

After Twyford Down, Geffen and others’ campaigning focus shifted back to London, and the campaign against the M11 Link Road.

Geffen describes this as a ‘Cinderella project’ because unlike Twyford Down, Oxleas Wood, or the later Newbury Bypass, this was not a road that was set to destroy precious natural habitats. Instead it was being run through a residential community that had been purposefully run down by government compulsory purchase of the houses.

As such, the No M11 Link Road campaign moved the debate about road building on. Rather than just being about protecting the natural environment, it also became focused on the destruction of communities and the choices we make about the use of our urban space.

Geffen talks the Inquiry through a number of the actions and strategies that the campaign used, such as ‘Operation Roadblock’ and the squatting of Claremont Road.

Operation Roadblock was a plan to hold daily direct action on the worksites of the M11 Link Road, coordinating people coming from all over the country. Each day was preceded by a brief training session on the principles, practicalities and legal implications of non-violent direct action. This enabled and empowered people to make informed decisions about how far they were prepared to go to stop the diggers:

‘We were exhausted by the end.’

Claremont Road was the last fully intact street on the route. All the houses on the street had been compulsorily purchased, bar one.

Dolly Watson was 93 years old. She had been born in that street and she wanted to die there. One by one, protesters squatted the homes around her, creating a little self-contained car-free community, and she welcomed them into her road. Geffen explained:

‘Defending Claremont Road would be strategically crucial.’

With the homes being decorated and children playing in the street, it became a rolling street party that lasted for six months, and something of a prototype for the concept of Reclaim The Streets.

Poulsen was not very interested in the power of the community campaign, however, and instead pressed Geffen about any possibility of criminality, asking him about the times he was arrested.

Geffen very sensibly wrote his own statements about these arrests at the time, to support his defence. He has exhibited these to his statement to the Inquiry and is able to take Poulsen through the reasons why he considers them wrongful arrests. When charges were brought at all, he was found ‘not guilty’ over and over again.

A Special Branch report [MPS-0739546] describes one of the arrests, and Poulsen asks Geffen about the mood of the security guards on the day.

Geffen explains that some were very confrontational, while others were sympathetic and were just doing a job.

Protesters made friends with some of the security, but sadly it was the aggressive and confrontational guards who got promoted, so the make-up of the security team got worse over time.

Poulsen points out that the SDS report that ‘police conduct in the circumstances was restrained’. Asked if he agrees, Geffen’s short, dry, understated, ‘no’ was met with laughter from those in the public gallery who had been at present at the protests.

Geffen did a great deal of police liaison throughout the M11 campaign and says the police sergeant in question was quite honest in how he portrayed the campaign, in sharp contrast to the much of the SDS’s ‘intelligence’.

‘Q. Neither he nor other officers involved in the last phase of the M11 campaign tried to present you as anything but peaceful. Is that right?

A. Yes.

Q. And do you accept that those officers’ observations contrast with some of the SDS reports about you and the group’s actions?

A. Absolutely… and I think that would be a really good question to put to the SDS’s management. Why was it that they were so out to smear us, tarnish us with this label of being violent when we absolutely were not?’

Poulsen exhibited a flyer from the No M11 Link Road campaign, for an action on 22 January 1994. The image appeared on two dozen computer monitors all over the room, creating a beautiful juxtaposition between the raw energy of the campaigns Geffen was talking about and the sterility of the hearing room.

However, Poulsen’s concern is that fliers like these might have encouraged ‘activists of a more militant and violent persuasion’ to get involved.

Geffen points out that things like that may or may not have been discussed at the time, but the key point is that it never happened.

The next exhibit was an iconic image of a banner action on the roof of the home of the then Transport Secretary, John MacGregor.

‘While we were out taking direct action on one of their work sites [the contractors] effectively came behind our backs and took the roof off one of the houses on Claremont Road…

We had this conversation where somebody kind of laughing said, “Oh, we should go and smash up the roof of John MacGregor”.

They weren’t serious, but you know it kind of prompted this idea that we should do that symbolically, by painting this banner that you can see there that effectively showed a road going through John MacGregor’s own home.

So, yeah, this was a piece of direct action that worked incredibly well in in media terms… peaceful direct action on the roof of the Transport Secretary on whose behalf bailiffs were smashing up other people’s homes um to really just highlight the injustice of what the Transport Secretary was doing.’

Poulsen asks how Geffen knew the address of John MacGregor and suggests that he was creating a security issue for the Transport Secretary’s family.

Geffen points out that the action was a peaceful protest that called attention to the very real violence being faced by the residents of communities affected by the M11 Link Road.

‘After all, cabinet level secretaries are expected to have a certain amount of thick skin and they’ve got the weight of the state behind them to protect them, whereas the residents of Claremont Road had nothing of the sort.’

Poulsen again tries to suggest the action was reckless:

‘What steps did you take to ensure no one would destroy his property?’

He suggests to Geffen that this action was ‘going too far’. However, again, Geffen simply points to what actually happened on the day. Although those arrested were charged with causing alarm, harassment and distress, they were found not guilty, because:

‘This had been an entirely peaceful protest that had been conducted safely, precautions had been taken, and this was again in that “honourable tradition of civil disobedience”, confronting the root cause of the problem in a peaceful way.’

Geffen also describes another similar protest against the Criminal Justice Act, which took place in the garden of the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, noting that both actions attracted very positive media coverage, and stressing that:

‘Our networks were very solid on that common philosophy of believing in non-violent direct action.’

QUESTIONS ABOUT VIOLENCE

Nevertheless, Poulson repeatedly presses Geffen on the question of violence, in between reprimanding him for giving overly complex answers to what are in fact very open questions about topics like the philosophy of direct action, attitudes towards breaking the law, violence and non-violence, and even whether activists ‘wasting’ the government’s road building budget had considered the affect that might have on the public purse.

Geffen points out in answer to this last question that, although additional policing and security was estimated to cost around £2m, they actually helped save the public purse around £18bn as a result of road building schemes being cancelled, not to mention the additional carbon emissions that were prevented as a result.

Poulsen asks a number of direct questions about ‘attitudes towards violence’ in Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets, and about Geffen’s own belief in the rule of law, before delivering what he appears to think is a ‘gotcha’ moment, saying that despite claiming to believe in the law, Geffen has supported people who have broken it.

Geffen is unfazed by these questions and simply explains again:

‘I believe that the rule of law is an important principle, but I also believe – and I do not believe there is a contradiction – that there are times when when the rule and the process of law and of public inquiries ultimately fails and that bad laws sometimes need to be broken.’

Poulsen continues to complain that Geffen’s answers are too long, and observers in the public gallery began to wonder whether the problem is that Poulsen lacks the attention to listen to long answers.

He is certainly doing the Inquiry no favours with this approach, and the overall impression is of a barrister tied to his list of questions, unable to adapt to thoughtful answers to what are obviously complex questions, instead just asking the same questions over and over again in different forms.

We are well into the questioning by this point, but Poulsen has not asked a single question about the undercover police infiltration of these groups or the behaviour of the spycops.

EARTH FIRST!

The Earth First! (EF!) network was very prominent at Twyford Down, where the focus was on the defence of beautiful landscapes and ancient woodlands.

As a group, EF! was infiltrated by a great number of undercover officers, including:

• HN2 Andy Coles, who claims to have been a ‘founder member’
• HN14 Jim Boyling
• HN3 ‘Jason Bishop’
• EN32/HN596 ‘Rod Richardson’
• EN12 Mark Kennedy
• EN1/HN519 ‘Marco Jacobs’
• EN34 ‘Lynn Watson’

EF! applied for Core Participant status in this Inquiry but it was refused, and the group has not been given disclosure in this Tranche. Poulsen nevertheless asks Geffen not only about his own role in EF! but also about the wider attitudes and actions of the network.

Geffen offers a short history of how Earth First! came to be launched in the UK and the close relationship with Reclaim the Streets, saying is was often the same people wearing different hats. He explains both groups were non-violent.

RECLAIM THE STREETS

Geffen first met with Reclaim the Streets (RTS) in 1992 when they were planning a sit-down protest on Waterloo Bridge in London. He attended this action, but didn’t feel confident enough to sit down in the road and face arrest.

There were a number of actions after that, including stunts at the Birmingham and London motor shows and painting cycle lanes onto roads in Lambeth where the council had neglected to do so.

Geffen explains the aims of some of these actions:

‘to highlight the problems of a society that is overdominated by dependence on motor vehicles and lacks sustainable transport alternatives to enable people to get around without depending on motor vehicles…

alternatives that would be better for our health, better for our air quality, better for our climate, better for social justice, better in so many ways, and yet the motor manufacturers sell us this dream that we all have to depend on our cars…

[while the way] the government spends its transport budget is contingent on perpetuating car culture rather than providing the alternatives.’

Geffen explains that Reclaim the Streets paused its activities in summer 1993 to focus on the No M11 Link Road campaign, but re-emerged in 1995.

At this point, Poulsen finally asks his first question about an undercover officer, establishing that Jim Boyling attended his first weekly meeting of Reclaim the Streets in November 1995.

Geffen rejects Boyling’s claim that these meetings were closed, and is very clear that they were open to anyone to attend. He suggests Boyling be questioned about this when the Inquiry brgins the spycop in for questioning.

During a break in the hearing, Tom Fowler made this reaction video:

In the early 1990s, the Metropolitan Police started deploying Forward Intelligence Teams, groups of officers with very high quality film and video camera who would document people attending political events.

We hear how Geffen was followed by members of the Met’s Forward Intelligence Team to his workplace. They then arrested him there on a dubious pretext, so they could offer him the opportunity to become a police informant.

This was shortly before Boyling began attending RTS meetings and Geffen suggests the Inquiry investigate the relationship between this failed attempt to recruit him as an informant and the decision to deploy Boyling into the group.

Geffen points out there were other police informants in the movement, and asks what the relationship was between them and the undercover police.

Geffen talks us through the tactics used by RTS, such as taking two old cars to be crashed into each other to block the street and make it safe for party-goers. RTS parties were incredible, vibrant, family-friendly events.

However, on a number of occasions they were attacked by riot police late in the day when people began to disperse. Poulsen incredibly asked Geffen whether he accepts that the police had a duty to ‘pick a fight’ with RTS in order to reopen the road.

Geffen disagrees, pointing to the nature of the events and the disproportionate levels of violence used by the police:

‘With hindsight, one of the things we learnt was that we should have made sure we had a plan for how how to end without allowing the police to do that.’

He adds that in fact that is exactly what RTS did at the next street party event on the M41.

Poulsen nevertheless asks (for the sixth time!) whether Reclaim the Streets street parties were violent or disorderly. He uses the fact that RTS would warn party-goers about the possibility of police violence or arrest, as though that somehow demonstrated that they were not themselves peaceful. It was incredibly frustrating to listen to, but each time these questions are asked, Geffen offered a sensible, detailed and patient response.

HN14 JIM BOYLING IN RECLAIM THE STREETS

It is remarkable how few questions Poulsen asked Geffen about the role of the undercover officer Jim Boyling who, using the name ‘Jim Sutton’, was tasked to spy on Reclaim the Streets.

Poulsen did refer to some of Boyling’s reporting and Geffen sets out in detail how inaccurate some of it was, highlighting ‘sexed up’ intelligence which pretended that RTS were attempting far more dangerous or disruptive actions than was in fact the case.

Geffen also points out how Boyling exaggerated disputes within RTS, noting that the spycops seemed obsessed with trying to drive wedges within the movement.

One example of this is a report claiming that Geffen was ‘excluded’ from a meeting about the Selar open cast coal mine.

Geffen says he has no recollection of this, but would have had no interest in attending that meeting if he had known about it, as he had no local knowledge to contribute to the discussion.

This is pattern also emerged in the evidence of ‘Monica’, with Boyling’s reports emphasising and exaggerating divisions within the group that the genuine people who were there simply do not recognise.

Boyling was far from unique among spycops. The Inquiry has seen that one spycop after another exaggerated the danger they were in, and exaggerated or simply invented the plans of the infiltrated group. These lies were further exaggerated by office staff who collated the reports, which in turn were exaggerated to an even greater degree by managers seeking to impress the Met’s top brass and the Home Office.

RTS IN LATER YEARS

Asked about anti-capitalist activism in the late 1990s, Geffen explains how as time went on, Reclaim The Streets sought to widen the agenda from car culture to the fossil fuel economy and capitalism more generally.

It forged links between the environmental direct action movement and related workers’ struggles such as the striking Liverpool dockers, or London Underground workers campaigning against the privatisation of the tube.

However, Geffen stresses that he himself was not very involved in those later years. He points out that while he is grateful for the opportunity to give evidence, he feels that the Inquiry has failed to call the people who are best positioned to speak about that period when SDS spying on the group was at its most intense.

We do get to hear about yet another wrongful arrest though, when Geffen and two others received several thousand pounds in compensation after being arrested while preparing to distribute a spoof newspaper, the ‘Evading Standards’, on the eve of the March for Social Justice, shortly before the 1997 general election.

All 10,000 copies of the paper were seized and destroyed by police, and Geffen points out the seriousness of the police taking this kind of action simply to prevent a political group distributing its ideas.

‘It does look like another act of political policing – not the only one in Reclaim the Streets’ history – where the purpose of the arrest seems to have been to prevent us from getting our message out, rather than to prevent disorder.’

Poulsen seeks to ask Geffen about preparations for ‘J18’, the Carnival Against Capitalism in the City of London on June 18 1999, and Boyling’s role in it, including the purchase of several cars that were crashed to block the street. But Geffen again points out that he is not the correct witness to talk about this.

The Inquiry should be asking Jay Jordan, one of Geffen’s co-authors of the RTS witness statement to the Inquiry, who has important evidence to give about a number of issues.

Jordan worked on the production of the ‘Evading Standards’ newspaper, they were arrested and prosecuted alongside Boyling (who was using his false name ‘Jim Sutton’, even in court!) and they worked closely alongside Boyling throughout 1998 and 1999 on the planning of J18. It is hard to comprehend why Jordan has not been called to give evidence.

Nevertheless, we will undoubtedly hear more about SDS spying during those later years of RTS when questions are put to Boyling himself.

MARK KENNEDY AND CLIMATE CAMP

Mark Kennedy’s deployment will not be investigated until the Inquiry examines the SDS’s parallel unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. These hearings, ‘Tranche 4’, have no date set but are not expected until the second half of 2027 at the earliest.

It is unusual for the Inquiry to question witnesses about other tranches. Nonetheless, Poulsen does ask some questions about Geffen’s role in the Climate Camp (or Camp for Climate Action, to give it its proper name), and his interactions with Kennedy there.

Geffen offers a potted history of the progression towards the Climate Camp, setting out how J18 influenced anti-capitalist movements targeting the summit meetings of global capitalist institutions like the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and the G8, leading to the camp against the 2005 G8 meeting in Scotland.

In turn, that experience led to action camps being adopted as as tactic by climate change campaigners, and Camps for Climate Action took place outside Drax Power Station (2006), Heathrow Airport (2007), Kingsnorth Power Station (2008), the financial centre of London (2009) and the Royal Bank Of Scotland’s headquarters (2010).

The early Climate Camps were in fact targeted by officers from both the SDS and the NPOIU, and the Climate Camp legal team is a core participant in the Inquiry, and has submitted a witness statement for Tranche 3.

Geffen is just asked about NPOIU officer Mark Kennedy, then known to everyone at the Camps as ‘Mark Stone’. Kennedy was involved in the Climate Camp’s land group, the core secret subgroup that identified sites for the camps. Geffen says he was unaware of this at the time.

Kennedy was based in Nottingham while Geffen was based in London, so he did not know Kennedy well beyond being a familiar face.

Geffen was part of the Climate Camp legal team at the inaugural Drax camp in North Yorkshire, taking care of anyone arrested at the event. Kennedy was part of a large group of people at an action a long way away, at Hartlepool nuclear power station.

Kennedy had locked himself to the gates and was among those arrested. They were released very late at night, and Geffen organised the transport to get them all back.

Geffen says it is highly likely Kennedy was party to conversations between activists about their arrests:

‘Particularly given that he was arrested himself at this action… I’ve little doubt that he was party to conversations with his co-arrestees about the circumstances of their arrest.

And I would really urge the Inquiry to ask him what information he gleaned from conversations like that because I’ve little doubt that would have taken place.’

When they arrived back at the camp from Hartlepool, Kennedy was driving, and he drove the van straight at a police officer standing in the gateway, forcing him to run out of the way for his own safety.

Geffen says he didn’t confront Kennedy over his behaviour, but it did strike him as odd.

‘It just struck me as: he is showing off…

he was known for regularly wanting to kind of incite more disorder, a more confrontational attitude, and this was just a part of a pattern of Mark Kennedy’s behaviour.’

Like Boyling, Kennedy’s traits were not unique. The Inquiry has heard numerous descriptions of undercover officers being more aggressive than the rest of the group, and being disparaging about those who are less bellicose.

Geffen is also asked about the second Climate Camp, which took place at Heathrow in 2007. BAA, the owners of the airport, took out an injunction, which Geffen describes as:

‘another example of a strategic law suit against public participation…

it included injuncting people and organisations who were involved… which included groups like the National Trust – Patron, the Queen.

It would have ultimately meant that the Queen was not allowed to travel on the Piccadilly line to Heathrow…

It was that absurd in the scope of what was prohibited under the injunction.’

This use of civil law and injunctions to prevent protest is an important theme that emerges in the Inquiry’s Tranche 3 era (1993-2008), and non-state Core Participants have asked the Inquiry to really look at the appropriateness of any role undercover officers might have played in these processes.

Finally, Poulsen asked Geffen about the raid of school in Nottinghamshire where 114 people had assembled for a briefing, prior to a planned action at Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power station.

Geffen was arrested there, alongside spycop Mark Kennedy, and 112 others.

Geffen points out that most of these people were not charged with anything, presumably to hide that fact that one of the arrestees was a police officer – prosecuting him would have presented problems for the police so, despite his key role, Kennedy was not charged.

Twenty people were convicted though, but their convictions were later quashed when it emerged that the prosecution had deliberately withheld recordings made at the briefing by Kennedy. These would have supported their defence that they were genuinely seeking to prevent carbon dioxide emissions by shutting down the power station.

It is noteworthy that the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time was Keir Starmer, who helped ensure that CPS staff and spycops avoided accountability for orchestrating these wrongful convictions – a number of core participants, including Geffen, have called for Starmer to give evidence to the Inquiry.

A significant number of core participants were arrested at Ratcliffe and it is likely to be a significant issue for the Inquiry in when it covers Kennedy’s deployment in Tranche 4.

OTHER QUESTIONS

Geffen is asked a number of other questions, such as whether he knew undercover officer HN78 Trevor Morris. Geffen has no memory of him, however it is evident that Morris reported on him, including recording his bank details.

This prompted Geffen to ask further questions about whether there is other relevant reporting from other spycops such as Morris, HN2 Andy Coles or HN43 Peter Francis that the Inquiry has not shown him.

Poulsen also asks about a spycop’s report stating that Geffen once gave the judge a Nazi salute in court. He explains that this was a reaction to an abuse of process where the magistrate repeatedly extended their bail conditions, and questions why this petty anecdote is being raised at all:

‘I do wonder firstly, why is that question relevant to an inquiry on police spying? Was a rather silly gesture of contempt for the magistrate a justification for undercover policing?

And secondly, who was the police officer who recorded the intelligence about that and… what legally privileged information he might also have been party to on that occasion.’

Asked whether he ever used pseudonyms, Geffen explains that it was common practice for pseudonyms to be used when talking to the media in order to avoid stories becoming personalised or focusing on the individuals rather than the issues.

Finally, Geffen is asked about the impact of being spied on. He explains that it’s unsettling, especially knowing that they were right at the heart of our social networks, and again he wonders why some of the people who were much more closely affected have not been called to give evidence.

CLOSING SPEECH

At the end of his evidence Geffen delivers a very eloquent speech setting out all the questions he feels the Inquiry has not addressed, which we encourage you to watch in full:

He talks about police informers, particularly the convicted paedophile Edward Nicholas Gratwick who infiltrated environmental campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s. Geffen asks how much the police knew about the child abuse offences their employee was engaged in.

He asks the Inquiry to investigate the police tactic of confiscating huge numbers of leaflets, not only in the Evading Standards incident, but also in the run up to Reclaim the Streets’ Mayday 2000 demonstration where disclosure of police fiels reveals a detailed police plot to harass and specifically target RTS’s printed material, even contemplating raiding the print shop where the material was being produced.

Geffen asks why the police created so much disruption and discord, and why the police repeatedly tried to conflate Reclaim the Streets with terrorism, citing an incident where police planted an incendiary devices on an activist which went off in his home, following a protest against the Terrorism Bill.

The media were given detailed, entirely fabricated, stories along these lines. The Sunday Times reported that, ahead of a protest on 30 November 1999:

‘At least 34 containers of CS gas and four stun guns capable of delivering a 50,000 volt electric shock were purchased by Reclaim the Streets.’

RTS took the issue to the Press Complaints Commission who agreed there was no basis for the story but, as RTS wasn’t a formal organisation, it couldn’t be defamed and so rejected the complaint.

Geffen also sets out the evidence (examined in more detail in the RTS witness statement to the Inquiry) that the police were actually using the intelligence gathered by the SDS to make disorder more likely.

Why was evidence collected by Boyling about the plan for J18 not passed on to City of London police who were responsible for public order policing on the ground?

Geffen asks the Inquiry to call police force commanders of the time, such as Anthony Speed and Perry Nove from the Met and City of London police respectively, to explain what happened.

Geffen concludes by saying that there was simply no justification at all for what the SDS did. They knew the intentions of the RTS to hold family-friendly events, yet they acted as agent provocateurs and painted us as terrorists.

He points out that only a week ago the government had to publish a report from its own national security services about the grave security implications of the current climate and ecological crisis – a report that the government had balked at publishing due to the severity of the facts, and had been forced into releasing a redacted version by concerned citizens using a Freedom of Information process.

Geffen asserts that the real threat to national security was the SDS who went to such lengths for so long to prevent us from getting our message across.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, rather awkwardly thanks Roger Geffen for attending, adding:

‘We’re a free country. Um, despite all the difficulties that, uh, I am examining. Thank you.’

This was met with laughter from the public gallery.

Immediately after the hearing concluded, Geffen spoke to Tom Fowler:

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Days 9-11
5-10 November 2025

INTRODUCTION

Special Demonstration Squad officer HN16 James Thomson ‘James Straven’ was deployed 1997-2002, infiltrating London-based animal rights groups. He deceived several women into long-term intimate relationships.

He gave evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry over three days: 5, 6 and 10 November 2025. His evidence was broadcast audio-only in order to protect his privacy.

It is not clear why the Inquiry chose to pander to the desires of this abusive perpetrator and deny the public video access to important evidence, despite Thomson’s relatively recent photo and real name being in the public domain.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

This hearing was part of the Inquiry’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 1’, which is examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad, 1993-2008.

Thomson was questioned by Counsel to the Inquiry, David Barr KC. The full transcripts and audio for each day can be found on the Inquiry’s hearing pages for 5 November, 6 November, 10 November.

As there is no video from the hearings, it is important to report that spectators in the public gallery described Thomson answering many of the initial questions with a smirk or a wry smile. From his body language, he appeared to be enjoying himself, being asked about his time as an undercover officer.

But later on, as the questioning moved on to the many serious matters of his multiple wrongdoings, his demeanour changed, and he became visibly less comfortable. This is the kind of important detail the public misses when the Inquiry refuses to broadcast video of the spycops giving their evidence.

When specific documents are mentioned in this report, we give their Inquiry reference numbers. If the Inquiry has published them, the numbers are hyperlinked.

However, at the time of publication, three months after the hearings, the majority of the 67 documents we cite in this report are still unpublished. It is absurd that the Inquiry thinks it is fulfilling its purpose when it hasn’t got round to publishing the evidence it is citing.

Questioning went back and forth on topics a lot over the three days, so this report has been organised according to themes in the evidence rather than going through it day by day.

This is a long report. Use the links below to jump to a particular topic.

A Known Liar
The major lies told before the hearing began

Misuse of Fake Identities
Stealing Kevin Crossland’s identity long before Thomson was undercover, fraudulent use of documents

Abusive Relationships
Sara, Wendy and Ellie; harassment and manipulation after his deployment ended

Targeting and Deployment
Hunt saboteurs, Shamrock Farm, the growing remit of the NPOIU

Participation in Crime
Public disorder and ‘Operation Lime’ – the gunpowder plot

Foreign Travel
Going abroad with and without authorisation

Intelligence and Tradecraft
Low value reports, racism, sexism, and violation of legal privilege

HN26 ‘Christine Green’
Thomson’s contemporary who left the police to marry a hunt sab

Management Accountability & Post-Deployment Dishonesty
Introduction of RIPA regulations, withdrawal and disciplinary action, claims about mental health

Conclusions
The absence of conscience, remorse and credibility

A Known Liar

At the start of this set of hearings in October 2025, David Barr KC’s opening statement to Tranche 3 gave a summary of what would be heard in the following weeks. He singled out Thomson’s dishonesty:

‘One thing is certain: Mr Thomson has, on his own admission, told many lies to date. He has lied not only to those he mixed with whilst deployed but also to his managers and to the Inquiry. His credibility is very much an issue.’

Now that Thomson was at the Inquiry in person, Barr began by reading Thomson’s witness statement into the evidence. He specified:

‘You have provided a witness statement to the Inquiry, in fact a series of witness statements. I am referring to the last and the longest of those witness statements.’ [UCPI0000035553].

Barr later noted that several of Thomson’s written statements were retractions of lies he had told in previous statements, offering excuses for his mendacious behaviour.

Thomson was questioned about many issues that arose from the evidence of ‘Sara’, ‘Ellie’, ‘Wendy’, ‘L3’, and Liisa Crossland who we heard from in previous hearings.

Barr went on to explore those lies with him in more detail on the last day of questioning. We were shown Thomson’s October 2017 witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000035199]. In it, he asserted that he never had inappropriate relationships with Sara, Ellie or Wendy, and even claimed to have never heard Ellie’s name.

Thomson admitted these were bare-faced lies, and that he deliberately and dishonestly sought to mislead the Inquiry. He claims this was to avoid being exposed as having conducted deceitful sexual relationships and losing his anonymity, and tries to suggest it was only ever intended to be a temporary lie.

We were then shown a statement he made in April 2018 [UCPI0000035223]. In it, Thomson states:

‘This statement is intended to correct parts of the account I submitted to the Inquiry immediately before the closed hearing on 17th October 2017, held to consider my application for anonymity, and as importantly to allow me to apologise to the Inquiry for my comments in particular, and my approach in general.’

Barr asked Thomson why he made that apology:

‘Q. Was it also to try to give the impression to the Inquiry that you were contrite and now coming clean?

A. I was contrite.

Q. And coming clean?

A. I hope so.

Q. Let’s have a look at that.’

In the second statement Thomson admitted he did have relationships with Sara and Ellie, but described the former as ‘a brief sexual relationship over a few weeks’ and the latter as ‘lasting a number of months’. There is no mention that he had sex with Ellie as late as 2015, fifteen years after the relationship began.

Barr pointed out that the apology came after the Inquiry had written to Thomson to inform him that his cover name would be made public. It was only a matter of time before Ellie and Sara would be able to tell the Inquiry about the relationships themselves.

The fact that Thomson has repeatedly told proven lies to the Inquiry in the past clearly framed Barr’s approach to his answers during the hearings, and set the tone for all of the evidence we heard over the three days.

Misuse of Fake Identities

Thomson committed a dizzying list of deceitful, fraudulent and illegal acts while undercover, involving the creation of false identities and the manipulation of ID documents.

Thomson used the official cover name ‘James Straven’. He says that creating an undercover persona by stealing a dead child’s identity was briefly mentioned to him when he was first sounded out for joining the SDS, but he never spoke again to any other SDS officers about how to do it.

The practice was no longer in use when he joined. When he was creating his ‘legend’ he was directly told by his managers HN216 Keith Edmondson and HN10 Bob Lambert not to steal a dead child’s identity.

‘James Straven’ was a fictitious identity, not based on any real individual, and he is not aware of anyone ever researching or testing the ‘James Straven’ legend.

KEVIN CROSSLAND

Despite this, Thomson did use an alternative (and seemingly unauthorised) identity, ‘Kevin Crossland’, which he stole from a dead child.

The real Kevin Crossland died in a plane crash in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia in 1966, when he was 5 years old. We heard evidence from Liisa Crossland on 4 November about Kevin’s life and the damage Thomson has caused her family.

One extremely striking feature of Thomson’s theft of Kevin Crossland’s identity is that he seemingly obtained the birth certificate in 1991, five years before he joined the SDS. This strongly suggests that he was already corrupt and criminally minded, even before he became an undercover officer.

A copy of Kevin’s birth certificate [MPS-0526867] was made on 9 July 1991. Barr pointed out that it bears a Special Branch reference number, SB/309/476.

Thomson claims he does not know what that number is, but states that he would have made the copy as a fairly junior operative in Special Branch, insisting he doesn’t remember how he came across it, nor how he still had it in his possession when he joined the SDS five years later.

We were then shown Kevin’s death certificate [UCPI0000038350] which records the death occurring in a plane crash in Ljubljana. In his witness statement, Thomson says he knew Kevin had died abroad, but in his oral evidence he claimed this may be the first time he had seen the death certificate and that he couldn’t remember whether he knew that Kevin died in a plane crash.

Thomson says he wants to apologise again to Liisa Crossland and knows how hard it must have been for her to give evidence. However, his apology was significantly undermined by the evidence we then heard about his extensive and apparently criminal misuse of Kevin’s identity.

We were shown an Experian search for electoral roll information [MPS-0722300]. It shows two names registered at James Thomson’s cover address: James Straven and Kevin Crossland. Neither man existed, both were fake identities being used by Thomson.

Thomson says he knew it was wrong and illegal to register Crossland’s name on the electoral roll, and that he did this so he could use the Crossland identity if he was ever arrested, to do bail checks.

However, the one time we know he was arrested, he gave the name ‘James Straven’.

We were shown records of both ‘James Straven’ and James Thomson making payments to what appear to be private detective agencies [MPS-0719722] (Thomson claims this is a mistake and he was in fact buying flagstones for his garden).

However, he does not deny that, by the time of his SDS deployment ending in early 2002, he had applied for a driving licence and attempted to open a bank account in the name of Kevin Crossland.

We were shown a letter from London Electricity saying Kevin Crossland had been the registered customer at James Thomson’s cover address since 28 January 2001, and a letter from British Telecom about registering a phone line in the name of Kevin Crossland.

Crossland was also the name on council tax bills and water bills for Thomson’s cover address (all these utility documents are in MPS-0526867).

Thomson agrees that he knew at the time that all of this was illegal. It never occurred to him that it was immoral, but he says he realises that now.

Thomson’s theft of the Crossland identity was uncovered by his managers and he was challenged on it in early 2002. A meeting note from 19 March 2002 [MPS-0745388] records Thomson claiming he had stolen Kevin Crossland’s identity for ‘operational safety’. Thomson now says this claim was a lie.

He says he struggled with management generally, and that he cannot rationalise now what his plans were for the Crossland identity.

He admits that he wanted to retain James Straven’s life – the people, the sexual relationships, and the liberated lifestyle – which was completely at odds with the ‘buttoned-down Met Police existence’.

He was expecting to be sacked from the police and was building the Crossland identity as a backup.

FRAUDULENT USE OF DOCUMENTS

In addition to his illegal misuse of Kevin Crossland’s identity, Thomson obtained numerous passports in his ‘James Straven’ identity. He admits to removing pages from them to conceal unauthorised travel from his managers, which we explore in more detail in the section on Foreign Travel.

We were shown a report dated 8 March 2002 [MPS-0719569] which says that Thomson also had four driving licences in his ‘Straven’ identity. He accepts this. They are listed as the original, two replacements he obtained himself, and a fourth he asked the office to get.

The fourth licence is registered to the address of an activist, and an internal SDS debrief document explains the ruse [MPS-0722282]:

‘In conversation with the SDS office it was established that if his address was so remote that public transport was ineffective and he would be unemployable without a vehicle, a court would be disposed, under existing European guidelines, to merely fine him and put points on his (thus far clean) licence.

As a result a new licence was obtained showing JS resident at one of his weary’s addresses in deepest Sussex. This had the added benefit of having the ungodly involved in a small deceit against authority, which further enhanced JS’s legend.

Again the office was aware and seemed to agree it was a frightfully good wheeze. In the event the prosecution, like two before it, failed (more because JS, unlike JT, enjoyed the luck of the devil than because of any strategic thinking).’

From this it is clear that Thomson was prosecuted at least three times for traffic offences in his Straven identity, and supportive SDS management thought that committing fraud to deceive the courts was a ‘frightfully good wheeze’.

Another curious aspect of Thomson’s deployment is that, unlike most of the spycops we have heard about so far, he really did do the ‘cover job’, the employment he told activists that he had.

As James Straven, Thomson was a location finder for film and television. He actually gets credits in several productions, including the 1998 TV drama Coming Home, which starred Joanna Lumley and Peter O’Toole.

Throughout his deployment, Thomson was visiting his cover employment’s office one or two days a week. During filming, he would sometimes spend two full weeks on a set.

He says that he found the cover employment interesting. It included some travel, and he got to meet famous people like O’Toole and Lumley. It also meant he was receiving money over and above his overtime-inflated Metropolitan Police salary.

Thomson says he spent the wages he received from his cover employment in his ‘Straven’ identity. He had multiple credit cards and bank accounts, which he used for anything he would prefer his management not to know about.

The overall picture we are left with is of a deeply deceitful and duplicitous man who had significant criminal tendencies well before he started working for the SDS.

Abusive Relationships

Thomson has now admitted to conducting two deceitful sexual relationships while undercover. He acknowledges that neither of the women he deceived would have consented to have sex with him if they had known his true identity.

Thomson says he was divorced when he was recruited into the SDS and was in a new ‘off and on’ relationship. He says that managers preferred ‘a stable background’, but that their investigation into the stability of his relationship was limited.

He and his partner went through short-term breakups that he did not report to his managers, although he was expected to do so. He was concerned they would terminate his deployment if they knew his real relationship was on the rocks.

Significantly, Thomson recalls speaking to a number of former undercover officers whilst he was working in the back office, preparing to deploy.

He was mentored by ex-undercover officer HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’. We heard from Liz Fuller in the Inquiry’s Tranche 2 hearings about how she was deceived into abusive sexual relationship by HN1.

Thomson claims HN1 never talked to him about sexual activity during deployments, but did give him advice on how to infiltrate animal rights activism:

‘He described them and their world quite accurately. He described sort of, I would say, the type of people… what was acceptable, what wasn’t.’

He was asked if he spoke to HN2 Andy Coles, who groomed a vulnerable teenager into a sexual relationship while he was undercover, and went on to author the notorious ‘SDS Tradecraft Manual’ [MPS-0527597]). Thomson says he cannot remember talking to Coles, but it is likely that he did.

Barr also asked Thomson about the Tradecraft Manual itself, which offers deeply unpleasant advice to officers about deceiving women into sex, and advocates ‘fleeting and disastrous relationships’.

Thomson says the manual was regularly consulted for meetings with deployed officers. This is in contrast to the claims of other officers who say they never saw it at all. However, Thomson says neither he nor anyone else ever discussed the passage on sexual relationships.

Thomson says he knew his contemporary HN14 Jim Boyling well. Boyling deceived at least three women in his target group into sexual relationships, before going on to have children with one of them. Thomson recalls ‘chatter’ within the SDS about the fact that Boyling’s partner, ‘Rosa’ was trying to find him after his deployment ended and had got hold of a phone number for the SDS office.

Thomson remembers speaking to his manager Bob Lambert about the work. But again, he claims these conversations were never about sex.

‘He was a Detective Inspector, as you said, so sort of more general advice as well. A lot more on the process, about how slow to take it and so on…

Lots of stuff about cover employment, back story. So what bits of legend work and don’t work, what that should look like…

Q. Any advice about how close to get to the activists you were seeking to report on?

A. I think as close as you could.’

Lambert’s earlier period as an undercover officer in the 1980s is one of the most controversial deployments. He gave evidence over seven days in 2024, including about how he deceived four women into sexual relationships, and fathered a child with ‘Jacqui’.

Lambert is expected to return to the Inquiry in 2026 to give evidence about his time as a manager of the SDS, including his oversight of Thomson.

The upshot of all this is that the newly recruited Thomson was introduced to the job by HN1, Coles, Boyling and Lambert, all of them known abusers.

It really brings it home that, by the late 1990s, the SDS resembled a predatory grooming gang, with the worst offenders being promoted and put in charge of initiating new members. It is therefore unsurprising that Thomson’s would become one of the most disturbing deployments to date.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH SARA

‘Sara’ joined the Croydon hunt saboteurs in 1998. She met Thomson on one of her first hunts, in the autumn of that year. Her evidence is that Thomson asked her out to dinner.

‘Q. You got on well?

A. Yes.

Q. And you called her?

A. Mm-hm.

Q. What caused you to call her?

A. I can’t actually remember calling her. I don’t dispute that’s what happened.

Q. This is calling her to ask her out for dinner?

A. Mm-hm.’

This kind of evasive response is very common from officers like Thomson when they are asked about the details of their abusive behaviour. They don’t deny the facts, but neither do they properly admit them. It is dismissive and offensive. Their identical claims to have no memory of events (without disputing the woman’s account) are made so often and consistently that they lose all credibility.

Asked why he asked Sara out for dinner, Thomson replies:

‘Beyond the obvious attraction, various other things, my own psyche, loneliness, I don’t know… Sexual attraction, certainly…

Q. Can we take it this was done purely for your sexual gratification?

A. No, I think that’s unfair. I think it was a genuine relationship.’

Describing their abusive, deceitful and sexually exploitative behaviour as ‘genuine relationships’ is another offensive SDS trope we have seen time and time again. Like other sexually abusive officers at the Inquiry, Thomson has conceded that he understands that she would never have let him near her if she’d known who he was, and yet is unwilling to admit what that really means.

Thomson claims that he and Sara had a ‘strong connection’, although he also claims not to have known that she wanted the relationship to become long-term. He accepts that he saw Sara about twice a week, and that their relationship was well known within the small social circle they were moving in.

‘Q. You told her that you loved her in 1999, didn’t you?

A. I accept that…

Q. Why did you tell her that you loved her?

A. Because I did.

Q. There was an elephant in the room though, wasn’t there?

A. Certainly.

Q. You were not who you said you were?

A. Correct.

Q. You were a serving police officer?

A. Yes.

Q. On duty?

A. Yes.

Q. She wouldn’t have consented to the relationship or to sex if she had known who you really were, would she?

A. I think not. Sorry, I know not.’

Thomson seemed visibly uncomfortable during questioning about Sara. He gave mostly monosyllabic yes/no answers, not disputing Sara’s account but claiming not to remember or not to know what his thoughts and motivations were at the time.

He says he can’t remember telling Sara that his ex-partner had tricked him into having a child, but agrees that he probably said it because the ages of his children would have meant he had them very young.

This is because Thomson was lying to Sara about his age, claiming to be several years younger than he really was; another trait so common among SDS officers that it was surely training and tradecraft.

REPORTING ON SARA

The first mention of Sara in Thomson’s reporting is from March 1999 [MPS-0001923]. It is an intelligence report about an animal sanctuary that claims Sara works there part time, and Croydon hunt saboteurs are forging close ties with the sanctuary:

‘In the near future the entire sab group will be attending the sanctuary to assist in the construction of a duck pond.’

In addition to the total absurdity of a police intelligence report about a duck pond, Barr pointed out that the report is inaccurate. In fact, the only link between the sab group and the sanctuary was that Wendy and Sara were involved in both. Thomson reported Sara as being employed by the sanctuary, which wasn’t true.

‘Q. That’s not really close ties between the group and the sanctuary, is it? It is more the fact that two animal lovers are both hunt saboteurs and work at an animal sanctuary?

A. No, but it was a link across to the hunt saboteurs.

Q. “Sara” didn’t work there, did she?

A. No.

Q. So this information is wrong… Were you trying to place “Sara” at the sanctuary, making the connection with Croydon hunt saboteurs to justify reporting on “Sara” and spending time at the animal sanctuary?…

Doesn’t the phrase “entire sab group will be attending the sanctuary” overstate the position?…

A. Yes, I would agree with that.’

BREAKING UP WITH SARA, PARTIALLY

Sara’s account of the breakup of her relationship with Thomson was that he disappeared over the Christmas period in 1999. She couldn’t contact him for about two weeks.

He says he assumes he was with his family, and answered all further questions about the breakup with ‘I accept that’ whilst saying he cannot remember.

In fact, Thomson spun Sara a cruel story about experiences of childhood rape and sexual abuse that he used as an excuse to end the sexual relationship. Asked why he did that, he dismissively said:

‘That was in my legend anyway… The abuse and so on.’

Barr noted that there is no written record of any mention of child abuse in James Thomson’s legend.

Despite this, Thomson claims he’s sure it was not something he invented just to tell Sara. He insisted that his managers were fully aware that a history of child sexual abuse made up part of his false identity, and he remembers talking to Detective Sergeant Webb about it.

He says he cannot recall giving any thought to how any of this might affect Sara, and he tries to deny how manipulative it was.

‘Q. If it wasn’t highly manipulative, what was it?

A. I am not disputing that it wasn’t, I just didn’t see it like that. I saw it as a continuation of a genuine friendship.

Q. How could it be a genuine friendship when it was so deceitful from your side?

A. As I said, that was my perspective. I fully accept it can’t have been, and yet I believed it was.

Q. An extremely selfish way to behave?

A. Certainly.’

Thomson alternately claims that he cared about Sara whilst also admitting that he never thought about her feelings or how his behaviour might affect her. By now, he seems a lot less relaxed about the questions.

Thomson remained close to Sara and very shortly after their breakup, in early 2000, he travelled out to Goa, India to meet her there and visit an animal sanctuary. Again, he claims he has no memory of this:

‘I can’t remember it. I don’t dispute it might have happened.

Q. Assuming it happened, unauthorised?

A. I presume so.’

This is just one of many highly controversial trips abroad taken by Thomson which are dealt with below. Sara was also persuaded to join Thomson in France on holiday during what now turns out to have been the extraordinary ‘Operation Lime’ plan to fit up hunt sabs on firearms charges.

Sara moved abroad, and Thomson encouraged her to do so, giving no thought whatsoever to how he was influencing her important life choices. Thomson admits he stayed in contact with Sara by email long after she left the country.

We were also shown his phone’s call logs [MPS-0719722], which show 48 calls to Sara, who is described as the ‘ex-girlfriend of L1’. Thomson accepts Sara had never been L1’s girlfriend.

‘Q. Might it have been that you were deliberately trying to misrepresent events to throw managers off the scent of your own misconduct?

A. Entirely possible.’

Sara then became the focus of additional secret police attention. We were told that management documents exist that talk about ‘protecting’ Thomson from Sara, because she lived close to his ex-wife and children, and so there was a risk of her seeing him in his real life.

Thomson admits that he knew where Sara lived when he started the sexual relationship. He knew this put his deployment at risk and says it was stupidity that led him to put his sexual gratification ahead of basic security.

This is part of another pattern we have seen: entirely innocent people met SDS officers in their undercover roles and were then placed under intensive surveillance, simply because they lived near the officers’ real homes.

People were physically followed in order to establish patterns in their lives. There is evidence that attempts were made to influence where they lived (for example Wendy’s house purchase, examined below).

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH WENDY

The first of Thomson’s intelligence reports to mention Wendy is dated 22 August 1998 and refers to the Old Burstow Hunt’s first cubbing meeting of the 1998-1999 season [MPS-0247867].

Wendy gave live evidence to the Inquiry on 23 October 2025, during which she made clear that she is sure she met Thomson long before the Old Burstow Hunt event.

Thomson accepts that he met her early in his deployment, in 1997, when she was just 17 years old and lived at home with her mother. He became part of her intimate circle of friends, but tries to play their relationship down in his evidence:

‘Q. You became very close friends, didn’t you?

A. We were certainly friends, yes…

Q. To say that you were a close associate would be to understate the position, the reality was you were very close friends?

A. In which case I will accept that.’

In fact, Thomson supported Wendy during her mother’s long illness and death. Thomson says he can’t remember that, although he added:

‘I accept that if I had that opportunity I would have taken it, yes…

Q. You don’t remember the protracted course of somebody dying who is close to one of the people you are mixing with?

A. No.

Q. Why do you think that is?

A. I don’t know.

Q. Is it because you just didn’t care?

A. I hope not.’

Thomson also advised Wendy to split up with her then-boyfriend.

YOU WEREN’T MEANT TO FIND OUT

We were shown an intelligence report where Thomson mentions that breakup, along with the personal lives and sexuality of several members of the Croydon hunt sab group, in flippant and disrespectful terms [MPS-0003413].

Thomson defended the deeply personal nature of the reporting:

‘As I say, I reported anything. They were obviously always intended for the very small audience anyway, and certainly not for the subject to ever read it. So I can only apologise for that.

Q. Was there generally a culture of being disparaging about activists?

A. Yes, I suppose that’s fair.’

Wendy encouraged Sara, and later Ellie, to have relationships with this man who she believed was her good friend. She also recalls a number of instances where Thomson tried to create a sexual frisson in his relationship with her. Thomson denies this but adds ‘there’s lots of things I can’t see myself doing that I have done.’

He is asked whether he is trying to claim Wendy posed a physical threat or was a violent activist. Thomson says no, but then claims that ‘she had a temper and she was a committed activist’. His evidence in this section was frankly all over the place.

The most shocking evidence we heard about Thomson’s friendship with Wendy concerned the fact that, after her mother died, she bought a house very close to where Thomson’s ex-wife and children lived. We were shown a management document [MPS-0719701] which refers to ‘attempts to disrupt this purchase having failed’.

Thomson claims not to remember what he and his managers did. He is sure he tried to put her off, though he claims this was limited to telling her there were better areas to live.

However, Wendy recalls significant issues with probate. Her solicitor told her probate sometimes took up to six months, but with her mother’s simple uncontested will it would be much swifter. But it took six months to the day. She nearly lost the home she’d set her heart on.

This all indicates that the SDS actually tried to interfere with the will and the house-buying process.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH ELLIE

Thomson started a relationship with Ellie very soon after Sara moved abroad.

Ellie wasn’t an animal rights activist, she was a friend of Wendy’s who worked at the same animal sanctuary. Thomson asked Wendy to set them up.

Again, he claims he can’t remember that, but he accepts it. Ellie was 21 at the time. Thomson told her he was 33. In fact he was 37.

‘Q. For a 37-year-old serving police officer undercover to initiate a sexual relationship with a 21-year old woman is an aggravating feature of your deception of her, isn’t it?

A. Yes…

Q. A very conscious deception of “Ellie” as to your real age?

A. Yes, it was all a deception.’

Thomson’s replies became quite petulant and defensive during Barr’s questioning about Ellie.

Asked why he started a sexual relationship with her, Thomson replied:

‘I don’t know that I did start a sexual relationship with “Ellie”. I think I started a relationship that became sexual, which is not quite the same thing.

Q. Why did you start an intimate relationship with “Ellie”?

A. I liked her. I liked her.

Q. So, again, your own sexual gratification?

A. In amongst the other parts of “like”, yes.’

At the time, Ellie had lost her job following sexual harassment by her boss. She was homeless, and unemployed.

‘Q. To take advantage sexually of a woman who was not only vastly younger than you, but also vulnerable, young and naive was a further aggravating feature of your deception of “Ellie”, wasn’t it?

A. I agree that it was. I am not sure I saw her as vulnerable.

Q. Is that because you really weren’t thinking about her feelings at all?

A. Entirely possible.

Q. Thinking entirely about yourself and your own sexual gratification?

A. Yes. I don’t like the word “entirely”, but I won’t dispute it.’

Thomson was Ellie’s first boyfriend and her first love. He accepts that he knew that. She thought it was a committed monogamous relationship, but he was actually in a relationship with someone else. Thomson did not use condoms and he got Ellie to use to use other contraception to avoid pregnancy.

Barr asked Thomson about his use of ‘mirroring’ – reflecting a person’s interests, feelings and personality back at them in order to make them feel a connection – and other manipulation of Ellie, to which Thomson replied:

‘You are reading a lot into it. I don’t think that’s fair.’

Yet all these elements are strikingly similar to how other women had been deceived by earlier SDS officers who were Thomson’s superiors. Identifying a vulnerable, much younger woman, and then grooming her into a relationship is exactly what Bob Lambert had done with Jacqui, and Andy Coles with Jessica. As with the lying about age, it seems too much of a coincidence.

Thomson took Ellie on holiday to Indonesia and Singapore during another of his unauthorised trips abroad, which are examined in more detail below.

BREAKING UP WITH ELLIE, PARTIALLY

Ellie had been with Thomson for about ten months when he told her, in January 2002, that he had to move to the United States because his ex-wife and children were moving there.

That was supposed to be part of a longer exit strategy from his deployment, but Thomson’s managers had, by then, begun to uncover the extent of his extensive fraud and other misconduct, and his deployment was brought to a rapid end.

Thomson had to tell Ellie he was leaving sooner than expected, and he pretended to leave the UK in March 2002. He maintained the sexual relationship right up until he supposedly left. He accepts that there was no real ending of the relationship, because he immediately began to deliberately lay the ground for it to continue.

‘Q. You didn’t want your deployment to end, did you?

A. I didn’t.

Q. And you were a man who ignored your managers when you didn’t like what they had to say, and you were going to stay in touch with “Ellie” despite being withdrawn, weren’t you?

A. Yes.’

HARASSMENT AND MANIPULATION AFTER HIS DEPLOYMENT ENDED

Thomson remained in contact with both Ellie and Wendy for sixteen years after his deployment ended, from 2002 to 2018, by email, phone and meeting up in person. This continued even after the spycops scandal broke and after the Undercover Policing Inquiry had been announced.

We were shown an email to Wendy that he sent on 30 March 2014 [UCPI0000038209]. In it he lies about his life, claiming to be in Canada and returning home to LA (in fact he was still a police officer, living in London). He says he is in an airport sat opposite the Victoria’s Secret store watching rolling adverts of women in lingerie for hours:

‘Let me know if you think that’s sad at all won’t you – even I might get a little jaded by the time I fly’

His regular emails asked about her life and the other activists he had targeted while undercover. He claims that this was ‘just because they were people I knew and had liked.’

Thomson says he doesn’t know if he would have ever ended his contact with Ellie and Wendy if his real identity hadn’t been exposed. He admits that his conduct was extremely harmful and unnecessary.

In her appearance at the Inquiry two weeks before Thomson’s, Ellie gave detailed evidence about the ongoing contact.

Thomson claims not to remember details, but does not dispute anything Ellie has said. He admits he always enjoyed seeing her, and they were ‘like a couple’. He accepts that he prolonged the romantic relationship, picking up where they had left off.

We were then shown some of his emails to her. Barr systematically went through the sexualised comments, including repeated references to sexual frustration, to ‘drooling’ about her ‘in entirely inappropriate ways’, references to a ‘uniform fetish’, and Thomson fantasising about Ellie naked in his office – which is particularly worrying considering where he worked.

We saw an email from October 2011 that is very heavy emotionally and includes him complaining about how sexually frustrated he was, having recently seen her but not had sex.

It is remarkable that he was still sending these emails even after spycop EN12 Mark Kennedy had been uncovered and the scandal of undercover relationships was front page news. Thomson says he didn’t make a connection between himself and these things.

In another email, dated 13 September 2011, Thomson asked Ellie to send photos of herself in lingerie to help with his sexual frustration. Thomson tries to claim he was not being serious, and yet he repeated it in later emails. He claims the persistent requests were not pressurising her, and tries to characterise it as a ‘running joke’.

He often projected their relationship into the future, describing how it will be fun to meet up when Ellie is ‘old and grey’, and he is ‘a ghost’. He admits that he was stringing her along.

Ellie has said that she never got over the relationship with ‘James Straven’, because real men couldn’t measure up to his fabricated persona. He accepts he manipulated her emotions, and affected her ability to have real world relationships.

On 24 June 2015, Thomson met up with Ellie and they did have sex. It is pointed out that this sex with Ellie was soon after the start of the Inquiry. He, incredibly, claims that in his mind he did not connect the two things.

In December 2017, the Inquiry ruled that it would release Thomson’s cover name, ‘James Straven’. In 2018, Thomson finally told Ellie that he was an undercover officer. He didn’t tell her his real name during the call. He didn’t apologise.

He now says he didn’t realise that he hadn’t apologised. He says he never gave Ellie ‘the right sort’ of thought at all, and never once considered her feelings, because his conduct has always been directed by his own self-interest.

This extreme self-centred thinking, not just during deployments but afterwards, is yet another running theme among spycops officers.

Targeting and deployment

INFILTRATING THE HUNT SABS

It is notable that although Thomson was initially deployed into the Brixton hunt saboteurs, most of his infiltration was into the Croydon hunt sabs. He sought to defend that in his evidence by claiming they were more or less one and the same:

‘The organisational end was the Croydon bit by that time. Brixton hunt saboteurs sort of turned up.

Q. Would it be fair then in the light of that answer to say that you deployed into both Brixton and Croydon hunt saboteurs from the outset, or was there a progression from Brixton to Croydon?

A. I can’t remember the exact order, but certainly it was close.’

However, he went on to differentiate between the two groups, claiming that Brixton hunt sabs were more likely to attack the hunters, whereas Croydon would focus on saving the fox.

‘Brixton would sort of kind of turn up for the ruckus and they would tend to go towards hunt supporters and the people running the hunt and the hunt itself…

Insult them, spit at them, try and get people off horses. Try and basically start a confrontation. Just encourage and then join in a fight.’

However, when asked exactly how the sabs would get people off their horses, it became clear that this was more like an act of self-defence against mounted attackers with whips:

‘If they tried to swing a crop, obviously that gave an opportunity to grab that and pull and so on.’

In fact, Thomson accepted that he only ever witnessed minor criminal damage and minor assaults by hunt sabs. Barr says he gets the impression it was more a question of goading by sabs and violence by hunters:

‘Q. Did you see hunt saboteurs throwing the first punch?

A. I am not sure. I can’t remember a specific incidence of that.’

Thomson also said that sabbing got more violent over the course of his deployment. Again, he was asked who would have committed the first violent acts in that escalation:

‘I wouldn’t like to say. I think I am probably biased, because I would say the hunt were more likely to, and I was on the other side.’

We were shown his first report, dated 22 February 1997, about upcoming animal rights protests [MPS-0000168]. He said he doesn’t know if the information in his first report was publicly available or not, but he accepts that at that stage, his infiltration was limited:

‘I would have turned up at a couple of sabs’.

Barr points out that this demonstrates that a very superficial shallow infiltration was all that was needed to get that kind of information.

GOING DEEPER

In May 1997, a file note [MPS-0247080] written by his manager HN10 Bob Lambert, just four months into Thomson’s deployment, recorded that:

‘The activists seem to have been impressed by [Thomson’s] ability to handle himself and face up to violent threats from hunt supporters and the like.’

Thomson agreed that this is probably accurate, although again, he cannot recall a specific incident.

Thomson claims that he doesn’t remember ever being known by the nicknames ‘Posh Sab’ or ‘James Blonde’ whilst he was deployed.

He claims he ‘would have noticed’. All the civilian witnesses he spied on insist that they remember calling him these names to his face.

The May 1997 file note also describes:

‘On Monday, 5 May he received his first in-depth grilling from his new associates. He appears to have handled this well.’

Asked about this, Thomson says:

‘It was a back room in a pub in south London. And just lots and lots of questions… My interest, vegetarianism, veganism, a little bit about where I had been, why I hadn’t been on sabs before.
That sort of thing…

Q. As to the demeanour, were these threatening questions or were they just gentle inquisition?

A. I felt slightly under pressure, as far as I can recall. I didn’t feel physically at risk. I wasn’t looking at the windows or anything that I can remember…

Q. If you had not satisfied your questioners, what do you think would have happened?… Was your feeling that you would have been under any physical threat?

A. Yes. They were naturally violent, or some of them, to be fair. Some of them were naturally violent…

Q. Might that have been a subjective fear rather than one with an objective basis?

A. Absolutely.’

One spycop after another infiltrated hunt sabs and described them as seriously violent. Under examination, none of the officers can cite any instances, but vividly describe serious violence from hunters and supporters. HN2 Andy Coles even wrote in the SDS Tradecraft Manual [MPS-0527597]:

‘I know that in the future I will have nothing but contempt for fox hunters and in particular their terriermen.’

Despite all this, the SDS did not infiltrate hunts, and even now they insist that sabs were a deserving target for spying. This proves that the SDS wasn’t focused on the risk of violence and disorder, but rather on threats to established social hierarchies.

ACTUAL DANGER AND VIOLENCE

We were then shown an SDS memo dated 8 August 1997 [MPS-0247206] which records that Thomson was in fact hospitalised in his cover identity on 10 July 1997, with a fractured collar bone and jaw.

But it was not the hunt sabs who caused those injuries: he was attacked by hunt supporters on a Countryside Alliance march.

Asked about the incident, he says his managers were sympathetic. However, Thomson himself cannot remember how it happened as he was concussed and suffered amnesia.

This was not the only instance where Thomson was injured. A file note dated 21 November 1998 [MPS-0001577] records serious injuries to Thomson’s jaw, back and legs after being attacked by hunt supporters with golf clubs when sabotaging a hunt in Kent.

Thomson claims he cannot remember who else was there when he was attacked. The file states that the attack left Thomson:

‘in cheerful mood and upbeat about his increased credibility.’

A further injury report was filed on 18 November 1999 [MPS-0002618], when Thomson slipped a disc, which made it harder for him to participate in sabbing. He said it slowed him down.

Despite the SDS’s own files showing overwhelming evidence of violence coming predominantly from the hunters, we were shown an intelligence report from 4 August 1997 [MPS-0000483] in which Thomson claims southern England hunt sab groups had ‘hard reputations’.

Questioned about it, he admits that numerically there would almost invariably been far more hunt supporters than sabs. He further admits that it was common for sabs to be unfairly arrested by police:

‘I don’t know what powers they were using. You would be sort of stuck somewhere and quite likely released once the hunt had finished or gone.’

The report claimed that saboteurs were being asked to wear similar black clothing to make identification and post-hunt arrests more difficult. However, Thomson said he was never asked to help identify sabs from photographs, even if there had been incidents of violence, stating:

‘I was there for intelligence, not evidence.’

We were then shown a series of Thomson’s reports from the 1998-1999 hunt season. One report from 23 March 1998 [MPS-0000959] describes the hunt supporters coming off ‘second best’ to the sabs and being attacked while they hid with the police.

Barr was obviously quite struck by this report:

‘Wouldn’t that have been quite a striking and memorable incident.. one which certainly, as depicted here, is violence perpetrated by hunt saboteurs that goes well beyond lawful self-defence?’

Thomson seemed unimpressed, and claims to have no memory of the incident. Despite this, he denies any possibility that he might have exaggerated his report:

‘If I have reported it, then it happened.’

Given the fantastical nature of such a lot of SDS reporting (including the staggering claims made by Thomson about Operation Lime) this statement is meaningless in terms of establishing historical accuracy. Nonetheless, it offers an interesting insight into the SDS mindset and the way they approached intelligence: if we reported it, then it happened (and not the other way around).

MORE NON-SPECIFIC ALLEGATIONS OF VIOLENCE

Another report, which is undated but which the Inquiry has placed within this period, refers to Croydon hunt sabs supposedly planning an attack on a local fascist [MPS-0001541]. Barr points out this is an unusual report:

‘It is not about animal rights, is it? It’s about an alleged plot by the Croydon hunt saboteurs physically to attack a man for his far, or perceived far, right political views…

Did that actually happen?… Why would the Croydon hunt saboteurs, an animal rights group, plan an attack on a fascist?’

Thomson is characteristically vague in his responses, claiming that sabs were very anarchic and that:

‘The right wing were the enemy… across sabbing and animal rights generally.’

He claims he cannot remember whether anything came of the supposed plan. He accepts that if a man had been attacked he would have reported it, but then immediately adds more vague allegations of the same kind:

‘I mean attacks in that area did happen, especially after drink. But they tended to be spontaneous ones.’

The justification for Thomson’s spying on the hunt sabs seems tenuous at best. By then, hunting was on the way to being made illegal, and we saw notes from a strategy meeting dated 2 January 2000 [MPS-0003394]:

‘Sabbing will remain an important area, particularly as the ground is prepared for the anti-hunt bill to be presented in Parliament.’

Barr then showed us a document claiming that Thomson had close contact with activists from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). The ALF was one of the SDS’s main bogeymen at the time, regarded as the most extreme tier of animal rights activism.

The document is a file note dated 22 May 2000 [MPS-0003403], signed by HN58, the Detective Chief Inspector in charge of the SDS 1997-2001. It refers to Thomson ‘having forged close links with active ALF types.’

However, there is no real evidence to suggest Thomson ever had any links to the ALF, only to the Croydon hunt sabs.

It appears to be another example of the spycops exaggerating their work to the managers, then the managers exaggerating further, an effect repeated as the information went up the chain of intelligence to the higher echelons of the police and Home Office.

Indeed, not only were there no reports from Thomson about the ALF but also, Barr pointed out, the Inquiry actually has very little reporting from Thomson at all in this period.

Asked how much sabbing he actually did in the 2000-2001 and 2001-2002 hunting seasons, Thomson replies:

‘A. I don’t think there was any drop off particularly…

Q. There is reporting about the injury suffered by L4 and responses to that which we will be coming to in due course. But we do not see, as we have done to date, a stream of reporting about hunt sabotage.’

It appears, from the evidence, that Thomson’s decreased reporting about sabbing events may have been due to the changing relationship between the SDS and a new spycop unit, the NPOIU, which we will look at in more detail below.

SHAMROCK FARM

We saw significant reporting by Thomson throughout 1999 about the campaign against Shamrock Farm monkey breeders, Europe’s largest supplier of primates for vivisection.

Thomson reported on large, public and ‘fairly orderly’ demonstrations near the farm, describing them as ‘fairly well, if not heavily, policed.’

His reports also mention ‘home visits’, with activists protesting at the homes of people who owned Shamrock Farm, informing their neighbours of who they lived near. Thomson said he attended a lot of them.

It was put to him that, at the time, home visits could have been legal, but he disputed that fact:

‘The objective was to frighten the people there, or their associates, to make them in turn stop doing what they were doing, or drop the links they had to whichever company it was, depending on the association.

Q. What is the basis for your saying that the intention was to frighten, as opposed to make a point and disagree with what that person was doing by way of legitimate process?

A. I suppose that’s how I remember it.’

In fact, there was no law preventing these kinds of protests until the Criminal Justice & Police Act 2001, something which Thomson, as a serving policing officer working in the animal rights field, really ought to have been aware of.

Thomson’s claim that the aim of the visits was ‘intimidation’ is further undermined by the fact that, despite saying he had attended many of them, he could only recall one instance of criminal damage (a broken window) and one instance where there was an altercation with a neighbour of the targeted house.

It was clear from the documents we saw that, although Thomson was taking part in the actions, he didn’t actually report much specific or pre-emptive intelligence about these protests at all.

Shamrock Farm closed down in 2000. Barr commented:

‘Whether or not that was because of the campaigning may be a separate question… there was some suggestion it may have been because of financial improprieties at Shamrock Farm, but there is another report… [MPS-0003412] dated 25 May 2000.

It says a person, whose name we are protecting, “has discovered, through an employee of the firm, that the arson on [privacy]’s garage was the final ‘straw’ that led to the closure of the premises”.’

It says a lot about the questionable quality of the SDS intelligence we have seen over the past five years of this Inquiry that Barr’s next question was:

‘Do you know whether or not that in fact occurred?’

Thomson can’t remember, and there are no intelligence reports about such an incident. So, Thomson was deep undercover, spying on the Shamrock Farm campaign, but is unable to provide any useful information at all about an arson attack that he alleges got the place closed down. It’s simply not believable.

THE GROWING REMIT OF THE NPOIU

We saw a file note about targeting strategy which recorded a meeting between Thomson and Lambert dated 30 January 1998 [MPS-0247069].

It explores an out-of-London tasking, specifically going down to Hastings, which it describes as ‘an emerging centre of ALF activity’.

Thomson was asked whether there was there any boundary drawn between the Metropolitan Police district and out-of-area activities:

‘Not that I can ever remember, no.

Q. Was a matter of geography ever raised by your managers with you?

A. No… When you say “matter of geography”, I think at the very end of my deployment that was raised, but not at this point.’

Thomson was not specific about what he meant by saying it was raised at the end of his deployment. However, it seems it may well be to do with the formation of a new undercover policing unit.

The National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) was established in 1999, using undercover officers in the same way as the SDS, and targeting the same sort of activities. But unlike the SDS, who, as a Met unit, were restricted to London, the NPOIU had a national remit.

There was a sizeable degree of crossover between the two units. It’s established that SDS Tradecraft Manual author HN2 Andy Coles trained the early NPOIU recruits, and there’s a mysterious gap in HN10 Bob Lambert’s CV at exactly that time.

A file note dated 22 May 2000 [MPS-0003403] reviewing Thomson’s operation states:

‘In view of NPOIU’s ever-expanding remit it is becoming increasingly difficult for SDS to operate effectively outside London on anything other than an occasional basis.’

Most, if not all, fox hunts would have taken place outside of the Metropolitan Police district, and Thomson’s decreased participation in and reporting on hunt sabbing from 2000-2002 may well have been related to that as much as his slipped disc.

Thomson claims not to know about this:

‘I was aware of them. But clearly there is something else going on in terms of who is responsible for what there that I wasn’t really cognisant of.

Q. Was there a feeling, that you were aware of, of the SDS’s work being encroached upon by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit?

A. Not that I can ever remember feeling…

Q. Did you have any direct contact with the National Public Order Intelligence Unit?

A. No.’

SDS AND NPOIU CROSSOVER

There are a number of SDS reports made on NPOIU forms. For example, in November 2025, during the Inquiry’s questioning of trade unionist Frank Smith, we saw that SDS spycop HN104 Carlo Soracci ‘Carlo Neri’ had filed a report on 29 January 2002 on NPOIU forms [MPS-0007725].

It’s unclear whether this was actually the NPOIU also spying on Smith, or whether Soracchi was using their forms for some reason.

Either way, it shows a significant degree of overlap between the two units.

Thomson was also asked about the earlier relationship between the SDS and the Animal Rights National Index (ARNI, which was later subsumed into the NPOIU), specifically whether ARNI was a customer for SDS intelligence. Yet again he was vague and said it didn’t really come up.

However, the impact of that relationship was certainly greater than Thomson is letting on.

Because of the changing remits and the growing role of the NPOIU, SDS manager HN58 suggested that Thomson should begin looking at a withdrawal strategy in May 2000, with early 2001 as a finish date for his deployment (this may be what Thomson meant by the matter of geography coming up at the end).

‘Q. You are recorded as expressing some disappointment at that, and the reasons are then set out.
Is it right that you were disappointed at the prospect of ending your deployment in early 2001?

A. Yes, I am sure it was.

Q. Is that something you felt really pretty strongly about?

A. I suspect so, yes.

Q. Would it be fair to say that your cooperation with this plan was rather begrudging?

A. Yes, I imagine so.’

Thomson’s resistance to the plan to shut down his operation in early 2001, and his desperation to find an excuse to continue, form the backdrop for what subsequently became Operation Lime: his trip to France with a bizarre plot alleging hunt sabs were buying a gun.

Participation in Crime

Asked about participation in crime, Thomson says his manager HN10 Bob Lambert spoke to him about this:

‘We certainly discussed the reporting of it, how that was managed, advance information. We discussed some sort of bits on spontaneous violence and how you deal with them…

Q. Did you discuss the gravity of offence that you might become involved in?

A. Certainly as a relative thing, i.e. you’re there to prevent and mitigate harm. So that’s what you do. In terms of is there an absolute limit, no, I think that was always part of the context.

Q. Were you told that you needed to get advance authority to participate in crime?

A. I was certainly aware of that where possible, yes.

Q. And where not possible?

A. Then you prevent harm, report later.’

Thomson described the process for getting authority to participate in crime:

‘I think I would always have expected it starts with a conversation with the person who is handling you and then they will then decide what sort of level authority it might need.’

Barr pointed out that there is no evidence of a paper trail or any prior authority for any of the crimes Thomson was involved in, with the exception of Operation Lime, which we look at below.

Thomson claimed that he and Lambert did not discuss any specific examples, but that these conversations about participation in crime made up a significant part of the conversations he had with Lambert.

‘I think we discussed scenarios, rather than examples…

What would you do if the group you’re with see someone and decide to attack them, for example. What would you do if they suddenly decide they are going to commit an arson, et cetera.’

This is obviously significant as Lambert himself is accused of having organised and participated in arson attacks against Debenhams department stores. Sadly, Thomson was silent on exactly what Lambert said he should do if his group decided to commit arson.

Barr also asked whether the Home Office guidelines on participation in crime [MPS-0727104] formed the basis for Thomson’s discussions with Detective Inspector Lambert, to which Thomson replied ‘I am sure they were. I am sure they were,’ before admitting:

‘I am not that familiar with them, I can’t remember ever actually looking at that at the time.’

The guidelines expressly forbid misleading courts, though Thomson not only did this but had his managers’ blessing too.

PUBLIC DISORDER

The evidence is that Thomson participated in crime on multiple occasions. We were shown an intelligence report from 12 April 1997 [MPS-0000303] about the March For Social Justice, which Thomson attended with the hunt sab groups he had infiltrated.

The report describes some serious public disorder, and Barr asked him about that:

‘Q. Were you anywhere near that public disorder?

A. I assume so.

Q. What do you recall of it?

A. I can’t recall anything specific. There were a lot of these at that time. Not necessarily labelled March For Social Justice, but serious public disorder in central London…

Q. Were any of the people who you were attending this demonstration with violent?

A. Yes.

Q. On this occasion?

A. I don’t know about this occasion.

Q. Are you able to help us with whether any of them broke the law on this occasion?

A. No, not specifically this occasion. I couldn’t say that.’

These kinds of generalised allegations of serious criminality, violence or disorder without being able to offer any specifics is typical of SDS evidence, and came up very frequently during Thomson’s oral evidence.

While Thomson didn’t know if he was disorderly or not on the March For Social Justice, he says he was active in disorder in ‘these sorts of events’:

‘Q. As a matter of generality, how disorderly were you at this sort of event?

A. I was certainly active… obviously I had been the other side of the shields sort of thing, so I knew that you could go and kick a shield for as long as you like and it didn’t do any harm. So that sort of thing, I would certainly have done that. Yeah, I suppose I just worked within those sort of limits.

Q. In order to demonstrate your activist credentials, how forward were you in this activity?

A. I would have been in and amongst.

Q. Would you be the first to kick the shield?

A. No, I don’t think I would ever have been the first.

Q. Amongst the first?

A. Amongst the first is probably fair.’

We were then shown a file note written by Lambert from 6 May 1997 [MPS-0247080], about the March For Social Justice and a protest at Consort Beagles in Ross on Wye, a breeder of dogs for vivisection, where Thomson was injured by riot police.

In it, Lambert refers to the Consort Beagles protest as ‘an ALF demo’.

As we saw with SDS manager HN58’s reference to Thomson having close contact with the Animal Liberation Front, this seems to be another instance of management exaggerating Thomson’s activity, upgrading him from hunt sab to a group viewed as more dangerous.

Asked about the difference between an animal rights demo and an ALF demo, Thomson replies:

‘I don’t know that there is one. I suspect ALF is a bit of a shorthand.’

This confirms what we saw in evidence in the Inquiry’s Tranche 2 hearings, that the SDS used the term ‘ALF’ as a catch-all, leading to sloppy and inaccurate reporting that sought to justify spying on everyone and anyone with an interest in animal rights.

HUNT SAB ‘MASS HIT’

Thomson was also questioned about an incident on 13 December 1997, about a ‘mass hit’ against a hunt.

A ‘mass hit’ was when one hunt sab group called for others from further afield to come and join them. They often happened after an incident of extreme violence by hunters, as a way of showing that sabs would not be easily cowed, and to discourage hunters from violence in future because it only made sabbing increase.

A report [MPS-0000736] described hunters’ cars being damaged and a fight with hunt supporters. Thomson accepts that he was there but he can’t recall much, nor give any real reason why he was there:

‘My mental image is actually the windows. That’s why I think I was there, I have got a mental image of the breaking of windows, car windows. And after that I sort of am in it and wouldn’t be able to sort of look up…

Q. When you say words to the effect you had your head down after the first window was smashed or words to that effect, was that because you were participating in this affray?

A. I was there.

Q. Were you participating in any of the violence against property?

A. Not that I can remember, no. I don’t believe so…

Q. At an event like this, what did you see your role as being?

A. To the extent I had a role, a useful role at all by that stage, just mitigate harm to the extent I could…

Q. You have seen the report. It is a long report, but it doesn’t identify any individuals, does it?

A. Mm-hm. No, it doesn’t.

Q. Can you recall whether or not you did intervene to mitigate the criminality that was ongoing?

A. I can’t.’

ARRESTING THE SPYCOP

Thomson was arrested on 29 August 1998, for obstructing police, as part of a sit-down protest on the A1 near Huntingdon Life Sciences vivisection facility. He was bailed but ultimately not required to return.

Minutes from an SDS strategy meeting from 27 January 2000 [MPS-0003394] refer to the Mayday 2000 protests organised by Reclaim the Streets, which Thomson attended.

He claims that members of the group he was with took part in physical violence that day, fighting with the police in Whitehall. But, yet again, he can’t make an allegation of any specific violent act.

He claims he reported it at the time, but there is no sign of that report.

Thomson admits that he provided night vision equipment to the sabs, and that his intention was that it would be used for illegal activity.

‘Q. So you were facilitating crime?

A. I accept that.’

He defended providing the equipment, claiming doing so would improve his credibility with the group. In fact, the sabs mostly used it for wildlife watching at night.

Thomson also admits to committing criminal damage by destroying badger traps on a regular basis. He says his SDS managers were aware of this and content for him to do it.

However, the most extreme instance of Thomson’s managers allowing him to participate in crime is the story of ‘Operation Lime’.

OPERATION LIME – THE GUNPOWDER PLOT

Operation Lime is an astonishingly complicated police plot which eventually involved Thomson travelling in his cover identity to Turkey, Indonesia, Singapore and twice to France, ostensibly as part of a conspiracy to acquire a firearm, ammunition and (inexplicably) a bag of ‘black powder’.

The supposed plan was to buy those items in France, traffic them to the UK and use them to murder a supporter of the Surrey and Burstow hunt. There is no evidence of this plot ever existing, apart from Thomson saying it did.

The beginnings of Operation Lime came shortly after Thomson was told, in May 2000, that his deployment would be brought to an end by early 2001. It was recorded at the time that he was very unhappy about that decision. It seems he came up with the gun plot as a way to extend his deployment.

On 1 September 2000, a member of the Croydon hunt sabs, known in the Inquiry as ‘L4’, who Thomson had befriended during his deployment, was almost killed by a hunt supporter who ran him over with a Land Rover.

Thomson was not there when it happened, however he filed a report that same day [MPS-0003867] which claimed:

‘There has been immediate talk of reprisals, but no definite plan has yet been formulated.’

Barr asked him who was talking of reprisals at that stage:

‘I can’t remember who I spoke to. I think everyone. It was a truly shocking thing… I mean everyone was very, very angry…

Q. But no indication that that anger would translate at that stage into action?

A. No.’

There was a demonstration at the hunt’s kennels the following day, 2 September, and another a few days later on 6 September. Barr went over Thomson’s reports about those events.

‘Q. I am not asking whether it had completely finished the saga, but was your impression that there had been a venting of anger?

A. No, I don’t think so.’

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

We were then shown a report entitled ‘The French Connection’ dated 31 October 2000 [MPS-0004388]. It is about a plot to obtain a firearm and a strategy to disrupt it.

‘Q. Is it right that your managers’ belief that there was a plot to obtain a firearm was the result of your telling them that?

A. I would presume so, yes…

Q. Were you ever told there was any other source?

A. No.’

The sole source of information about this uncorroborated plot was therefore, at all times, the word of Thomson himself.

The ‘French Connection’ report says the objective is:

‘to gain intelligence on the activities of L2 or L3 … leading to their arrest or disruption, without compromising the source and other long-term SDS operations. A requirement for source to give evidence in court will lead to compromise.’

On the same day, 31 October 2000, HN58 the Detective Chief Inspector then in charge of the SDS, sent a minute to the Commander Special Branch recommending disrupting or frustrating of the plot, rather than making arrests. He also requests authority for Thomson to take part in what is described as a ‘dry run’.

The resulting plan was absurdly convoluted. The police decided to allow the supposed purchase of a gun to take place, on foreign soil. The plan described:

‘a possible opportunity to disrupt in France. Having discussed with MT [‘Magenta Triangle’, code name for Thomson], the theft of his vehicle with ordnance inside could be engineered. This would take the ordnance away from the conspirators and severely disrupt any future plans.

The problem with this scheme is that Roger Pearce probably could not authorise it, particularly as the substantive ‘offences’ are taking place in France.

However, MT feels confident he that he could engineer a position whereby his vehicle could be “stolen”.’

The police plan for Operation Lime included the following steps:

‘MT + Companion depart for France
MT picks up ordnance and secretes in car
MT books into hotel or goes to restaurant
Vehicle gets stolen and ordnance removed’

There are further steps to the plan, but they have been redacted. The Inquiry has not said why.

A PLOT WITHOUT PLOTTERS

The detail of the police’s plan is quite striking. Firstly, because the document suggests that it is Thomson himself who is acquiring the ‘ordnance’, the activists seem to play little or no role. Secondly, because the document asserts that the activists have not actually planned anything:

‘Nothing has been planned so far; the intelligence has come from a number of conversations between interested parties.’

Barr asked Thomson to clarify:

‘In the period between 1 September 2000, when L4 was run over, and 31 October when this document is generated, what conversations had been held between which interested parties?’

Thomson pointed to L2, L3 and himself, but hedged his bets about whether anyone else was involved.

‘Q. Just the three of you?

A. I can’t say that exclusively.

Q. Well, who else?

A. I don’t know…

Q. It is quite a big deal, conspiring to either shoot or murder somebody, isn’t it?

A. Of course.

Q. And one would be pretty careful about who one entered into a conspiracy with to do that?

A. Certainly.

Q. Is it really the case that you are not sure who was party to the conspiracy at this stage?

A. I only know the people I was talking to.’

It was very noticeable that Barr wanted concrete details about who, where and how the plot came into being, while Thomson seemed to be intentionally vague.

A NEW CONSPIRATOR

It seemed that Thomson was making up this gun plot as he went along, and there were audible laughs from the public gallery as he failed to answer any of Barr’s direct questions.

He eventually, begrudgingly, named four people: L1, L2, L3, and a fourth person who had not been previously mentioned at all. They have now been ciphered as L6.

Like L3, L6 had no part in this Inquiry until Thomson suddenly named him in his evidence. L6 has since made a written witness statement (we don’t have a reference number for this and it seems to be another document that the Inquiry hasn’t published yet).

Barr drew Thomson’s attention to the fact that in 2001 the authority to travel abroad [MPS-0006714] recorded only two people being part of this supposed conspiracy:

‘Q. Why has two in a document generated in 2001 become four in your evidence before the Inquiry today?

A. I think it’s a larger number. I do not think that’s accurate.’

Barr asked Thomson about the nature of the conversations he had with L1, L2, L3 and L6, but he was unable to give any specific examples of what was said.

Barr also dug deep into why Thomson thought this supposed murder plot was real:

‘Q. These are people you have described as being involved in essentially minor criminality to advance the cause of animal liberation… Murder is an entirely different ball game… What made you think that any of these four people was capable of that?

A. Because what you describe as minor, they had an ability, a desire, to visit real harm on people and to take satisfaction from it…

Q. Can you give the Inquiry an example of L1 inflicting physical harm on another human being and taking satisfaction from doing that?

A. On a specific day, date, time, place, no…

Q What’s the most specific recollection you have that would support the assertion that you have just made?

A. Home visits, I think…

Q. How many times did you witness L1 being violent in this way?

A. I don’t know.

Q. Why don’t we have any reporting of that?

A. I don’t know.’

Barr asked similar questions about all four of the activists Thomson had named, trying to establish why he believed them to be violent. Thomson was completely unable to cite any real incidents.

He answered all Barr’s questions about specifics with a nebulous refusal to be pinned to any certainty: ‘I can’t remember’; ‘if there was it would have been reported’ and even ‘sorry, I have forgotten the question’. He was visibly uncomfortable by this point.

Barr pointed out there are no (or at least, no surviving) intelligence reports at all about the conversations leading up to this incident. All we have are the management notes.

‘Q. Was there any discussion with your managers about whether or not this should be written up?

A. Not that I can remember.’

This is problematic for Thomson because, while we have internal SDS records that show him telling his managers that this plan existed and them building this incredibly tortuous operation around it, there is no contemporary record at all of any of these supposed conversations taking place between the activists, and no first-hand accounts at all of the meetings and conversations they are supposed to have had.

The only meetings about this plan on record are those held by the police. This fits with the activists’ version of events, as they say it simply didn’t happen, there were no such discussions, and the first they have heard of this plot was very recently, when it was described in the Opening Statements to this Inquiry.

ALWAYS FRANCE FROM THE START

Many aspects of this supposed plot clearly trouble Barr. He asks about when France was first mentioned as the destination for the arms deal. Thomson replied that it was later on, ‘after this report, when things began to firm up’.

However, that makes no sense. Although the 31 October note specifically states that nothing has been planned yet, the title of the document is ‘the French Connection’, and it mentions the possibility of jurisdictional problems in France.

Another internal note from just a week later, dated 6 November [MPS-0004441], seeks authorisation for Thomson to travel to Istanbul. We look at that trip in more detail in the section on foreign travel. Importantly, the note also states:

‘There is a plan to obtain black powder and a gun from France through a French animal rights activist.’

Thomson eventually concedes that France must indeed have come up earlier.

Another document [MPS-0009484] records a meeting on 10 November 2000 between Thomson and two of his managers, Bernie Greaney and Noel Warr, which took place at Thomson’s home.

Thomson says that kind of informal meeting at home was not unusual. It was common SDS practice, and he doesn’t seem to think it posed any kind of security risk. This particular meeting was about events on 9 November – the so-called ‘dry run’ to Calais.

True to form, Thomson says he cannot really remember anything about the trip. He took a long time to answer many of the questions, but he did eventually admit that he travelled to Calais with L1 and L1’s girlfriend.

Thomson claims the purpose of the trip was to see what security was like at the port, and that they were in fact stopped and searched whilst going through customs. His answers were unconvincing, using hedging phrases like ‘I presume I was’ to imply that he has no reliable memory of this at all.

The meeting’s notes record that Thomson told his managers he would actively reassure L1 and his girlfriend that, despite the stop and search, the plan to secure a firearm from France was still sound.

He says that he did do that, which is completely ludicrous for someone whose supposed mission was to prevent the acquisition, as Barr pointed out:

‘You are a serving undercover police officer trying to encourage L1, L2 and L3 to continue with a plot to obtain an illegal firearm with the intent to kill or seriously harm another human being…

In terms of participation in crime, isn’t seeking to reassure your fellow conspirators to continue with the plot at a moment of uncertainty the wrong thing to do?’

Thomson answers that he doesn’t really know now why he did it, but he is nonetheless somehow sure that it was the right thing to do, and that he was always in control of the situation.

He denies L3’s suggestion that the first trip to France was just a ‘booze cruise’ to buy cheap alcohol.

Moving on to the second trip to France, the note of the meeting with Greaney and Warr records:

‘MT has obtained a vegan guidebook for France and has identified a couple of restaurants and hotels in the Marseille area which he will try and use, and which can be researched by us on the recce.’

From this it is clear that Thomson was telling his handlers the destination for the plot was Marseille as early as 10 November. Barr points out that buying the guide book also suggests Thomson was really running the show:

‘You were not only in the driving seat of the vehicle but also in the driving seat of decisions as to where you stopped and where you ate?’

Thomson accepts this, but claims it was L2 who told him Marseille was where they could meet a man to buy a gun. However, he cannot provide any details, and he asks Barr if there is a report about it he could see in order to jog his memory. Barr pointedly says there isn’t:

‘Q. As we discussed yesterday, there is a remarkable dearth of intelligence reports.

A. Mm-hm.’

Like Lambert answering the Inquiry’s questions about his involvement in placing timed incendiary devices in Debenhams’ shops, Thomson is in full ‘I can’t remember’ mode about this plot.

‘Q. When you came back from the day trip to France, did you speak to anyone?…

A. Not that I can remember…

Q. You must have talked to somebody about reassuring the group over the next few days… Wouldn’t there have been a meeting to discuss whether the plot was viable?

A. There may well have been.

Q. Well, you were there. Was there?

A. I can’t remember anything that specific. I would have reported it at the time.’

Thomson also can’t remember who paid for the Channel crossing, the accommodation or the food on the trip, nor where the supposed £700 came from for buying the gun, or even whether they knew the price in advance.

‘Q. Is it right that L3 was not a man who could have afforded this trip on his own?

A. I would suspect so…

Q. And that from a financial point of view, your paying for the accommodation and the transport enabled him to go on the trip?

A. Yes, I suppose that’s true.’

So far, despite answering ‘I can’t remember’ to most of the questions, Thomson has admitted to encouraging the plot and ensuring it went ahead, planning the trip, where they would stay and where they would eat, paying for the travel and accommodation, and possibly even paying for the gun itself.

Had this plot been real, he would certainly have been playing far more than a minor role.

RECONNAISSANCE IN MARSEILLE, NOT BORDEAUX

Finally, six days after the Calais trip, from 14-16 November 2000, Thomson and his managers travelled to Marseille on a recce.

Barr read from a document which notes:

‘“MT’s vegan restaurant guide was well received, however, and he is confident that he will be able to steer his entourage towards the sites agreed during the recce.”

The phrase “the sites agreed during the recce”, suggests that during the reconnaissance, you and your managers made decisions about where you wanted the stops and the meals to take place.’

So, what about Bordeaux, which he had told his superiors would be the first stop before going to buy the gun in Marseille?

‘Q. Did you go to Bordeaux on the recce?

A. No.

Q. Why didn’t you go to Bordeaux on the recce?

A. Because it wasn’t where the operational bit was happening.’

This question about Bordeaux is important. Thomson told his managers the plan was to go to Bordeaux and then on to Marseille, some 400 miles away. He claims it was changed at the very last minute, too late for him to let anyone know.

They instead went to Marseille first and Bordeaux later. Yet he had somehow previously arranged for his then-girlfriend, ‘Sara‘, to fly out and meet them in Bordeaux at the correct time.

Barr points out that if the plan really had been to meet her in Bordeaux and then travel down to Marseille together, and then back from Marseille to Calais, then he was planning to have her travelling with them when they bought the gun.

‘Q. So, as I am understanding your evidence, you were planning to have L3 and “Sara” in your car with an unlawful firearm?

A. Yes…

Q. I think it is common ground that L3 likes wine and that Bordeaux is obviously a wine lover’s paradise?

A. Yes.

Q. And so on a trip to France to take the opportunity to visit Bordeaux in good company is an attractive one?

A. Certainly.

Q. But if one is in the business of purchasing an unlawful firearm with the intention to kill or seriously injure another human being, then a digression to Bordeaux and bringing along non-conspirators in the vehicle would be a surprising thing to want to do, isn’t it?

A. I don’t think so particularly. No.

Q. One would have to be remarkably relaxed about the operation of obtaining an illegal firearm to be planning it in these rather casual terms…

Is it your evidence that L3 had any previous experience in unlawfully obtaining firearms?

A. I have no idea…

Q. Did it strike you as odd that L3 was seeking to add this diversion and add these passengers to a serious criminal endeavour?

A. No.’

It obviously is odd, but Thomson stuck to his guns (so to speak).

‘Q. On the face of the report in front of us, you have had a conversation with L3, who has suggested a diversion to Bordeaux. There is absolutely no mention here of the availability of the supplier of the firearm…

If you were in fact going to pick up a firearm, one would have thought a central question to the itinerary and the timing is when that weapon was going to be available to you… an itinerary would need to revolve around when the weapon would be available?

A. Presumably.

Q. Yet there is no mention of that in this note or in any intelligence reporting?

A. I am sure there is. I mean not in this note, but I am sure there is reporting on that.’

There is none to be found in any of the material the Inquiry has seen.

THE REAL TRIP – STRAIGHT TO MARSEILLE

The actual trip took place in January 2001 and a memo [MPS-0005257] records the movements of Detective Sergeants Warr and Greaney who travelled to Marseille and rented a gîte in the Avignon area on 6 January. It also details the movements of Thomson and L3 who, the report states, travelled from Dover to Calais on 8 January, and then ‘drove towards Bordeaux’.

However, Thomson admits in his evidence that that is not what they actually did. Barr read aloud from the document:

‘During the course of this journey MT had contacted Detective Sergeant Greaney and indicated that he was OK but due to security was unable to say where he was located.’

Detective Chief Inspector HN58 travelled to Bordeaux on 9 January, completely pointlessly, as it turns out, because Thomson was not there. Thomson and L3 had driven straight to Marseille.

HN58 arrived in Bordeaux at 4:30pm but had to leave again at 5:30pm and hot foot it to Marseille, arriving at 11:30pm, long after the alleged arms deal had already taken place.

Thomson tries to say that, despite having a mobile phone, there was no way he could communicate a change of plan to his managers because it was so last minute, claiming:

‘I told them what I could, when I could…

Q. There was, in truth, no reason whatsoever, was there, why you could not have told your managers on Monday, 8 January that you were in fact heading straight to the South of France?

A. I can only disagree with that. I think there was a reason…

Q. Was it because you were trying to make it as difficult as possible for your managers to follow what you were doing whilst you were in Marseille…

You could have told Greaney by phone, by text message or voice message, on both the 8th and the 9th that the plan had changed and you were going to Marseille?

A. I accept that’s your opinion.

Q. It’s not my opinion. It’s a fact, isn’t it?’

Barr was uncompromising on this point, reminding Thomson that he didn’t tell his managers anything until he absolutely had to, which was at 5.07pm on 9 January, when the gun was in the vehicle, ready for them to fake the ‘theft’.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, was also troubled by this. Mitting brought Thomson back to the question at the end of the three days of hearings, asking him to confirm that the plan was always to travel to Bordeaux first, and when that plan changed.

Thomson tries to claim that it was altered at the very last minute, but Mitting astutely pointed out that the nature of the French motorway network means that they would have had to make a choice about their route – heading to the east or the west of the country – in Calais, a full two days before arriving in Marseille.

Thomson looks utterly ridiculous as he fails to explain why he didn’t inform his managers. He claims he ‘doesn’t have a memory’ but then shifts to suggesting that in fact he tried to tell them, but HN58 had misunderstood a coded message and gone to the wrong place.

‘BUYING THE GUN’

Finally, Barr asks Thomson about the actual purchase of the gun.

Thomson asks if he can have the document in front of him whilst answering questions about what he did in Marseille, but Barr doesn’t want him sticking to the script and tells him he must use his memory. That doesn’t bode well, as Thomson has not remembered much about any of this so far. So much so that Barr points out:

‘Q. Disrupting a plot to procure a firearm with which to murder or seriously injury another human being is quite a significant event, isn’t it?

A. It’s fairly significant, yes.

Q. Can you help us with why your recollection of events is so hazy for such an important matter?

A. It’s 25 years later and an awful lot of other things have happened.’

When it came to the actual purchase, Thomson does claim to remember a meeting in a cafe in Marseille, somewhere near the main station.

‘We go in, we are recognised straight away. We are there for sort of two minutes, which is a sort of: “Are you?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Do you have this, do you have that?”
“Do we do it here?”
“No, we don’t.”
I felt uncomfortable with it. Certainly in the cafe and around it. We get back in the cars…

There’s a brief discussion about exchanging there, which includes handing money over. I don’t feel comfortable with that. We say we will go somewhere else.

We get in the cars, we move away… There was certainly a bag. I don’t know if we looked in it.’

Despite saying that the reconnaissance trip to Marseille with managers had been to agree locations for the purchase, Thomson says that on the day they just drove at random and he told them to stop the car, also at random, near a housing block, where they exchanged money for the bag containing the gun, bullets and black powder.

‘Q. You randomly drive away from a cafe that you had not been to before and you just find somewhere to stop in Marseille?

A. Essentially, yes…

Q. Then what happened?

A. Just exchanged money. Got the bag, in a bag, looked in it…

Q. What did you see inside the bag?

A. The shape of a firearm.

Q. You said a moment ago that there was a bag within a bag?…

A. This is when the inner bag comes out and it is looking in the inner bag, which is just a plastic bag.

Q. Did you see any ammunition in the bag?

A. I can’t remember it particularly, but I only caught a glance… At that point I couldn’t tell you, it was bags of something.

Q. As I am understanding it you are describing a very cursory check?

A. Mine was fairly cursory, certainly…

Q. Then what happens?

A. Money changes hands. The seller gets out of the car. Walks away, we drive away.’

Barr pressed him on whether they did anything more than just look in the bag.

‘Q. Did you at any time do anything further to check whether or not this was a real weapon?’

Thomson is adamant that they did not. They just handed over £700 for some stuff in bags inside a plastic bag inside another bag. Then they hid it in the Land Rover and went to get food. A totally ordinary arms deal.

‘STEALING THE CAR’

At 5.07pm, Thomson informed his managers that the car was ready for collection. The next morning, he went out and checked that the vehicle had gone, then went back to the hotel and told L3 it had been stolen.

You would think that losing a car just after having stashed an illegal firearm under the seat would have generated some alarm, but Thomson claims that L3 did not to consider himself at any risk.

They reported the theft to the French police and hired a car to continue their holiday in Bordeaux. He claims all of this was discussed with L3. However, L3 says he woke up and Thomson was gone, leaving a note saying that the car had been stolen and he had gone to report it to the police.

Thomson accepts that it is possible he left a note but he doesn’t remember it, and admits he went to the French police station alone to report it.

Thomson also took charge of hiring the new vehicle, which he organised through his cover employers (though he did it in L3’s name). He claims to have no memory of how this happened nor where they collected the car.

We were shown police photographs of what was found inside the ‘stolen’ vehicle by Thomson’s managers. Black powder inside two plastic bags, a gun, and some bullets that were stuffed inside a torch.

Thomson says he can’t remember taking any precautions in handling the firearm or the bullets. It appears that, apart from taking the photographs we are seeing, no other tests or investigation were carried out on the gun by Thomson’s managers. What was ultimately done with all of it has been redacted in the files.

There are obvious questions to be asked about what on earth the French police were doing while all this was going on. However, the Inquiry appears not to have addressed that at all, at least as far as we can see.

SO WHERE DID THE GUN COME FROM?

Barr also asked Thomson about his own access to firearms. This is particularly relevant because in his Opening Statement to the Inquiry on 13 October 2025, Barr noted:

‘There has been no independent corroboration of the plot. Suspicions can only have been heightened by a disclosure made to HN36 Detective Chief Inspector Michael Dell by an undercover officer who has full anonymity in this Inquiry, to the effect that Detective Sergeant Thomson had been in possession of a firearm, given to him as a gift, while he was on protection duties.

Detective Sergeant Thomson was alleged to have sought permission to keep it as a gratuity but to have been refused. It was further alleged that he did not return the gun but instead took it to France and stored it in a deposit box.’

Thomson denies ever receiving any firearms. However, as an explanation for how a gun came to be found in Thomson’s car, this is far more credible than the convoluted story he told during the course of Operation Lime.

He was also asked if he had access to ‘black powder’. He mentions having ‘crow scarers’ that could have contained black powder, but claims he never took them apart.

Black powder is mentioned alongside the gun in even the earliest reports about the supposed plot, and it proved to be a significant bone of contention, since nobody seems to have any idea what it was for.

‘Q. When was there first mention of black powder?

A. I can’t remember.

Q. Why was there mention of black powder?

A. Again, I don’t know. I am not sure what you would do with it.

Q. Did you ever get an answer to that question?

A. No, I don’t think so.

Q. Did you ever ask?

A. I must have done…

Q. What was the answer?

A. I don’t think I ever got an answer.’

Mitting was clearly troubled by this. He intervened at the end of the three days of evidence to ask Thomson a number of questions about Operation Lime, including some detailed questions about the black powder:

‘I am trying to think of any remotely sensible reason why someone in the underworld in Marseille would supply powder of a kind which could be obtained without difficulty in England, or France for that matter, together with a lethal weapon and bullets?’

Thomson simply repeated that he doesn’t know what it was going to be used for, ignoring the substance of the question: why an item easily available over the counter was being supplied at all. It’s a bit like going to an arms dealer and asking for a gun, some bullets and a kilo of carrots.

WHO THOUGHT OF IT?

Quite how Thomson came up with the gun plot can only be a matter for speculation. However, it’s notable that his manager, who he speaks of as being supportive, was Bob Lambert.

 

Lambert’s Debenhams plot when he was an undercover officer also involved committing serious crime to go beyond the SDS’s remit of gathering intelligence, and attempting to secure convictions for the people being spied on.

The Debenhams plan worked. Two men received substantial custodial sentences and Lambert got away with it. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that Thomson was emulating the strategy, perhaps even with Lambert’s input and support.

In the aftermath of Thomson’s trip to France, a document dated 8 February 2001, headed ‘Operation Lime’ [MPS-0005282] reports about the operation.

It claims:

‘In the immediate aftermath of the incident and in the ensuing months there have been a number of revenge attacks against members/associates of the hunt.

All members and supporters of the hunt concerned are now considered to be at risk, although the driver of the vehicle would be a particularly attractive target.’

Barr asked Thomson for details of these attacks, but, yet again, he was unable to cite a single incident:

‘There was a constant drum beat of that in and around sabs and at other times as well.

Q. You say “drum beat of that”. If “that” is revenge attacks, what I am asking is not whether there was tension, but whether there were, to your knowledge, actual attacks?

A. Outside of demonstrations and sabs, I can’t remember any…

Q. We have no reporting in this period of any such attacks… Can you help us with where the author of this document, who was Detective Chief Inspector HN58, obtained the impression that there had been a number of revenge attacks?

A. I presume he was reading the reporting that was coming in.

Q. That’s an assumption on your part?…

A. I can’t remember with HN58 particularly. I think it was a constant theme when I was talking to my handler.

Q. How could it be a constant theme if you hadn’t personally witnessed any?

A. Because they are happening, there was a lot of violence. It was part of that.’

Thomson clearly kept this idea of revenge attacks, and the potential for ‘extreme violence’, alive in order to prolong his deployment.

A report of a meeting between Thomson and his SDS managers [MPS-0719571] dated 12 October 2001 (more than nine months after Operation Lime) records legal advice given to L4, the sab who’d been run over, about seeking redress for his injuries through the courts. It says that ‘L2 and L3 favoured causing L5 [the driver who ran over L4] at least the most severe harm’.

‘Q. Essentially here you are communicating to your managers that despite the fact that advice is being taken on pursuing legal redress, there is another plot afoot and you need to be out there on the ground ready to deal with it…

A. Yes, I think it’s too strong to say “another plot’s afoot”, but essentially that’s correct.

Q. But by this stage you are clearly pushing for your deployment to continue, aren’t you?

A. I believe so, yes.’

It is important to stress that it is not that Thomson has forgotten about all the violent revenge attacks that happened: no such revenge attacks ever took place.

Foreign Travel

It is hardly surprising that Thomson wanted to prolong his deployment. He was having a whale of a time.

Apart from the sexual relationships, and claiming all that SDS overtime, he was also getting paid for his ‘cover employment’ as a film and TV location scout, and he was travelling all over the world.

We heard evidence about trips to France, Turkey, the Netherlands, India, Indonesia, Singapore and the USA as part of his deployment.

Some of these were authorised, but it is also clear that Thomson did a significant amount of unauthorised foreign travel in his cover identity.

The full extent is unclear, as by the time his deployment ended he held several passports in his cover name and he had removed pages from a number of them in order to conceal entry and exit stamps from his handlers.

We have evidence of the following trips:

Leiden and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1998 & 2000
In addition attending the Animal Rights gathering in Leiden with HN26 ‘Christine Green’ in 1998 (we cover his links with HN26 in more detail below). Thomson admits he travelled to Amsterdam at least once in his cover identity.

We saw a document written by HN58 [MPS-0748499] requesting authorisation for Thomson to travel to Amsterdam with L2, L3 and L4 in 2001 but he cannot remember whether he went on that occasion or at a different time.

Goa, India, 1999 & 2000
Thomson went to Goa twice, once on an authorised trip, from 21 January to 4 February 1999, and once more with Sara in January 2000. There is no reporting from the first trip. Thomson claims there should be but accepts that there was no criminal activity while they were there and cannot remember what he would have reported.

He argues that the trip was justified because ‘a large part of it was credibility and burnishing animal rights credibility’. He claims to have no memory at all of the second, unauthorised trip, but adds ‘I don’t dispute it might have happened’.

Istanbul, Turkey, 2000
Thomson’s manager, HN53, granted authority for Thomson travel to Istanbul with L4 from 20-27 November 2000 [MPS-0527650], as part of the elaborate preparations for Operation Lime.

The authorisation, using Thomson’s code name of Magenta Triangle, refers to the:

‘probable intelligence dividend to be gained from L4 about the longer-term intentions … More particularly, however, the cementing of the relationship between Magenta Triangle and the most high-profile animal rights ‘martyr’ will greatly enhance his credibility.’

It is quite offensive that they refer to L4 as a martyr. He was the victim of attempted murder and suffered life-changing injuries as a result of that very serious assault.

The police should have been trying to prosecute the perpetrator; instead they were spying on L4 and interfering with his support network. Thomson was a serving police officer, posing as L4’s friend at a very vulnerable time.

‘Q. Given the gravity of the injuries, he presumably was not yet fully recovered?

A. Oh, he certainly was not fully recovered, no.

Q. What did L4 tell you of intelligence value whilst you were in Turkey?

A. I can’t remember particularly. I would have reported it at the time…

Q. There is no reporting of the trip to Istanbul, why is that?

A. I don’t know. There would have been.’

Calais, Marseille and Bordeaux, France 2000 & 2001
Thomson made at least two trips to France in his cover identity, the second of which allegedly involved meeting a member of the Marseille underworld to buy a gun. We look at these trips in detail in the section on Operation Lime above.

Indonesia & Singapore, 2001
We were shown an ‘authority to travel abroad’, dated 10 September 2001 [MPS-0006714], which illustrates that Thomson further used his claims about a murder plot to justify travel to South East Asia. L4 was in Jakarta at the time.

The document talks about the attack on L4, and states:

‘The dropping of charges by the Crown Prosecution Service following the imprisonment for unrelated offences of the main prosecution witness, has incensed activists and caused two of their number to express a desire to kill L4’s assailant.

Magenta Triangle [Thomson’s code name], a close field associate of L4 has agreed to travel to Djakarta to seek his views. He will obviously wish to report to the activists that L4 does not countenance violence against his assailant.’

Again, Barr asked for specific details about what plans existed to kill the assailant L5, what actual conversations took place? Where did they happen? Anything?

Thomson cannot remember any details at all.

‘Q. Was a reason why you were very keen to go because it would be a nice holiday to an exotic part of the world paid for by the taxpayer?

A. I can’t dispute that might have entered into my thinking, but I can’t remember it as such…

Q. Why did you ask “Ellie” to go with you?… Because you were in a sexual relationship with her at the time? And this would have been a very enjoyable holiday for the two of you to go on as a couple?

A. Indeed.’

Like the previous year’s trip to Turkey, Thomson went to Indonesia to visit L4 and support him during a difficult time. As prosecutors had just dropped all charges against L5, L4’s friends were worried about his state of mind.

‘Q. What was L4’s state of mind after the prosecution against L5 failed… Was he in a bad place mentally?

A. I think that’s probably fair. He had been a very physical bloke and was much diminished, essentially.

Q. You did go out to see him, didn’t you… Did you give any consideration to whether it was appropriate for an undercover officer to go and provide support to a man who was in a bad way mentally, as opposed to one of his genuine friends?

A. No, I think I regarded myself as a genuine friend.

Q. But you weren’t, were you?

A. I was an undercover police officer.’

DEFYING ORDERS

In fact, the authority to travel to Indonesia was quickly withdrawn, because of the 9/11 Al-Qaeda attacks in New York, which happened the next day.

Thomson’s managers took the view that tensions in the region presented too much of a risk, but Thomson disobeyed their orders and went anyway.

There are significant questions about who paid for his travel. The evidence from the activists is that the trip was funded by L4’s girlfriend who was very worried about L4 and wanted someone to go out there to support him.

Thomson denies this, and Barr points out that SDS records [MPS-0006850] show that he bought a ticket which he supposedly cancelled in exchange for a ‘partial refund’, and that he claimed the remaining cost back on expenses.

Thomson says does not recall whether he did cancel the ticket. He certainly did travel to Indonesia somehow, and he admits he paid for Ellie’s travel and accommodation as well, although where the money came from remains a big question.

Thomson’s answers only muddied the waters further:

‘Q. Who paid for your tickets ultimately?

A. I did.

Q. With what funds?

A. My own.

Q. When you say your own, could you be specific, please?

A. No, I don’t think I could. It would be my money from somewhere.

Q. From your real life personal accounts in your real name?

A. Possibly.

Q. Possibly?

A. I might have moved money from there, or taken money from a hole in the wall or whatever it was. It could easily have come from there or several places. I don’t know.

Q. What other places might it have come from?

A. The “James Straven” account.’

We were shown photographs of Thomson with Ellie in Singapore on holiday [UCPI0000038286, UCPI0000038287].

‘Q. Did you go and see L4?

A. Yes, we were staying with L4.

Q. What did you speak to L4 about?

A. Everything…

Q. Can you be a little bit more specific by what you mean when you say “everything”?

A. We were staying with him, so we had lots of conversations. Including his health, how he was feeling and how he was feeling about the case in the UK…

I remember him being sort of cynically resigned. Much less engaged about it than I thought he would be. Just tired, really.

Q. No desire to murder anybody?

A. No.

Q. But you didn’t report that, because you weren’t supposed to be there?

A. Because I wasn’t supposed to be there, mm-hm.’

Barr also pointed out that Thomson selfishly took Ellie to Indonesia even though his managers had assessed it was too dangerous to go, without any regard for the risk he might be exposing her to.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

It appears that this unauthorised trip to Indonesia and Singapore on his false passport was the catalyst that led to Thomson’s many transgressions beginning to unravel.

He says he ‘threw a wobbly’, lost his temper and self-control, and threw his passport in his manager’s face. He can’t remember why, just says it was ‘all coming on top’, and his management were expressing a loss of confidence in him.

We were shown a file note written by SDS manager HN53 [MPS-0719783]. It is dated 28 February 2002.

‘MT pulled me aside after today’s meeting (re his withdrawal) to say that he had a problem with his passport.

Somewhat shamefacedly, he told me that he had removed two pages from the document in the immediate aftermath of the Indonesia denouement in an effort to avoid detection. The pages related to his entry and exit visa stamps for that trip…

Clearly it would be operationally improper to countenance MT’s next trip to the USA with a defective passport, particularly in view of his place of birth (Muscat).

The fact that he chose to risk using it on last week’s trip to Los Angeles (and got away with it) must be borne in mind.’

USA, 2001 & 2002
Thomson admits that he did travel to Los Angeles on his defective passport, on an authorised 10-day trip to prepare for his exfiltration, which included telling activists he was moving to the USA.

However, we were shown a file note written by Detective Inspector HN53 [MPS-0719722] dealing with what he describes as an unauthorised USA trip:

‘As detailed in a separate file note, Detective Sergeant Thomson’s second “Straven” passport showed that he had entered the USA on 4 February 2001. This was an unauthorised visit which has yet to be explained.’

Thomson continues to deny this trip ever happened, despite the entry stamp and a number of credit card transactions in Hollywood on 6, 8 and 11 February 2001.

DECEPTION AROUND FOREIGN TRAVEL

Thomson accepts that he ripped pages out of one of his ‘James Straven’ passports to hide the fact that he had been on unauthorised trips. It is clear from the evidence that this wasn’t just the two pages with the stamps from Indonesia.

He mentioned Jakarta and Amsterdam, but then says that he cannot say these were all his unauthorised trips. He may have gone to France too. He ‘can’t remember’ and wants to leave it open.

Barr asks if it is really the truth that he can’t remember what he was trying to hide from his managers. Clearly, when you’re on foreign holidays as often as Thomson, it gets hard to remember which trip is which. Nevertheless, it seems likely he is lying, and hedging his bets in case more evidence comes to light.

Thomson was also issued a second passport in his cover identity of James Straven, after reporting his first passport as stolen to his managers. It hadn’t been stolen, so he had two passports. He says he knew this was illegal. He says he presumes he did it so he could travel without authorisation.

Possessing multiple passports and removing pages from them is just one example of Thomson’s fraudulent behaviour which we examine in more detail above.

Intelligence and Tradecraft

Thomson says that by the time he joined the SDS, reports were computerised. Handlers would meet with field officers and hand-write reports, then the staff in the back office would type them up.

In his witness statement, Thomson described his own practice of reporting:

‘My personal practice of how I provided my intelligence developed quite early on in my deployment.

I would write notes either as bullet points for discussion or as things I felt should be reported and needed to remember, for example car registration numbers.

I would write this on a computer and save on to a floppy disk which I would then put in an envelope with a doctor’s name on it to disguise it, and carry it to the twice-weekly meeting.

The handler would then put the disk in a computer at the office and go through the items with me.

The handler would pull out details and discuss this with me which helped me provide more information and make notes of this discussion.’

Asked if this was common practice, Thomson accepts that it was not:

‘I actually had a computer. A lot wouldn’t have done. It was very early days for them at the time. It was just something that worked for me. I was more comfortable with that than bits of paper.’

His witness statement also refers to the process of sanitising the intelligence:

‘My understanding was that the handler would subsequently assess what was relevant and worthy of reporting.

They would then compile a formal intelligence report that obscured the original source so far as possible, by adding in more general information from sources I would not have known about.’

It is notable that he prefaces this description with ‘my understanding was…’ and ends it by saying he would not have known about the other sources.

Barr pressed him on this and he accepted that it was speculation on his part. Understanding this process of sanitising the intelligence reports is very important in order to be able to interpret the documentary evidence.

Police witnesses are generally very cagey about how intelligence reports were produced, who was responsible for the intelligence they contained, where they were circulated, and who would have seen them.

Asked about the twice-weekly meetings at the safe house, he explained that they took place in small groups and a larger plenary session. He said that security problems, participation in crime, and larger demonstrations would be brought up at these plenary sessions, and that some officers were more detailed than others.

He claimed HN43 Peter Francis would speak a lot at these meetings, chronologically going through every aspect of his deployment. He says that SDS officers would also get together for occasional social events.

That pattern changed over time. Towards the end of his deployment those collective debriefings became less common, leaving only meetings with handlers:

‘The plenary everyone together disappeared, as did the sort of everyone on a three-line whip get together for social events once or twice a year.

The field stuff remained and they became a sort of individual element as well. So there was much more just you dealing with your particular operation.’

Over the course of the three days of his evidence, we saw a number of reports (which were dealt with by Barr in more or less chronological order). These touched on the now familiar themes of SDS reporting: sexism, racism, reporting that violated legal professional privilege, unprofessional language, and reporting that served no useful purpose.

LOW VALUE REPORTING

It was noted several times during questioning that contemporary records show that Thomson produced very little intelligence at all, especially towards the end of his deployment. Barr also sought to establish how useful the reports he did produce had been.

Thomson said he would be asked to identify suspects from photographs after demonstrations, but can’t remember if he was ever successful at doing so.

‘Q. Can I reasonably infer from that answer that so far as identifying offenders in the midst of public order is concerned, your deployment was of limited value?

A. It’s not for me to judge that.’

Barr highlighted another example of the limited value of Thomson’s reporting, a report from 15 December 1997 about an affray in a car park [MPS-0000736]:

‘Q. In short, despite the fact that you had produced some very specific intelligence about this event, it didn’t prevent a nasty episode of criminal damage and physical violence, did it?

A. No.’

In fact, Thomson himself took part in the fight in the car park, which is dealt with in the section on participation in crime above.

UNPROFESSIONAL LANGUAGE

As Barr went through Thomson’s reporting, he highlighted the language used. Thomson accepted that the tone of a report dated 26 May 2000 [MPS-0003413] was flippant and disrespectful and that reporting on an activist’s sexuality had no relevance to policing.

Thomson said he never addressed his mind to the tone and language of his reporting:

‘They were obviously always intended for the very small audience anyway, and certainly not for the subject to ever read it. So I can only apologise for that bit.

Q. Can I take it from that answer that the nature of the audience influenced how you wrote?

A. Yes, I guess so.

Q. Was there generally a culture of being disparaging about activists?

A. Yes, I suppose that’s fair.’

In another report, [MPS-0247867] Thomson describes a stand-off with ‘local scum’.

‘Q. Am I right to understand that the people you are referring to as the “local scum” are people who were supporting the hunt?

A. Yes, that is how they were known.

Q. That’s not a very professional way to refer to people, is it?

A. No, I agree. It shouldn’t have gone into a report.

Q. Were you by this stage becoming aligned to the world view of your target group?

A. Yes.’

This report is dated August 1998, suggesting there was evidence in Thomson’s reporting that he might have been becoming supportive of his targets a full four years before his deployment was brought to an end.

Then again, anybody seeing how hunt sabs were treated by hunters and uniformed police would have sympathy. Thomson was far from the first spycop to feel this way.

Thomson insists that he cannot recall any reaction from managers to this or any of the other unprofessional language found in his reporting.

SEXISM

An intelligence report of 27 October 1997 [MPS-0000614], written by Thomson about a woman hunt sab, records her as ‘surname unknown’, but described her as ‘a part time concubine’ of another activist, about whom there are no further details.

Thomson admitted he had no good reason to write that, and falls back on another ex-SDS trope:

‘This was the 1990s. The idioms and social norms were different.’

Like other spycops, Thomson was given to describing women as ‘girls’.

Another report of Thomson’s from 9 February 1998 [MPS-0000843] about Croydon hunt sabs animal rights activity states:

‘Ms SNU (17 years) recently commenced a career in the modelling field specialising in tasteful poses for gentlemen’s magazines.’

Asked why he reported that about someone whose surname he seemingly didn’t even know, and who was a child at the time, he replied frankly:

‘That probably is prurient… and sexist.’

Asked the purpose of recording such things in intelligence reports, he reiterated what we have now heard from many former SDS officers; that all information is good because it may somehow prove relevant to public order or anti-subversion policing:

‘I didn’t really think about, nor should I have thought about, the purposes for it. Because it may have meant something to someone else, down the line. And it may have been useful to someone else down the line.’

RACISM

Asked about racism in the SDS, Thomson says he received no training on the issue. He had no understanding of subconscious racism or indirect racism, and says that the topic ‘wasn’t important’ in the SDS.

Nevertheless, like other officers we have seen on the witness stand, he ludicrously claims that while he remembers overt racism from his time in uniform, he cannot recall any in Special Branch.

He was not aware that Detective Chief Inspector Bob Potter behaved in a racist manner, and he didn’t witness any overt racism from HN86 (he also says he didn’t have many dealings with HN86).

He claims not to remember anything about the SDS targeting the Stephen Lawrence family justice campaign, and Barr was clearly quite sceptical about this:

‘You essentially make a witness statement which is helpful to the SDS in relation to those allegations… in which you are continuing to portray the SDS as a unit with a moral compass… when you knew that so far as your own conduct is concerned, there had been no moral compass, and when, by that stage, considerable evidence had come out of great concern relating to the unit?…

How could you be sure of the truth of the evidence you gave in those circumstances?’

Thomson’s answers were vague, referring to a general feeling in the unit, things that were ‘broadly discussed in the plenary sessions,’ and echoing the view that the Lawrence campaign was ‘anti-police’.

‘Anything that was racially sensitive could easily become a big issue. So there were other things that happened and continued to happen. Which then flare up into anti-police and anti-authority-type, depending on who else comes along with them. I think that was generally true of that period.

Q. And bad for the reputation of the MPS?

A. Almost always.’

Like all the ex-officers discussing this issue, he completely misses the point that all these justice campaigns were asking the police to properly do their job.

LEGAL PROFESSIONAL PRIVILEGE

Thomson’s reports repeatedly breached legal professional privilege, the principle that conversations between lawyers and clients should be confidential.

A report dated 27 October 1997 [MPS-0000615] records that an activist has postponed his holiday:

‘This follows the advice of his optimistic but ungifted solicitor who believes [the activist] will be acquitted at court when he stands trial for assaulting a BTP [British Transport Police] officer.’

Another report dated 11 May 1999 [MPS-0002072] states:

‘[Privacy] is holding meetings with solicitors to discuss taking action against Sussex Constabulary following his arrest in Brighton on 24 April at the Shamrock Farm march. [Privacy] is collating video, photographic and medical evidence to support his case.’

Like other spycops have done, Thomson justified this reporting on privileged legal advice and a possible civil litigation simply by saying that he reported all the information he came across, and that he never received any criticism from management for that. He admits that he did know about the concept of legal professional privilege, but in the SDS context he ignored it.

He was shown the SDS Code of Practice [MPS-0526760], which refers to journalistic and legal professional privilege. The Code also says that, whether or not it engages those privileges, trespass to property will only be authorised in accordance with part 111 of the Police Act 1997 (which came into force in February 1999).

James Thomson says he has no memory of ever having seen the Code of Practice, nor of any instructions about the circumstances in which he could lawfully enter someone’s home, although his deployment straddled the Act coming into force. He does not remember any change to the procedure on trespass.

SLOPPY TRADECRAFT

The quality of James Thomson’s tradecraft merited a line of questioning all to itself. We were shown a document summarising management inquiries into his behaviour, dated 5 July 2002, shortly after his deployment ended. It was produced by SDS manager HN53 [MPS-0719722].

The report shows how Thomson mixed his cover and real identities, with sections entitled ‘Contamination of Thomson/“Straven” banking facilities’ and ‘Contaminated calls’.

Barr pointed out that his tradecraft was ‘very sloppy’ and asked whether this was because the people he was mixing with posed no physical threat.

Thomson denied this, insisting that he was in danger (demonstrating that exaggerated sense of personal threat we have seen in so many ex-SDS officers) and suggesting that he was just being reckless:

‘I am not sure I still cared.’

The document includes a log of Thomson’s phone calls for that year. We see from the analysis that he spent a lot more time on the phone with Ellie and Wendy than he did with any of his supposed targets.

‘Q. As well as being evidence which made your managers suspicious about your contact with women, undercover, this gives us some indication, doesn’t it, of how you were spending your time.

You were concentrating more on “Ellie” and “Wendy” than L3 and L4?…

Was that because the reality was you were far more interested in living the life that you have described as liking, than you were in policing animal rights activism?

A. No, I think that’s taking it too far. But I certainly did.

Q. This is at a time when there is extremely little reporting coming from you?’

Thomson disputes the allegation that he was hardly producing any reports by the end of his deployment. However, a contemporary document from July records him having submitted only 21 reports in two and half years.

For comparison, two other undercover officers delivered 222 and 170 reports respectively in the same period. Thomson claims the report is lying.

Thomson was also asked how much time he spent with his wife and children, and in his real life, whilst he was deployed. He was vague in his answer but it appeared to have been less and less towards the end. He claims he did spend time in his real life, but he spent it alone. He took a part time course with the Open University, which took about six years.

HN26 ‘Christine Green’

HN26 ‘Christine Green’ is a controversial officer who will not be giving evidence as she is living outside the UK, so the Inquiry has no legal power to compel her to attend.

Her deployment was 1994-1999, slightly earlier than Thomson’s but with 2-3 years overlap. She too was spying on hunt sabs.

Her name came up a number of times during Thomson’s evidence. It is clear from her reporting that she and Thomson both attended a European animal rights gathering in the Netherlands from 9-16 April 1998, at Eurodusnie, a squatted school in Leiden.

Thomson accepts that he, ‘Green’ and Thomas Frampton would all have stayed in the squat, however he claims to have had no knowledge that Frampton and Green were in an intimate relationship.

‘They would have been in their group, which is a separate sabbing group altogether, and I don’t think I knew them in the field at all.’

Thomson recalls that he and Green would have come across each other on several other occasions during his deployment.

‘Q. Did you ever see any sign at any point during your deployment that Thomas Frampton and HN26 were or might have been in a sexually intimate relationship…

A. I can’t help you on that issue. We kept very separate, for obvious reasons.’

Green left her husband and the police, confessed her real identity to Frampton and moved in with him. As far as we know, they are still together and living in Sweden.

Documents show she was relatively close with Thomson. One dated 26 September 2000 [MPS-0746307] records that Green was planning to leave the UK and live abroad, and that she ‘wanted as little contact as possible with the SDS office in particular and the Met in general’.

It says she told an officer (ciphered as TN0021) that she wanted to distance herself from the organisation and ‘put the whole thing behind her’. A handwritten note on the document says ‘need to speak to JT.’

A few weeks later, a file note from November 2000 [MPS-0009494] expresses SDS concerns that Green had left the country and they had lost touch with her, but says that she was still in contact with Thomson.

Thomson claims he cannot remember any of the conversations from that time. It is clear that Thomson and Green are still in touch with each other two decades later.

Management Accountability & Post-Deployment Dishonesty

As was standard protocol for SDS undercovers, Thomson was required to phone the SDS office twice a day, which he says he did when he could. He says he would mostly tell his managers where he was sleeping, although he claims he didn’t tell them when he was sleeping with Sara or Ellie, as he knew it was wrong.

Thomson also met Assistant Commissioner David Veness during his time undercover, when Veness visited the unit on 3 July 1998.

Documents reveal this was a 90-minute planned visit with chats between the ‘Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations’ and groups of approximately three members of the SDS, each for 15 to 20 minutes.

Thomson said he does remember the event and that the feedback they got was a general ‘he’s very pleased’.

Thomson says only general information was given, regarding things that would be of interest to broader policing such as larger demonstrations in London.

When asked whether sexual relationships between undercover police officers and members of the public was touched upon, even in jest, he is categorical that it would not have been mentioned. He concedes that it’s because it would have been a confession of wrongdoing.

THE INTRODUCTION OF RIPA

The SDS code of conduct was introduced in January 2000 [MPS-0018359]. It contains a section about ‘collateral intrusion’, the incidental spying on people because they’re close to the real targets. The code makes loose claims that measures will be taken to avoid such intrusion.

Thomson says he hasn’t seen it and doesn’t remember even hearing the concept of ‘collateral intrusion’ back then. He points out that it would have been a near impossible task to avoid it, and he doesn’t recall it ever even being talked about. There was no change in operations when this code of conduct was introduced.

Other matters raised in the SDS code of conduct include the stipulation that authorisations should last no longer than three months before being reviewed.

Again, Thomson says this never happened. We were shown authorisation and review documents for Thomson and a number of other officers, seemingly identical wihtout consideration for what the officers were actually doing.

‘Q. It looks as if the cut and paste function has been mastered, doesn’t it?

A. It does look like they had found that on the computer by then.’

The final authorisation for Thomson’s deployment ran from 2 October 2001 to 1 October 2002 [MPS-0526929]. It was compiled by HN36 Detective Chief Inspector Michael Dell and signed by HN85 Commander Roger Pearce.

Under the heading ‘Consideration has been given to any adverse impact on community confidence that may result from the use or conduct of a source, or information obtained from that source,’ it states:

‘The positive effects of the use or conduct of the source in this arena, and the information emanating therefrom, are likely to far outweigh the negligible negative impact on the few supporters of extremist animal rights activity within the community.’

The next heading is: ‘Details of who will be affected, including collateral intrusion’. The response is:

‘Anarchists and animal rights activists who are involved in public disorder, criminal damage and serious assaults. Only information regarding those involved in such activity will be sought and actioned.’

It is evident from the reporting we have seen that information was routinely recorded about people who were not involved in any such activity, and that the negative impacts of these deployments was by no means negligible nor was it limited to a few supporters of ‘extremist animal rights activity’.

‘Q. In order to make the judgement that the positive effects of the information would far outweigh the negligible negative impacts on the few supporters of extremist animal rights activity, are you able to assist us any further as to what evidential basis Detective Chief Inspector Dell had to come to that conclusion?

A. I would presume he’s basing it on the reporting thus far in the deployment.’

Thomson is clear that his managers never discussed any of these questions with him.

MAKING SPYCOPS LAWFUL

Reviewing authorities every three months and limiting collateral intrusion were just some of the checks and balances that became statutory obligations on 25 September 2000, when the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) came into force, right in the middle of Thomson’s deployment.

The aim of RIPA was to make undercover deployments lawful under the Human Rights Act 1998.

‘Q. Can you recall any discussion or any practical effects of the implementation of that Act of Parliament?

A. No.

Q. Would it be fair to say within the SDS everything continued just as it had always?

A. I think probably yes, but while there was no specific guidance, whether the way management managed might have changed.

Q. Save that some paperwork was generated?

A. Perhaps. Yeah, I don’t know.’

Barr’s questions on this point were very dry, however the implications are huge: if nothing changed after the introduction of RIPA, collateral intrusion was completely disregarded, and authorities were filled out using copy-and-paste, then SDS deployments were unlawful under human rights law.

WITHDRAWAL & DISCIPLINARY ACTION

Thomson was told in May 2000 that his deployment would be wound up in January 2001. He subsequently created the Operation Lime murder plot (dealt with in detail above). As a result of Operation Lime, Thomson’s deployment was extended for a further year. It looks a lot like he invented the plot as a way to continue his cushy life.

We were shown an exfiltration plan proposed by Thomson himself in October 2001. It suggested a very long and drawn out process that would have taken a very long time. He says that this was because he would have done anything to prolong his deployment. He admits that he was very begrudging about any plan to withdraw him.

Thomson told Ellie he would be moving to the USA in January 2002 and his actual exfiltration took place in March 2002, by which time he was under investigation by his managers.

Thomson claims not to remember much about his withdrawal. However, it was clearly a period of significant conflict with his managers that continued after his deployment was over.

A file note from 22 March 2002 [MPS-0719665] records that SDS manager Bob Lambert contacted fellow manager HN53 to say he’d received a call from Thomson, asking for a meeting.

Thomson says he can’t remember what he was thinking, but he thought Lambert would be an ‘understanding ear’. He tells Barr that Lambert already knew about his relationships and didn’t seem shocked or fazed by it.

Tellingly, Thomson says that if Lambert had handled his exfiltration, it would have been far more understanding and less of a disciplinary matter.

However, knowledge of Thomson’s behaviour was not limited to Lambert. Another document from 27 May 2002 records a meeting between Thomson’s mentor HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ and SDS manager HN53:

‘[Thomson] also told him [HN1] that he believed that most of the current suspicions about his operation stemmed from SDS management disapproval of field officers becoming involved in romantic relationships during the course of their operation.’

Thomson agreed with this:

‘I thought it was sort of hypocritical and sort of retrospective.’

By this stage he claims he wasn’t talking to his managers. In fact, it looks like Thomson tried to put pressure on them in the context of what he felt was a disciplinary process. This included him threatening to leave the force.

Barr points out that in fact he never was subjected to the Met’s formal disciplinary process. As with other errant spycops before him, he was immune to disciplinary or criminal charges because, above all, the SDS prized its secrecy and couldn’t risk a disgruntled officer letting the public know the unit existed.

This reason was stated explicitly in the record of an interview on 18 September 2002, with Detective Chief Superintendent Black and Detective Superintendent McLachlan [MPS-0722289]:

‘I have told him that he has come very close to central discipline and criminal investigations and that, if it were not for the secret nature of the operation and the need to protect his colleagues, he would be long gone.’

It is a shocking admission. Fraud, violation of citizens, lying in court and other crime, all committed with impunity, thus allowing those who follow to do the same and more. It is the very opposite of the stated purpose of policing.

SACKED AS A SPYCOP BUT STILL WELCOME

The final cancellation of the authorisation for Thomson’s deployment was signed off in July 2002 [MPS-0526929]. It states that it was made clear to him that he was no longer a ‘source’ and had no authority to continue to contact his targets (an instruction he completely ignored).

Despite his betrayal of his managers, his unit, his role and his oath, Thomson was not expelled from the police force, nor did he choose to leave.

He wrote a remarkable debrief [MPS-0722282] which included an apology for his behaviour. Barr points out that, just like now, he was apologising for:

‘only what had been discovered and was capable of being proved against you.’

Thomson agrees with that assessment.

At the interview with Black and McLachlan, Thomson was asked outright whether he had sexual relationships with Sara and Ellie, and he said that he admitted then that he did. He claims the question of whether he was still in touch with them never came up.

Finally, we were shown a record of a meeting in 2012 between Thomson and Commander Peter Spindler, the Met’s Director of Professional Standards [UCPI0000035555].

The document states that the purpose of the meeting is to ‘manage potential risk’ to the Met. It appears to be a damage limitation exercise by the police, after the breaking of the spycops scandal.

Commander Spindler was clearly very supportive, reassuring Thomson that this was not a reinvestigation:

‘PS explains that he does not wish JT to finish his career thinking he is under a cloud. The purpose of this process is to protect the officer and the organisation.

Describes that both BS and the Deputy Assistant Commissioner hold JT in high regard and value his commitment and dedication to his role – and is hopeful that in a few months time there will be a clearer picture of the SDS review and that we can respond positively to media interest…

PS explains that the main thrust of the review is to protect the ‘troops’ whilst examining SDS management.

Moves on to say that he wants to instil in JT that he still enjoys the full confidence of the organisation but that is not to say in the future as the review unfolds he may be called to question.’

In fact, Thomson and other SDS officers were later investigated by a large internal police inquiry, Operation Herne.

We were shown Thomson’s statement to Herne [MPS-0721959], in which he describes the ‘moral compass’ of the SDS. Barr’s questions about this were understandably incredulous.

Thomson insists, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the unit as a whole did have a moral compass and held the moral high ground.

He does concede that his own behaviour was immoral and that he has deliberately and dishonestly misled both Operation Herne and the Inquiry on numerous occasions.

THOMSON’S CLAIMS ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH

In both his witness statement and his oral evidence Thomson has sought to claim he suffers from mental illness, including dissociative identity disorder, in order to explain his behaviour:

‘I appreciate there is a dichotomy here, how I was living two different lives, basically…

I need to be specific and I am trying to explain a state of mind which I alluded to…

I think those reasons are important and relevant… to your understanding and certainly to any lessons learnt.’

Barr pointedly challenged him about this:

‘Q. [Are you alluding] to an assertion that you suffered from dissociative identity disorder? Were you ever formally diagnosed with that psychiatric condition?

A. That came from a meeting with a psychiatrist some years after my deployment and one meeting.
It was something he suggested.

Q. “Suggested” is precisely the word you use in your witness statement… That falls some way short of “diagnosed”, doesn’t it?’

Barr went on to point out that Thomson was assessed by psychiatrists on a number of occasions while he was serving.

‘Q. You have said that you were seen by the Chief Medical Officer for the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] and then by a specialist who dealt with special forces issues?… Neither prevented you continuing to serve in the Metropolitan Police Service?

A. No.

Q. Part of the assessment for developed vetting includes your mental health, doesn’t it?

A. Mm-hm, yes…

Q. Presumably there was no medical issue to stop you continuing to serve not only in the Metropolitan Police Service but in Metropolitan Police Special Branch at a very high level of security clearance?… The reason you were downgraded was because of your conduct, wasn’t it?

A. Yes.’

Barr further pointed out that Thomson’s attempts to imply that he was mentally ill pose some significant issues in relation to his claims about Operation Lime:

‘Q. You were acting as a police officer doing very dangerous work preventing a probable murder…but if the contrary account is true, then it is consciously spun deception for self-serving purposes to impress your bosses, pay for a holiday and to remain undercover?

A. Yes.

Q. All very calculated?

A. Indeed.’

There is some indication that there were concerns about Thomson’s mental health at the time that his deployment was ending. We were shown a file note of his expense claims from early 2002 [MPS-0719684] which recorded:

‘He said that yesterday, after his interview with Detective Chief Superintendent Black and me, he had, “spent two hours at Beachy Head” and now acknowledged the need to see our consultant psychiatrist… “I need to see Mary Piper”.

We agreed that he would keep the appointment to see her on 27 March and that he did not wish to accept my offer of arranging an immediate meeting.’

However, the document also records that Thomson claimed £19.98 in petrol expenses for his quasi-suicidal trip to Beachy Head, and subsequently refused to attend the meeting with the psychiatrist until the internal investigation was over.

Thomson insists that he was genuinely distressed and not simply trying to portray himself as a man in distress so that management would exonerate him of his wrongdoing.

Nevertheless, a document from April 2005 [MPS-0748497], several years after his SDS undercover deployment, records Thomson being furious and ‘considering his legal position’ because his manager HN53 had raised the topic of him being suicidal as a concern about his suitability to be restored to firearms status.

Thomson accepts this might have been a legitimate concern, but says:

‘I think it should have been earlier. It was the timing that so annoyed me.’

Essentially, he only thinks his mental health is relevant when he is trying to avoid being held accountable for wrongdoing.

In any case, despite his claims to have suffered (and to still be suffering) from dissociative identity disorder and other mental illness, Thomson was successfully vetted for firearms duty and security clearance several times after his deployment ended, and remained in the Metropolitan Police Service until 2014.

Either he is lying about it, or the police are worryingly lax about who they allow to carry guns.

Conclusions

Open questioning ended at lunchtime on 10 December, and was followed by a short ‘closed’ hearing where Thomson was questioned by the Inquiry in secret, to protect people’s privacy.

Only his own legal team, the team representing the women he deceived into sexual relationships, and the lawyers for the Metropolitan Police were allowed to be present.

Thomson’s deployment, and his evidence, is among the most gobsmacking this Inquiry has examined. He has admitted to a staggeringly varied array of misconduct, seemingly without remorse:

‘Q. Most people who accept that something is wrong will, at some point, stop… You don’t appear to have done that… Why not?

A. I have no good answer for that.

Q. Save for a complete lack of morality?

A. I would accept that.’

The Inquiry has seen evidence of ill intentions going back years before he even joined the SDS – such as acquiring the birth certificate of a dead child in order to steal their identity – and continuing long after his deployment ended, as he maintained contact with women he deceived for over two decades, even after the SDS had been exposed.

It is clear that Thomson has discussed the Inquiry with other ex-SDS officers. When he told Ellie he was an undercover officer he also told her that many ex-spycops were leaving the UK in order to avoid being questioned by the Inquiry.

He wrote down all the officers he has discussed the Inquiry with since it was announced. We were not told the full extent of the list, but we do know that Lambert, Boyling and HN26 ‘Christine Green’ were all on it.

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, ended the three days of questioning with a warning for Thomson:

‘I am going to have to think very hard about whether what you have told me about what occurred in Marseille is true, or whether what L3 has told me about what occurred in Marseille and on the way to Marseille is true. And about what objectively occurred and was recorded and verified at the time.

Is there anything other than your own assertion which could persuade me of the account that you have given is correct, and not that which has been given by L3 and which corresponds with the contemporaneous documents?’

Thomson seemingly did answer that question, but his words have been tantalisingly redacted from the transcripts. We will have to wait for Mitting to publish his interim report on the SDS, which is expected around mid 2027.

However, Mitting’s scepticism about Thomson’s evidence is clear from his closing questions. Most noticeably, he did not thank James Thomson for his time.

Press release issued by COPS on 2 February 2026, as a new tranche of Undercover Policing Inquiry hearings begins.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – 2 FEBRUARY 2026

Spycops hearings resume today

Victims set out their positions on the next phase of evidence

Today, the Undercover Policing Inquiry began hearing live evidence, in Central London. Five former undercovers from the notorious Special Demonstration Squad deployed between 1992 and 2007 will be giving evidence over the next two months. A series of ‘position statements’ by participants were published today on behalf of numerous participants including the Commissioner
for the Metropolitan Police and victims of abusive undercover policing.

The Inquiry has set out some of the questions it will be asking about the justification for spying on trades unions, justice campaigns, political parties and campaign groups, including Palestinian solidarity groups, as well as the accuracy of the intelligence reporting, the officers’ abuses, including blacklisting and sexual deception, as well as the impact of it all.

Following on from previous hearings about the police’s handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and spying on the Lawrence family, the Inquiry will explore how the tasking of undercovers focused on protecting the reputation of the police. In 2005 Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead in cold blood by the police, who then targeted undercover officers to spy on the campaign for justice. The Metropolitan police have proffered an apology to the family for the reporting on their campaign.

In the early 2000 this drive to protect reputations was expanded with a ‘policing’ focus on preventing embarrassment to the government, and protecting corporations and ‘UK Plc’.

The evidence is that they ran deliberate campaigns of harassment. We will hear evidence of how managers and undercover officers secretly plotted to disrupt democratic processes by targeting print shops, raiding people’s homes and deliberately harassing people, and we will hear from the victims about the psychological damage and disruption that caused.

The Inquiry will also hear from women targeted for deceitful sexual relationships where the evidence speaks of abuse and coercive control.

As with previous hearings, the Inquiry will hear about undercover officers’ roles in a number of high profile events, including the massive 2003 Stop the War demonstration against the invasion of Iraq, and the undercover officer who played a central role in planning the high profile 1999 Carnival Against Capitalism, often known as J18, which ended in widepread clashes in the City of London.

The extent of DC Jim Boyling’s role in organising the J18 event will be explored, alongside the decision by the Special Demonstration Squad to not tell the City of London Police the protestors plans, and Government claims that the police had no contact with the organisers and no way of knowing what would happen on the day. Boyling will also be questioned about his central role in
organising the first ever anti-genetic crop decontamination in Ireland.

DC Carlo Soracchi will be questioned about his attempts while undercover to encourage an arson attack on a charity shop in Maida Vale; and how he came to meet with police barristers preparing the Met’s defence in a civil case about the mass detaining of protestors, the 2001 Oxford Circus ‘kettling’, contributing to the police’s victory, and undermining the judicial process in a case which
set a major precedent.

This so-called ‘spycops’ inquiry is one of the longest and most expensive ever, and it has been plagued with delays. Nevertheless, its importance is probably best underscored by the final words of the Metropolitan Police in their position statement.

‘The human toll of the [Special Demonstration Squad]’s dysfunction has been severe and wide-ranging: misuse of deceased people’s identities, wrongful intrusion into individuals’ private and political lives, grievous sexual exploitation, damaged relationships, broken families, and widespread anger, distress and psychological harm (including to some of the officers themselves).

The MPS recognises how important it is to understand the damage that the SDS has caused, to hear directly from the people who have been affected, and for the Inquiry to hold those responsible to account.’

Hearings are taking place at the International Dispute Resolution Centre, opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. Core Participants affected by these deployments will will be available for comment at the hearing venue.

For live coverage of hearings follow @tombfowler on social media & see https://ucpi.uk/youtube/

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Notes to editors

• The UCPI was established by Theresa May in 2015 after a series of revelations exposed by campaigners and the media. It is investigating undercover policing operations including secret political policing by the SDS and NPOIU, spying on 1000 left-wing political groups and campaigns between 1968 and 2014.

• A timetable of all those due to give evidence live and in person can be accessed here: https://www.ucpi.org.uk/2025/12/23/provisional-schedule-for-the-tranche-3-phase-2-hearings/

The public can view live proceedings online from February 2, 10am. It is also possible to attend witness hearings in person, please contact the Inquiry for more information.

• The SDS operated in secret for 40 years, targeting environmental and social justice campaigns, trade unions, anti-racist groups, peace movements, left-wing MPs, and families seeking justice after deaths involving police or racist violence and a range of progressive organisations.

The spies’ abuses include:
▪ Deceiving women into long-term intimate relationships, even fathering children.
▪ Spying on grieving families of those killed by racists or police.
Colluding in the blacklisting of thousands of trade unionists.
▪ Interfering and undermining the justice system, leading to miscarriages of justice.
▪ Stealing and using the identities of deceased children, to bolster the spies’ fake personas
▪ Infiltrating anti-racist, socialist and progressive campaigns, including Youth Against Racism in Europe (YRE), the Anti-Nazi League, and multiple environmental campaigns – with the aim of monitoring, reporting on and disrupting them.
▪ Hoovering up personal details on thousands of people involved with or supporting
the campaigns targeted, passed on to MI5

• The Inquiry has already cost £114.3 million (to June 2025). The Metropolitan Police has spent an additional £70 million on protecting it’s secrets through anonymity, redactions and legal defence.

• The Inquiry published an Interim Report on 29th June 2023. https://www.ucpi.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2023/06/Undercover-Policing-Inquiry-Tranche-1-Interim-Report.pdf

On page 96, para 28, the Judge concludes:

“The question is whether or not the end justified the means set out above. I have come to the firm conclusion that, for a unit of a police force, it did not; and that had the use of these means been publicly known at the
time [the early 1970s], the SDS would have been brought to a rapid end.”

• The Met have also had to make a series of major public apologies, including for the targeting of women for abusive sexual relationships, for spying on black and anti-racist organisations and family justice campaigns, for the spycops routinely stealing the identities of deceased children, and for shocking failures of supervision of the covert operations. See
eg. paras 24, 29, 38, 71, and 80 in this Met statement of June 2024: www.ucpi.org.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2024/07/Commissioner-Lawyers-Opening-statement-T2P1.pdf

• Managers of the unit will also be giving evidence in Tranche 3 Phases 3 hearings, which are scheduled for June 2026. The Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting will then retire to produce his second Interim Report by 2027. Meanwhile a new Chair will be appointed to oversee the remaining Tranches 4 and 5.

This article was originally published on Diane Langford’s Substack.

Undercover police officer HN348 ‘Sandra Davies’ was deployed 1971-73, infiltrating the Women’s Liberation Front. The group studied political texts and campaigned for gender equality on issues that are now mainstream normality, such as like equal pay and creches at workplaces. She was paid 90% of a male officer’s salary, as was standard for the police at the time.

She said she only had a peripheral role and couldn’t remember what fake surname she’d used. However, WLF documents showed she was the group’s treasurer, ‘Sandra Davies’. Although, by her own admission, her deployment provided no useful information to the police, her deployment continued for two years and was only terminated because a fellow officer in a related area had been exposed. 

In 2015, the Undercover Policing Inquiry was set up. It is an independent, judge-led inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales. ‘Davies’ asked the Inquiry for anonymity. Although the Inquiry found there was very little risk of harm if her real identity was revealed, it agreed she would find it embarrassing. The Inquiry granted her request.

This left those she spied on, notably Diane Langford, with many unanswered questions.

We wrote summary reports of the Inquiry’s questioning of ‘Sandra Davies’ and of Diane Langford.

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A personal message to the woman spycop who surveilled the women’s liberation movement, by Diane Langford.

Hey Sandra, do you read me?

Are you a lurker on Facebook or Insta? Do you follow me on X or Bluesky? I’m easily found on social media or blog pages… WordPress, Substack, or Weebly.

My profile on the Undercover Policing Inquiry website is extensive too.

Sandra, are you reading this?

You spied on me in the early 1970s. You infiltrated the group I founded, the Women’s Liberation Front, (WLF). The long list of reports you wrote on us and other related groups testifies to this.

You say you only remember having used the name Sandra and that you accept, from documentary evidence, that you used the surname Davies.

You know me, Sandra. You’ve been inside my home, eaten food cooked by me, taken part in discussions in our women’s group about the issues we still face of male violence, discrimination in wages and conditions at work, unequal education, lack of child care, having to ask a male relative to vouch for us to obtain credit, lack of bodily autonomy… I could go on.

My problem is, nobody can remember you. I checked with other women involved in the WLF etc and no-one can remember a woman named Sandra Davies.

Were you the tight-lipped, uptight woman, who hardly ever spoke? Who broke down and cried and was comforted by us. You met my baby and may have contributed to buying her a carrycot.

Your claim, that you can’t remember your legend, is legendary. Maybe your name is ‘Sandra’. Other spycops have reported how much easier it is to use their first names. Being addressed by your actual name makes it easier to avoid the split-second failure to respond which rouses suspicion in circles well aware that undercover cops may be surveilling their meetings.

Of course we knew we were being spied on back then. The van parked outside with wires sticking out of its roof; the clicks on the phone lines. All very clumsy compared with today’s hi-tech surveillance. And of course there were people we suspected of infiltrating our groups.

Yet, discovering the details years later, there’s still a sense of betrayal. The creepy sense of you, attending Women’s Liberation Movement conferences and making derogatory notes about us and our campaigns, insulting lesbians, women of colour, and feminists in general, all the while being paid less than your male counterparts, apparently unaware of the irony.

My experience, obviously, is nowhere near the horror faced by the women deceived into exploitative intimate relationships, whose bravery has exposed state-sponsored rapes; it’s out of solidarity with them that I took part in the Undercover Policing Inquiry, to show the long history of sexism, misogyny and racism involved.

Now that the trauma those women experienced is out in the open, how do you feel about their exploitation by your male counterparts during your undercover work?

You applied for anonymity in the Undercover Policing Inquiry because you were afraid the people you spied on would hurt you. Your antics are worthy of a soap opera, the way you claimed I might rise out of my hospital bed, when, aged 80, I was undergoing a mastectomy, and physically attack you. ‘I’m afraid she might do me harm,’ you pleaded to the Chair of the Inquiry, and he heard you, Sandra, he heard you.

I, however, hereby challenge you to come clean. Tell me who you are, stop lying about your legend. For peace of mind, I need to know what you called yourself. If you have a shred of decency, I implore you to speak up against privileged anonymity, ridiculous redactions, threats to sequester our houses and possessions if we whisper the truth, even to our nearest and dearest.

Whatever your given name may be, or the name you are using now, I don’t care. I need to know what you called yourself and what you looked like then.

My personal details are laid out for all to read and judge in your reports, redacted to protect your identity and that of the many other spycops who surveilled me from the 1960s until… when? Now, Sandra? Are we still ‘friends’. Did you attend my daughter’s funeral? Send me a condolence card? Give me a hug? Who can I trust?

Statement from Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, an alliance of people spied on by Britain’s political secret police:

We wish to express our utmost solidarity with the campaign for the Hillsborough Law, and stand with those insisting the law should not be weakened to the point that it is ineffective. We are angry that the Government is seeking to exempt from the duty of candour the very agencies to whom it should most apply.

The Hillsborough Law must apply to every arm of the state, particularly the police and security services. There can be no justice or accountability without this – anything else simply perpetuates the very problem this law should address.

Through our own experience of seeking justice, we the victims of spycops understand all too well how state agencies do everything in their power to hinder and obstruct legitimate struggles for justice. Hillsborough families are still grieving for their lost loved ones. We are not, but other than that, the experience of the Hillsborough campaigners bears many similarities to our own battle.

It was us, the victims, who exposed the spycops scandal, who campaigned and forced the authorities to implement a public inquiry, just as it is the victims who have led in the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.

Justice delayed is justice denied

The police and government have spent over £150m between them trying to cover up and downplay the activities of two undercover policing units, and the Undercover Policing Inquiry is now entering its twelfth year. Time and resources have been squandered by police trying to hide their gross negligence from the public who paid their wages.

However, in the last two years, as the truth about spycops came to light, the police have issued numerous apologies.

Apologies that should have been and clearly could have been issued over a decade ago. Their own documents show they knew of these issues even before the scandal broke in 2011.

Had the duty of candour been in place, there would have been much more accountability, at an earlier stage so fewer delays and less expense. And and less ongoing re-traumatisiation of those who suffered, not least from the racist and sexual abuse by many of these officers.

The lesson is clear, if you grant the police and the security services these exemptions, they will continue to hide their abuses. Police forces across the country, as well as MI5, continue to obfuscate and hide behind policies, drag their heels, and cite national security in relation to absolutely everything to protect their own failures.

We remind people of the recent case of ‘Witness A’, a senior MI5 official who was found to have lied to the court in the case of an agent accused of domestic violence.

It is clear that state security agencies have limited accountability at present. Much is taken on trust – and clearly it should not be. A duty of candour with legal consequences for breaches, is thus an essential tool in curbing this disturbing pattern of dishonesty and abuse.

Security agencies will not change unless they are forced to publicly account for their failures. The government needs to address the fact that it is state secrecy itself that is the problem that needs solving.

In seeking to protect such state agencies’ abilities to mislead and obstruct, the government is centring the needs of abusers over those of their victims. It is the antithesis of democracy.

The Hillsborough Law must be as set out by the campaigners seeking answers for that terrible event. It is not just the tragedy that must not happen again, but also the painful decades-long fight for basic justice for the victims of 1989.

The Hillsborough fight is our fight, and the fight of everyone who travels down the same path of holding accountable the agents of the state, because the duty of candour affects every single one of us who steps on that difficult road to justice. Our own personal experiences with spycops attests to that.

There is only one Hillsborough Law and Starmer must fulfil his election promise to enact it. Anything less is a betrayal.

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 4
17 October 2025

INTRODUCTION

The first live evidence hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry’s ‘Tranche 3’ hearings took place on 17 October 2025 at the International Dispute Resolution Centre in London. ‘Sara’ (not her real name) gave evidence remotely and in order to protest her privacy the live stream was audio-only.

The Inquiry’s page for the day has the audio, a transcript, and links to many of the documents referred to.

Sara has also provided the Inquiry with a written witness statement [UCPI0000038210].

Sara was deceived into an intimate relationship by undercover officer HN16 James Thomson, who used the fictional cover name ‘James Straven’ and also stole the identity of a deceased child, Kevin Crossland.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

This hearing was part of the Inquiry’s ‘Tranche 3 Phase 1’, which is examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad, 1993-2008.

Sara was questioned for the Inquiry by Daisy Monahan, who referred to Thomson by his cover name, ‘James Straven’ for the first hour or so. The SDS created codenames for their undercovers in this period, and various reports from the time refer to him as ‘Magenta Triangle’. However, we will be using his real name throughout: James Thomson.

SARA’S BACKGROUND

Sara started as an animal rights activist giving out leaflets in the late 1990s, and she became involved in Croydon hunt saboteurs in 1998. She volunteered at the same animal hospital as ‘Wendy’ who Thomson also deceived into an intimate relationship, and who has also given evidence to the Inquiry.

In his written witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI0000035553], Thomson describes Sara as:

‘an occasional hunt sab interested in animal rights but not an extremist.’

Monahan began by questioning Sara about the hunt sab group – how did she get involved? What did they do? The Inquiry appears to struggle with the voluntary and ad-hoc nature of so much of the activism targeted by the spycops.

There was no recruitment process: people would just turn up and get involved. Sara explained that there was also a social scene.

They would all go to the pub together after protesting at a hunt, and the Croydon hunt sabs were a close knit group. She first met Thomson at one of those trips to the pub.

Sara told the Inquiry that she only took part in about 15 hunt sab actions, and she mostly did map reading in the van, because she wasn’t physically fit enough to keep up in the fields.

She said she stopped sabbing towards the end of 2000, before she left the country to live abroad.

EXAGGERATION AND LIES

James Thomson has described Sara as someone who was ‘prepared to risk arrest’ but not ‘fully committed to the violent struggle’ and not part of ‘any inner clique’.

His erroneous descriptions of rigid hierarchy and ready violence echo those made by other spycops. It may be due to a desire to seem like they were involved in activity that justified police interest.

Alternatively, it may be that because the police are an institution based on formal power structures imposed with the continual threat of violence, they simply project it on to everyone else.

Sara rejected the suggestion that an inner clique existed, or that anyone in the group was violent. Sara pointed out that hunt sabs were often violently attacked, and said that there was:

‘verbal shouting on either side, from us or the hunt.’

Monahan asked Sara a lot of questions about the group and what their actions were like, despite it being clear that she wasn’t actually present at most of the events she was being asked about.

For example, she never took part in any ‘home visits’ to hunt supporters (although Thomson says she did) so she said she could only imagine what they might have been like, and that people might have been ‘shouting abuse’. She never heard about anyone damaging property.

Looking at the secret police reports of the time, there is relatively little about Sara, and what there is appears to be inaccurate.

The first report highlighted by Monahan [MPS-0001923], dated 29 March 1999, mentions Sara’s work at an animal sanctuary, describing her as a ‘nurse’.

She says she wasn’t a nurse, she was an unqualified assistant. There are also two reports (including MPS-0745590, dated 8 September 1999) which claim that she’d sold her car to a hunt sab known as ‘L1’, and Sara says this isn’t true either.

Sara left the UK in 2001. She sold her flat before doing so, and says Thomson was aware of this.

However, the SDS management seem to have been told that she was renting the flat out and planned to return to it – this is detailed in an Appendix to their plan for ending his deployment,‘Magenta Triangle Extraction’ [MPS-0007389].

The same document also refers to her as a ‘one-time girlfriend’ of L1. She retorts that this was ‘absolute rubbish’. They were friends, but she was never his girlfriend.

Contrary to what Thomson said in one of his witness statements, she doesn’t believe Wendy had a sexual relationship with L1 either. This is all incredibly personal information of no obvious policing value, that the police have kept on file for almost thirty years, and they didn’t even get it right.

The SDS managers were aware that Thomson’s ex-wife and three children lived in Sutton, very close to Sara’s flat. The risk of a chance encounter is mentioned in a much earlier File Note about Thomson’s ‘extraction’ dated July 2000 [MPS-0749475], which suggests that HN58 (Thomson’s boss, a Detective Chief Inspector) was planning to research Sara’s ‘route to work etc’.

We then hear about a debrief written by Thomson after his undercover deployment was over, in which he states:

‘Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control a peripheral member of my target group moved in around the corner from my ex-wife and children, who it had been my habit to visit regularly.

After I initially reported this I was informed that S squad would be tasked to follow the hood in question [redacted] so that we could assess the threat accurately. This was never done and the ‘follow’ was eventually performed by an ex-member of the branch.’

Sara was not the only one of Thomson’s targets to live or work in Sutton, so the Inquiry is not yet sure if she was the person trailed by a former Special Branch manager at Thomson’s behest.

She made the point:

‘The risk that he took in the first place of beginning a relationship with me when he knew that I lived two streets away from his ex and his children. That was a massive huge risk that was taken that needn’t have happened.’

In his witness statement, Thomson notes:

‘I have been referred to page 4 of what is titled ‘Magenta Triangle extraction’ … which refers to the threat posed by the proximity of “Sara” to where my “children’s mother and step-father now reside”. I am asked why, bearing in mind this “threat” did I enter into a sexual relationship with “Sara”. I can only say through stupidity.’

CROYDON HUNT SABS

Monahan then moved on, to ask Sara about Thomson’s involvement in the Croydon hunt sabs.

Sara agrees that Thomson was already ‘well-established’ in the group when she got involved, saying ‘it was clear that he had been there for a while’. She recalls that everyone knew him and liked him, and he often lent out his car.

Thomson has claimed that he was part of the ‘second tier’ of the group but not the core. He’s said that he became ‘embedded’ in the group, and ‘included in their other protest activity’, as a result of helping with planning, organisation and logistics.

During her questioning, Monahan drew heavily on the work done by the Undercover Research Group, whose profile of Thomson mentions the group’s nicknames for him: ‘Posh Sab’ and ‘James Blond’ (Thomson has denied being aware of these nicknames).

Sara says she called him ‘James Blond’ to his face, so he definitely knew, but didn’t seem bothered about the name. She thinks it the name was because of his hair, not because anyone suspected him of being a spy.

According to the profile Thomson was considered a ‘strong fighter’, who didn’t shy away when the group was attacked by the police or hunt supporters.

Sara agreed that he had that reputation, and confirmed that he’d trained in some sort of martial art.

She was then asked a series of questions about her experiences of public disorder, and she recalled ‘scuffles’ and shouting, and instances of terrier men pushing sabs around, hunters using their whips to hurt sabs.

In November 1998, Thomson himself was attacked by hunt supporters armed with golf clubs and bats, who beat him around the head and body. Monahan produced an SDS File Note about this incident [MPS-0001577], and Thomson taking time off due to his injuries.

‘Wendy’ was attacked by the group too, and has described this in her written witness statement [UCPI0000038208]. However, Sara doesn’t remember this incident, and wasn’t there at the time.

We also heard about another report filed by Thomson in November 1998. In it he claims that the Croydon hunt sab group were planning to physically attack a fascist at his home.

Sara was involved in the group by this time, but says she didn’t know about this, and it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing they would do. She never saw the hunt sabs committing acts of violence, and doesn’t think that they ever carried weapons.

Thomson has made a number of claims about the group’s involvement in ‘criminal activity’ and public disorder. Sara doesn’t agree with his claim that they had ‘a broad anarchic agenda’.

She says some of them went on marches and protests for human rights as well as animal rights. She only went to one demo at Hillgrove (a farm where cats were bred for vivisection, which closed in August 1999 due to campaigning). Thomson told her that he was going to take part in some ‘home visits’, but didn’t share details of these with her.

On 1 September 2000 another Croydon hunt sab, ‘L4’, was run over by a member of the Old Surrey and Burstow hunt in a 4-wheel-drive vehicle, and very nearly killed.

His injuries were so severe that he spent months in hospital, regularly visited by Thomson, who pretended to be a good friend.

In his report of the incident, Thomson wrote about the anger felt by the hunt sabs who witnessed this deliberate attack, and claimed that there was immediate talk of ‘reprisals’.

Sara was not there that day, but remembered how upset and outraged everyone was. In her witness statement she wrote about going along to a protest at the hunt’s kennels after this incident, but leaving early because of the atmosphere. There were very few police there, but 36 animal rights activists were arrested afterwards.

OPERATION LIME

Questioning then moved on to Sara’s holiday with Thomson in Bordeaux in January 2001. This was a fairly spontaneous, last-minute trip, proposed by Thomson, supposedly because he wanted to research a business venture involving golf carts, although as far as Sara was concerned it was ‘just a jolly’, a nice little break with friends.

Thomson and another sab, known in the Inquiry as ‘L3’, drove there together. Sara flew down to meet them a few days later.

Here, Monahan read from Sara’s witness statement:

‘He arrived at Bordeaux Airport to collect me in a hire car, saying his Land Rover had been stolen in Marseille.’

He didn’t seem particularly bothered about the loss of this vehicle and everything inside it. Sara doesn’t remember Thomson saying anything about looking for it, or reporting the theft.

Unsurprisingly Sara doesn’t remember much in the way of detail about what appeared to her to be an innocuous trip to France 25 years ago:

‘Nothing stands out… I can remember we had a walk around town, went for coffee and lunch and things like that, and we went to the beach at one point for a walk. And that’s all I can remember, really. I think we went to a… whether it was an Indian or vegetarian restaurant or something we found while we were there. That’s all I can really remember.’

However, documentary evidence reveals that this ‘holiday’ was in fact ‘Operation Lime’. The ‘theft’ of the Land Rover was engineered by Thomson’s police handlers, ostensibly to disrupt the procurement of a firearm in Marseille, for £700, by ‘L3’, who allegedly had criminal contacts in France. The gun was supposedly in the vehicle when it was ‘stolen’.

Q. Were you aware at any point of any what seemed to be secretive conversations between the two of them, of them nipping off for private conversations?
A. Not that I can recall…

Q. Just for the avoidance of doubt, just to be absolutely clear on your evidence, you have no recollection on that trip of anything being said about a firearm having been obtained in Marseille?
A. No. No, not at all.
Q. Nothing about the firearm being in the vehicle?
A. Nothing, no.

We heard from David Barr KC, Counsel to the Inquiry, during Opening Statements that even at this time, SDS managers were suspicious that this ‘plot’ might in fact have been a self-aggrandising tale made up by Thomson, planting a gun he had in order to make it seem like the animal rights activists were trying to buy one.

There is evidence that Thomson owned a firearm which he kept in a ‘deposit box’ in France, and Barr has made clear that the Inquiry will be investigating whether there was ‘a genuine plot which DS Thomson’s intelligence and actions thwarted, or was it all a deception on his part?’

Sara, who was present on the trip, clearly had no notion that there was any kind of plot involved.

INTIMATE AND SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP

Monahan then moved on to ask ‘Sara’ about the things she is really here to give evidence about: the deceitful sexual relationship that James Thomson engineered with her.

Sara met Thomson in autumn 1998. She was in her early 30s at the time, and remembered:

‘We made each other laugh. I think we just had a lot… we just connected.’

She was interested in him, and discussed the idea with friends. At some point he called her, and arranged a dinner date at a vegetarian restaurant in Croydon. It went really well, and he called her almost immediately after to invite her on a day trip to France. It was clearly the start of something. They went to Calais and bought wine and cheese (she wasn’t vegan at this point).

Sara describes the relationship as affectionate, but quite chaste, for the first few weeks. They would spend the night together, but not have sex:

‘I know he was reticent that is true, at the beginning… he was holding back and wanted to wait…’

Q: Even though you weren’t having full sex with him, did you during this period of time consider yourself to be in a fully committed monogamous relationship?

‘From my point of view, yes, we were in a relationship at that point… Just the intimacy between us. I don’t mean just physically I mean in general, the connection that we had with each other.’

Like other officers, Thomson lied to Sara about his age, claiming to 33, five years younger than he really was.

Sara was specifically asked about this, as Thomson had told ‘Ellie’, a substantially younger woman he deceived into a relationship, that Sara had corrected his claim to be 33 and reminded him he was actually 36 (Ellie has also given evidence to the Inquiry).

Sara is certain this never happened:

‘No, because my understanding until I found out the truth was that he was two years younger than me, three years younger than me, I can’t remember exactly now, but he was younger than me. That would have made him older than me, so that wouldn’t have happened.’

In fact, he was neither 33 or 36 when he began his relationship with Ellie, but 37.

Thomson told Sara he was a location manager and scout for TV and films, and that meant he travelled a lot for work.

He also told her he had three children with an ex-partner, and made it clear that he was a devoted father; they were his priority.

Thomson claimed that his ex had tricked him into having the first child, and Sara says she found it odd that he had gone on to have two more children with the same woman if she had tricked him into having the first.

Not long after they became close, they did start having sex, and the relationship became more intense. They would see each other two or three times a week, generally at her house.

SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT

Sara only stayed at Thomson’s place once. Her description is very similar to those given by numerous women deceived into relationships by other spycops:

‘It was totally not his style and it didn’t look lived in… it didn’t look like anybody lived there. I found it quite strange and I thought it was because he was travelling so much that it was just a touchdown base.’

Sara described the relationship:

‘I felt like I had met somebody who really got me, and who got my life on all levels, especially the spiritual aspect of my life that was happening, getting deeper at that time. We had a lot of fun together.

And there was just a connection… it felt for me like a soul connection, that’s the only way I can describe it, like somebody I had known a lot longer than I actually did, on some level. It was not just on the physical mental plane, there was something else for me going on there.’

They never had any rows or conflicts. She introduced him to her parents as her boyfriend. During a trip to the town of Glastonbury in the summer of 1999, he told her he loved her. She adored him.

‘It was a mutual thing for me, we just really enjoyed each other’s company and I was always over the moon to see him.’

Nevertheless, in her written statement Sara described being cautious:

‘His life was very compartmentalised. Something didn’t sit quite right. It was as if there was a part of him that was kept at bay.’

He met her friends. But she never met any of his, nor his family.

The mixed messages Sara received took up a lot of mental energy and were ultimately quite damaging to her:

‘I was very preoccupied with this, so much so that there were nights when I could not sleep and running it over in my mind and writing in my journal about it. However, I was totally in love with him and just thought that was how he was and that he was a very private person.’

She described one odd incident when he was away and she asked him for an address. She tried to send him flowers but the delivery failed. The address was a B&B and there was no James Straven known at that address.

However, he made up a complicated story about it being owned by his family and the staff not knowing he was there, and she gave him the benefit of the doubt. With hindsight she says she would always find a benign justification for the way he was behaving.

UNDERSTATEMENT AND LIES

Thomson has made several statements to the Inquiry, with differing accounts of his relationship with Sara. In his second witness statement [UCPI00000352], dated 17 April 2018, he claimed:

‘We had a brief sexual relationship over a few weeks.’

Monahan observed that ‘he’s very vague about the duration of your relationship’ and in his 2023 witness statement he says:

‘I cannot remember how long the sexual relationship lasted. We were good friends until she moved abroad.’

Sara testified that the sexual relationship had in fact lasted over a year.

It ended after Thomson had disappeared for around two weeks, during Christmas 1999:

‘At that time of year, it’s a time where, you know, intimacy can deepen or just you know you would expect to be hanging out a little bit with the person you’re in love with.

And usually if he’d gone away, if he was away with his kids or if he was away on a work assignment, I would know about it and roughly how long he would be and we were always in touch when he was away.

So the fact that he just totally disappeared, I got quite concerned about it as well, like, what’s happened to him?’

After two weeks of unexpected silence she was upset and confused, and for the first time ever, challenged him about his behaviour. His response was to show up at her house, hand-deliver a letter and leave her alone to read it.

ENDING IT

In her witness statement, Sara recalls Thomson’s stories in the letter:

‘He had difficulties maintaining intimate relationships for long periods of time due to traumatic childhood experiences. He said that when he had been at boarding school his best friend had been raped by the headmaster and had subsequently committed suicide…

He also said that his first sexual relationship had been with a 35-year old teacher from his school and that this had impacted him significantly.’

He returned to talk to her once she’d read it. He said that the trauma made sexual relationships very difficult for him.

Monahan asked Sara about her reactions to this letter, which were obviously complex. She spoke of compassion, empathy, but also some confrontation about why he had put her in that position:

‘I think there was that lot of mixed emotion going on there, because I think there was something that clicked about, “ah that makes sense”, to why he had been behaving like he had.

There was also, sure, some disappointment but there was that lot of hope also because that wasn’t the main part of our relationship.’

However Sara also pointed out:

‘That whole story was that all pre-planned so that it all made sense all the way down the line. All the jigsaw puzzle bits being put together way in advance of all of this happening.’

This degree of premeditated manipulation was not exclusive to Thomson, many spycops had elaborate stories of childhood abuse and trauma as part of the reasons why they could not continue being with people they deceived. They gave no consideration to the horrendous impacts this had.

Sara explained how Thomson asked told her not to tell anyone about the letter:

‘I have to say at this point that I did talk to people about that letter because it was necessary for me because the adjustment from going from that type of relationship to this…

One of the reasons for me that finding out [that he was a spycop] was such a relief, because I had so much guilt over that for years and I want to make it absolutely clear at this point that these relationships did not just affect us during the relationship…

Q. If this doesn’t seem like a silly question, but what was your understanding at the time of why he was asking you to keep the contents of the letter secret?

A. Probably because of… it’s not something he would have wanted widely known, that he had problems around sex.

Q. And because it was private information about painful past experiences?

A. Yes.

Q. Thinking about it now, “Sara”, do you have a view on why you think he swore you to secrecy, now you know the truth?

A. Because of the contents of that letter are outrageous. It’s an outrageous thing to have told me if that is not true. And maybe some part of him knew that it would come out at some point.

I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to have other sexual relationships and that wouldn’t have made sense. I don’t know…

Q. Again, at the risk of stating the obvious but now that you know that it was all fabricated, what is your feeling about this letter?

A. I don’t really have the words… I think you can understand how disgusted and outrageous it was to have written what he did and to put me under that sort of pressure, and a pressure that has lasted over 20 years of my life.’

In his witness statement Thomson claims:

‘The sexual relationship ended through mutual agreement. I realised it was getting serious and I recognised the difficulties that would cause for both of us.’

However Sara was adamant that there was no ‘mutual agreement’, saying:

‘It was definitely on his request that the sexual relationship ended.’

The sexual element of their relationship was over, but in the letter Thomson had written that he still wanted to spend time with Sara, and seems to have continued acting as if she was his girlfriend. She says:

‘For me, sex or no sex, it was still a very intimate and exclusive relationship.’

STAYING CLOSE

He admitted to her that he wouldn’t be happy about her getting together with someone else. They were still very close, in regular contact and emotionally intimate. He travelled to India to join her on holiday in Goa, where they shared a room. He bought her a birthday present.

Sara described her feelings about this new relationship status in her written statement:

‘After this, we continued to spend much time together for several months, although we were no longer having sex with each other. For me, it was possible to make the shift to a non-sexual relationship because our connection was so strong on so many levels.

We still delighted in each other’s company and, of course, the continued close relationship meant that I held on to a hope that he would change his mind with time or that we could somehow work it out. It was on my mind all the time.’

‘James Straven’ had been to Goa before – he’d gone there with some other hunt sabs back in 1999. That little jolly was authorised by the SDS. His handler, Sergeant Greaney, justified it in a document [MPS-0527635] claiming:

‘This trip offers him the greatest opportunity yet to bridge the final barriers and gain total acceptance into the inner sanctum and all the advantages that will entail.

In a neutral environment, away from the paranoid fears of police/state interference, it is probable that he will become privy to the past actions, present plans and future intentions of L2 and L1.’

However, it seems there was no such authorisation for the week he spent there with Sara. Asked why she thought he went, Sara replied:

‘I would say it was pleasure… we went to the beach, we travelled a bit. Yes, it was just like a fun time.’

Sara moved abroad in March 2001. Soon after she left she discovered that Thomson had started seeing ‘Ellie’.

‘Q. How did you feel when you found that out?

A. Shattered, if I am really honest. Confused, completely and utterly confused… in my mind it was like, if we were that close and it was a sexual thing that stopped the relationship, why wouldn’t he have carried on just seeing me? Why was he starting a relationship that I knew to be sexual with somebody else?…

And I also had deep concern for the fact that he was going to take somebody else down the path that he had taken me…

I emailed him about that and was like, “What the hell are you doing? It’s not fair if you are about to start down the same pathway as you did with me”.

So it caused a lot of confusion and a lot of angst… He didn’t reply and I never heard from him again.’

Sara also recounted an incident where Thomson found out about a casual relationship she had with another man months after Thomson had ended the physical relationship with her. In her written statement she describes how Thomson reacted:

‘He wrote to me when I had moved abroad and asked why I had shared a room with him in January 2000 on the Goa trip if I was seeing someone else. I was not seeing this man when I went away with him in 2000, James had the dates wrong.

In this email he basically questioned my morals, which now I know the truth I find abhorrent.’

Monahan goes even further to say that it sounds like Thomson was gaslighting Sara.

IMPACT

Sara was plagued by distressing and disturbing dreams about Thomson, long before she discovered he was an undercover officer.

Around 2013 she ended up ceremoniously burning all her journals, lots of photographs of him, the letter he’d written (in which he claimed to be a victim of sexual abuse) and anything else which related to him, in order to get him out of her system.

She eloquently explained to the Inquiry:

‘These relationships did not just affect us during the relationship and from the date we found out, that it has been ongoing in that period in between.’

It never occurred to her at the time that he was an undercover police officer. After the news broke about HN26 ‘Christine Green’, who also infiltrated hunt sab groups, somebody suggested to her that he might have been one too.

However Sara didn’t take this possibility seriously, saying ‘it sounded too far-fetched’. In the absence of concrete proof, she refused to believe it.

‘I didn’t really take it on board… It was to do with not just his closeness to me, but other people in our group as well. The fact that he was such an integrated part of our group.

And for me at that time it was, like, having had the letter about all his sexual difficulties and the abuse and everything else, it was like, well, that happens to people, and that could be why he compartmentalised sides of his life, it was a way of coping with what had happened. So for me it was like that could be completely plausible.’

The Inquiry contacted Sara for the first time in August 2018, and told her that Thomson had been an undercover police officer. She says she was shocked, angry and confused, but also relieved to realise that she wasn’t paranoid:

‘Well, you know, after years of confusion and trying to work out… it is like layers of an onion coming off, you know. It takes time to make that switch from what was to what is, it’s not overnight.

I would say it took months, years, whatever, it is still ongoing in some ways…

The psyche knows when something is off. It’s a subconscious thing. And I think there were times, you know when I burnt those journals it is like, am I nuts, why can’t I move on from this? Because it didn’t make sense. So I used to question my own like feelings and stuff around it.

I did feel crazy at times. So in a way there was a relief in finally knowing that there was a good reason why I felt like that.’

However, Sara was also very scared that she would bump into Thomson, or that he would turn up and threaten her into silence. The discovery has had a lasting impact on her:

‘It changed my behaviour. It changed my feeling of safety completely and until I moved a year ago, if ever anything disappeared in my house that I couldn’t find, my response was always “who’s been in my house?” And that is a really hard thing to live with. And something happens you just get used to it. It becomes a new norm.

And it is only when I have looked back that I realise how much of an impact that is… it’s completely and utterly annihilated any sense of trust. It’s annihilated my trust in the state, in the police, I don’t know where I would go if something happened to me…

It affected my mental health. It affected my concentration and ability to relax and that is ongoing to this day. That has never returned to the level that it was at before. And I just feel like my life has been invaded again and again and again.’

ABUSE AS TRADECRAFT

Monahan read out the now-infamous advice of HN2 Andy Coles that appears in the SDS’s ‘Tradecraft Manual’ [MPS-0527597]:

‘If you have no other option but to become involved with a weary you should try to have fleeting disastrous relationships with individuals who are not important to your sources of information.’

Sara said she found it ‘utterly misogynistic and outrageous’.

Monahan went on to explain about the SDS’s mentoring scheme. Thomson’s mentor was HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’, another officer who is now known to have deceived a woman, Denise Fuller, into a sexual relationship. (The Inquiry has granted him anonymity over his real name, despite the their earlier promises not to do so for such men).

HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ also mentored HN14 Jim Boyling, who had three or four sexual relationships during his deployment.

In his witness statement to the Inquiry (which the Inquiry has not yet published), Boyling says that HN1 was ‘candid’ about the benefits of entering into relationships:

‘I remember him saying words to the effect that as an undercover you were never going to break through the glass ceiling of acceptance, you were never going to get the acceptance of the inner circle unless they had confidence in you and this would not be forthcoming if you were perceived to be a single man living alone. Confidence could come from seeing you in a relationship with a fellow activist.’

The Inquiry has seen evidence that HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ knew about Boyling’s relationships, and was also aware of Thomson’s. He reported this to an SDS Inspector, HN53, in May 2002.

By then though, Thomson’s time in the field had been brought to an ignominious end. SDS managers carried out an investigation into his activities and concluded that as well as failing to deliver a decent amount of credible intelligence, he had committed a host of other disciplinary breaches, some of them criminal.

These included disobeying his managers, travelling abroad in defiance of orders, making fraudulent expenses claims, the misuse of unauthorised false identities and last but not least, some extremely shoddy tradecraft.

Following an interview in September 2002, Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Black noted in a document [MPS-0722289] that:

‘It is clear that he has entered into relationships during the course of his work which are inappropriate.’

CULTURE OF IMPUNITY

Thomson was never formally disciplined, or prosecuted, for his behaviour. The managers knew that taking action against errant officers would risk them becoming disgruntled and making the unit’s existence public.

Learning about all this now for the first time, Sara reacted:

‘For me it is just unbelievable that there was no consideration for the impact that would have on us whatsoever. There was no consideration given to their wives and partners…

[It was known] that he was having a relationship, though it was decided not to be divulged to us to protect the SDS. So for 17 years of my life earlier I could have known that and been saved quite a lot of distress…

But it seems that there is no importance given to the impact on us, whatsoever, in any of this, and I find that abhorrent and shocking.’

After Monahan had finished, Sara’s own barrister, Charlotte Kilroy KC, asked her if there was anything she wanted to add. She made a point about undercover policing today:

‘Shortly after the Sarah Everard case [a woman raped and killed by a Met officer] and there was talk about the Metropolitan Police putting undercover – I can’t even say this – they were going to put undercover officers in nightclubs to protect women.

And for me, I am like, really, please do not put those men in charge of our safety. Ever. And I just want to be clear on that. I found that so shocking, after what they have done to put them in charge of women’s safety anywhere is unthinkable.’

Sara ended with a plea on behalf of other women:

‘It has been a journey, you know, of recovery. And I thought I was getting there, but I see from today that the impact is still there, how deeply impacted my life has been…

And I am standing here for other women, and I wouldn’t be here for any other reason and please do not allow this to happen again.’

The Chair of the Inquiry, Sir John Mitting, thanked Sara for giving evidence, recognising that it has plainly been a very difficult process:

‘As I am sure you know, I am not in charge of policing and although I can make my own views clear to those who are, all I can do, like you, is to hope that your views and mine will be paid heed to.’

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 19
26 November 2025

On Wednesday 26 November 2025, the Undercover Policing Inquiry heard evidence from Sukhdev and Tish Reel. They are the mother and sister of Ricky Reel who died in 1997 following a racist attack.

The police did not take Ricky’s death seriously, and treated the family in a callous and overtly racist manner. The Reel family’s campaign for justice was spied on by the Special Demonstration Squad, notably officer HN81 ‘David Hagan’.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

The Reels’ questioning is part of the Inquiry’s Tranche 3, examining the final 15 years of the Special Demonstration Squad, 1993-2008.

Sukhdev has given the Inquiry three written statements, and Tish has given one written statement.

The Inquiry’s page for the day has a transcript of the live session.

The Reels gave evidence together. They were questioned for the Inquiry by Nazmeen Imambaccus.

RICKY REEL AND HIS FAMILY

The Inquiry started by establishing who Ricky was as a person.

Lakhvinder ‘Ricky’ Reel was born on 11 July 1977, the second of four children. The family lived in West London, where his mother Sukhdev was a housing officer for the Borough of Hounslow.

We’re shown a picture of him aged 20, shortly before he died, then one of him much younger with two of his siblings. Sukhdev is near to tears as she says the photo shows the cheeky grin he always had.

Sukhdev describes Ricky as a son any mother would be proud of. At primary school, instead of going out to play during breaks, he would often be found inside assisting kids who needed help.

In secondary school, Ricky developed skills with computers and taught Sukhdev how to use one. He was the first of his siblings to pass a driving test and so would help the family out with errands.

Despite his academic commitment, education wasn’t his highest priority. When Sukhdev became ill he drove her to hospital. She told him to leave her there as he had exams the next day. He refused, telling her:

‘No, mum. I can always take exams the next year but I won’t get another mum like you.’

He enrolled at Loughborough University in the Midlands, but found he disliked being away from home so transferred to study computer science at Brunel University in Uxbridge.

Ricky’s generous disposition extended well beyond his family. After he died, Sukhdev heard from many people who described him helping others. His work placement employer realised he’d been doing more work than he needed to. A neighbour who worked nights said that Ricky would see her coming home when he was out jogging and say ‘auntie, give me your bags, I’ll walk you home’.

Sukhdev said:

‘He was a responsible child I could rely on… he had a cheeky smile that attracted everyone… but at the same time he was very shy, he wasn’t the sort of person who was going out every time.

The one day he did come out – and I encouraged him to go out, I was pleased that he was finally going out – is the day he never came back, and I carry this guilt with me that I didn’t stop him going out that night. That guilt stays with me throughout my life.’

Before Ricky went missing the family had had no dealings with the police. Sukhdev had some interactions with police in her role as a senior homelessness officer, helping clients facing great distress and sometimes violence. She thought the police were there to help and support people in trouble.

DISAPPEARANCE

Ricky went missing on 14 October 1997. He had gone out with three Asian friends to Kingston Upon Thames. They intended to go to a Diwali gig at Options nightclub. Ricky told his family he would be home by 1am.

He had never been late home before. Sukhdev spent the night waiting on the stairs. Fearing he may have been in a car accident, she rang hospitals to check if he’d been admitted.

The next morning, Sukhdev rang her local police station at West Drayton but was told that because Ricky was over the age of 18 he had to be gone for 24 hours before she could make a missing persons report.

When he still didn’t arrive home, Sukhdev contacted the police again, who sent an officer round. Sukhdev gave him the contact details for one of Ricky’s friends.

The officer spoke to the friend and was told that the group had been attacked. After they’d parked their car and were walking into Richmond town centre, two white men started shouting racial abuse at them. The men physically assaulted and punched them.

At this point, Ricky and his friends ran away, but in different directions. It was the last time Ricky’s friends saw him.

The officer then told Sukhdev what he’d heard. She asked him to investigate:

‘It’s common sense if four people are attacked, three are back at home, one’s missing, so that person is in danger.’

The officer refused to take it further, reiterating that he had to wait 24 hours to file a missing persons report.

As their local police station weren’t helping, Sukhdev’s husband and brother took Ricky’s friends to Kingston police station, as that was the nearest to the location of the attack.

Even though Ricky’s friends had visible facial injuries, they were waved away. The officer at the desk said that perhaps Ricky was running away from an arranged marriage, because that’s what Asian people do. Or perhaps he ran away because he was gay and doesn’t want his inevitably homophobic Asian family to know.

The officer then winked and suggested Ricky had a secret girlfriend that his Asian family wouldn’t approve of.

Sukhdev said the situation could not have been clearer:

‘From then on we knew a racist label was placed on our forehead. They were not interested in looking for Ricky, because Asian families in their opinion do not deserve justice, do not deserve the equal amount of investigation like anybody else.’

Realising they were on their own, the family created leaflets on Ricky’s computer and went to Kingston every day to hand them out.

They also contacted Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group which assists families facing racial discrimination, especially those who’ve lost a loved one (Grover gave evidence to the Inquiry a week before the Reels).

‘Suresh came in, listened to us, and then he went and spoke to my MP John McDonnell. They both came in and they have been by my side ever since, and without their support I don’t think I would be sitting here today.’

This is in complete contrast to the spycop reports of the officer who spied on the Reels’ campaign, HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’, who falsely claimed that Grover’s support was inconsistent [MPS-0001370], and that Asian people didn’t like him supporting Black families [MPS-0748392].

The police appointed Family Liaison Officers who visited the family at their home. Sukhdev expected them to keep the family updated about the investigation but they never knew anything. Instead, they asked questions about exactly who else had been visiting.

In retrospect, they were spying on the family, just as the Family Liaison Officers had with Stephen Lawrence’s family a few years earlier.

Sukhdev noted that the officers had asked if they needed to take their shoes off entering an Asian household. She says it was part of the ‘othering’ that they experienced which underpinned all their dealings with the police.

‘So from very the beginning an ‘Asian woman, Asian family’ label was put on our heads, and that’s how they treated us.’

The police refused to treat the racist attack and Ricky’s disappearance as linked.

Two days later, a van of police arrived at the Reels’ house. Officers ran in and took Sukhdev’s husband Balwant into the garage to keep him out of the way while the rest of the house was searched.

Sukhdev was angry:

‘They thought we’ve hurt Ricky, we’re hiding him in our house. And then they searched the house, they searched the garage and they said “that’s fine, we’ve done our job”.’

The family were spending a lot of time leafleting in Kingston, but Sukhdev still couldn’t get officers there or at home to engage:

‘Whenever I contacted West Drayton I was told to ring Kingston, and when I rang Kingston they said, “No, it’s at West Drayton”, because each one were trying to save their resources.

And with Ricky missing, within 24 hours I was told by Kingston police that they have closed the investigation and I said, “Why? He’s still missing”. And they said, “We don’t have resources to investigate your son’s disappearance”.’

It was left to the family to get CCTV footage and search the streets. With their amateur lack of resources and equipment, the one place they couldn’t search was the river. They asked the police to do it several times, but nothing happened.

DISCOVERY

The police relented on 21 October 1997, a week after Ricky went missing, and undertook a search of the river Thames. Ricky’s body was found six minutes after the search began. Had they searched sooner, it would not only have saved a lot of anguish and effort for the Reel family, it would also have allowed police to secure better forensic evidence.

Sukhdev was with Suresh Grover at the Monitoring Group office, preparing a press release. She received a phone call saying the police had some news and were on their way. She hoped Ricky had been located in a hospital. She rang her home and spoke to her daughter, but then the line went dead.

Two police officers had entered the house and seen the children there, without their parents. Tish Reel, who was 17 at the time, recalled it:

‘The police officer pulled out the phone cord from the wall, which meant I hung up abruptly. The call was ended abruptly to my mum, which was quite distressing for both of us.

And then she turned to my siblings and I and said, quite callously and coldly without any emotion, using the exact words: “We found your brother’s body at the bottom of the river”…

Then she went to the corner of the room where I’d been sitting where the phone was, and her and the police constable were cracking jokes in the corner and laughing. I don’t know what was so humorous.

And whilst they did that I had an asthma attack, they didn’t bother to help me, I had to crawl up the stairs to go and get my asthma inhaler. My sister went into shock and my little brother was just walking around, didn’t know what to do, and my parents weren’t there.’

Back at The Monitoring Group office, the police arrived and told Sukhdev they’d found Ricky’s body. She passed out.

‘When I came round, I think it was my husband pulling me from under the table and his hands and his arms were shaking.

I was put in the car and all throughout the journey I was thinking about how I was going to break this news to my children, because I had been promising them that I will bring their brother home.

And when I got home, one look at their faces showed me that there was something wrong there.’

When Sukhdev arrived home she found the children devastated and the police inhuman:

‘The children told me what had happened, they couldn’t relate to the words used by the police to an 11-year-old child that, “The body of your brother”. “Body”…

[My son] just stood there and I went near him, he flinched, he was just like a stone standing there. My other daughter, elder daughter, was just standing there with a tray, glasses of water on a tray, didn’t know what she was doing.

And the two police officers laughing and joking as Tish told me that she had to crawl on the stairs like a dog to get her inhaler. She told the police officers where the inhaler was in her bedroom, could someone please get it, they didn’t. She would have died that day as well.

So I told them to get out of my house.’

Detective Superintendent Bob Moffat, the officer in charge of the investigation, told the press that Ricky had been found. He said the death was a tragic accident, that Ricky had unfortunately fallen into the river while urinating, and the case would be closed.

There had been no forensic examination of the scene or of Ricky’s body. Moffat told the pathologist that it had been an accident. The post-mortem did not examine Ricky’s body for signs of defensive injuries.

INVESTIGATIONS

The first investigation into Ricky’s death was performed by West Drayton and Kingston Upon Thames police stations. The police did not look at the CCTV footage from Richmond that contained clues. They took months to speak to witnesses.

On 20 November 1997, Sukhdev made a formal complaint to the Police Complaints Authority (PCA). Surrey police looked into the Met’s handling of the investigation. They also tried to do an investigation themselves but the Met refused to hand it over to them.

The PCA sent Sukhdev a letter on 15 February 1999 [UCPI0000038555] which upheld the family’s complaints:

‘There were weaknesses and flaws within the organisational structure… the investigation has found your allegations of neglect of duty in respect of Police Constable D, Police Constable H, and Detective Superintendent Moffat to be substantiated.’

Under a subheading ‘racial issues’, in classic ‘protect the guilty’ style, the letter said the failings were:

‘for the most part attributable to organisational failings, rather than to neglect on the part of any particular officer.’

Tish says the family were disgusted. Having spent over a year reliving experiences and believing they’d get redress, they were fobbed off with a letter, and were not allowed to see the PCA’s report.

Sukhdev condemns the fact that the PCA report is still under lock and key today, 28 years later. She herself has belatedly been shown a copy, but on strict condition that she does not discuss its contents with anyone, not even Tish or Balwant.

The second main investigation into Ricky’s death overlapped with the PCA complaint. It was carried out by the Met’s Racial and Violent Crime Task Force, headed by Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, and it ran from 1 November 1998 to 12 March 1999. It found that all lines of enquiry had been exhausted, with no fresh leads or investigations to pursue. Sukhdev dismisses it as ‘a paper exercise’.

Grieve and the Racial and Violent Crime Task Force also eventually handled the investigation into the death of Michael Menson, after the original investigation was condemned by the PCA. Menson’s family were also spied on.

We have seen evidence [MPS-0748390] that Grieve was kept in the loop about spying on family justice campaigns, and he was closely linked to the Met’s handling of the Macpherson Inquiry at this time.

On 8 February 2000, Sukhdev made a complaint to the PCA about that second investigation, specifically the officer in charge, Detective Chief Inspector Sue Hill. This time the PCA found that misconduct proceedings were not justified.

With the first PCA complaint against him upheld, the detective in charge of the first investigation, Detective Superintendent Bob Moffat, was now facing disciplinary proceedings. In the time-honoured manner of guilty police officers, he promptly retired from the police to avoid any charges.

RACIST TREATMENT

Sukhdev recounts some of the discouragement and racism she was subjected to by the police:

‘I took six months off and I travelled all over the country attending meetings, conferences and everything, speaking about Ricky’s case.

And I was told by the police to return to work, look after my children. Because in their view they saw an Asian woman confronting them, and in their opinion Asian woman should be tied to the kitchen.’

She refers back to Ricky’s brother being so cruelly told about Ricky’s death, and points out that we never hear of white kids being treated that way.

Tish adds:

‘My dad speaks limited English, English is very much a second language for him. My mum was the one who was communicating to the police officers, talking to them.

But whenever they spoke to my parents they always addressed my dad and it was clear that they assumed that in Asian families you address the male, because the male is the head of the family.

They would look past my mum, speak over her, literally speak over because she’s so short, and it was clear that that was because they assumed this is how Asian families operate.’

The family’s leaflets and outreach started to pay off. They got support from some local groups, including the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Sukhdev got a phone call from someone who said she’d given the SWP a piece of paper with an address on it of racists who may be connected with Ricky’s murder.

Sukhdev told the police who went and collected the paper and said they’d investigate:

‘So when we asked them what was the outcome of this investigation, they told us – honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry – they told us, “yes, we visited the address, these are white educated people, their house is clean, they can’t be racist”.

So we were dealing with this type of behaviour, which has continued even after 28 years. So that’s the reason we are here. To find out why we are here.’

CAMPAIGNING

Two weeks after Ricky died, the family set up a campaign for to find out the truth about what had happened.

Sukhdev stresses that it’s not something done on a whim, it was a commitment to a lot of work. There would be meetings, petitions, research, vigils, working with other justice campaigns. It was done out of necessity, because it had already become clear that the police were uninterested and what little information they gave couldn’t be relied upon.

Tish expands on the point:

‘We knew that the police weren’t going to investigate this beyond assuming, as Moffat did, that it was a tragic accident. We were treated in a racist way, we were treated as if we weren’t people just because we had brown skin. Just because mum was a woman.

They didn’t want to give us information. Every time we asked them to do something it was too much trouble, there was an obstacle in the way, there wasn’t enough resources to do certain lines of investigation, to carry those out.’

The police were reluctant to share information, or to receive it. They were wholly avoidant of the issue of racism, whether it be acknowledging that it was a racist murder, or the fact that the family were being treated in an overtly racist manner.

The family realised that the police were not going to properly investigate and find out what had happened to Ricky, let alone bring the people responsible to account. The investigation was only interested in portraying it as an accident and was refusing to consider the evidence to the contrary.

After the post-mortem, the family were given Ricky’s clothes. Sukhdev noticed a rip in his shirt. On the advice of Grover, McDonnell and lawyers, the family commissioned a second post-mortem, which found the rip matched injuries on Ricky’s body.

Tish explains how vital it was to have a team to find the truth:

‘Without that co-ordinated approach from other people outside of the family, which would eventually turn into what is now called the Justice for Ricky Reel campaign, we wouldn’t have that evidence, and the police wouldn’t have benefited from that evidence, and we as a family wouldn’t have benefited from that evidence.’

Sukhdev received early support from Neville Lawrence, father of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, whose campaign had achieved national attention by that time. They’ve shared a platform innumerable times and support each other’s campaigns to this day. They were sat together at the first hearing of the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

‘Whenever we meet we don’t ask how you are, because we know how we are. He always said to me, “I’m here for you if you need support”, and I’ve always said the same.’

At Neville’s request, Sukhdev attended almost every day of the 1998 public inquiry into Stephen’s death. She was there to support the Lawrence family, and as the evidence was heard she was astonished at the similarities in the police’s treatment of Stephen and Ricky’s murders. It was literally agonising for her and there were times that she had to leave the room to be physically sick.

She was one of several representatives of family justice campaigns who gave evidence to the second part of the Lawrence inquiry as it examined wider issues of racism and policing.

This clearly didn’t sit well with police, who expended yet more resources in the wrong place. Sukhdev noticed an audible click at the end of phone calls. It was a common experience for activists in the 1990s, seemingly part of police phone-tapping operations. Police resources that should have been spent catching killers were instead being used to spy on victims.

POLICE SPYING

The Inquiry then went through a number of secret police reports made by Special Demonstration Squad officer HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’. He had infiltrated Movement For Justice which supported a number of causes including several family justice campaigns. From this position, he reported on the Reels and the Lawrences.

By his own recent admission, he exaggerated his involvement and influence in order to impress his bosses.

On 25 June 1998, Hagan filed a report [MPS-0001147]. Though primarily about a Newham Monitoring Group meeting about the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, he also said that Movement For Justice may be turning their attention to the Reel campaign:

‘The case is still not recognised by the police either as murder or a racial killing… [despite] the fact that there appears to be good evidence of police mismanagement and racism in it.’

Hagan is on the ground, hearing the evidence. Surely this is the stuff that intelligence should be useful for. And yet he still styles the Reels’ campaign as a ‘campaign against the police’. This is a problem endemic to the police, and beyond into their satellite bodies and supporters.

An organisation interested in justice would want to find the truth, and to root out racism in its personnel and procedures. Instead, they close ranks around proven wrongdoers and portray any complaint, no matter how valid, as an objection to policing in general and every police officer as an individual. Then they wonder why people don’t trust them.

Hagan submitted another report on 3 September 1998 [MPS-0001288]. It describes a meeting in Hackney organised by the Socialist Workers Party.

Sukhdev shared the platform with people from two other justice campaigns, Myrna Simpson (mother of Joy Gardner who had been killed by police), and George Silcott (brother of Winston Silcott who had been framed for the murder of a police officer).

The report describes Alex Owolade from Movement For Justice (MFJ) talking to Sukhdev, and the fact that she gave Owolade her mobile phone number.

Sukhdev describes the anger she felt, finding out she was being watched so closely. She says that Owolade getting her number was no accolade, she was giving it to anyone who may be able to help the campaign. She wonders if Hagan had it too.

The Inquiry turns to Sukhdev’s second, most substantial written statement [UCPI0000038548] in which she says she was wary of MFJ.

Asked about this, she recounts a public meeting with Neville Lawrence where Owolade made a contribution from the floor and Neville disliked it, saying that he could speak for himself. Like Neville, she strongly believes that family justice campaigns must be run and directed by the people at the centre.

WHO’S IN CONTROL

The Inquiry then showed a document from the same month titled ‘SDS intelligence update September 1998’ [MPS-0720946]. It was written by HN10 Bob Lambert, who was running the SDS at the time.

Lambert describes:

‘Another significant breakthrough for Movement for Justice: on Wednesday evening, 2 September they cemented good liaison contact with Sukhev Reels [sic], Ricky Reel’s mother, and are now planning to assist her in mounting a large-scale campaign against the police.

It is important to emphasise here the extent to which the Reels’s case has potential to cause police embarrassment on the same scale as the Lawrence case. Certainly, so far as Mrs Reel and the activists are concerned there are glaringly similar racist overtones between the police handling of both investigations.’

This is a thinly veiled admission of police culpability, like Hagan’s, and yet they’re trying to defend it. Like Hagan himself, Lambert characterises objection to police malpractice as ‘a campaign against the police’.

Lambert’s report talks about Suresh Grover supporting the Reel campaign, and says the campaign is putting itself under ‘the Grover banner’. It shows the police believing that their regimented and hierarchical way of organising is the only way. They see everything in terms of factions, subterfuge, power struggles, and division.

Tish condemns the entire paradigm as dehumanising. It’s not how the campaigns were at all. It’s also nothing to do with public order problems that were supposedly the reason for the spying. Instead, Tish notes, it’s a management strategy attempting to steer the campaigns.

It’s notable that Lambert spells Sukhdev Reel as ‘Sukhev Reels’. Doreen Lawrence pointed out in her evidence to the Inquiry that police reports consistently spelt Stephen’s name wrong.

The misspelling of names of people and groups happens so frequently in spycops reports that it raises questions about how they could be searched as useful intelligence, and gives rise to a suspicion that it wasn’t an accident but was an in-joke among officers, another way to denigrate their targets.

It wasn’t just MFJ that the SDS viewed with suspicion. The Inquiry shows a report of Hagan’s dated 26 October 1998 which describes a march for Ricky in Kingston [MPS-0001462]. Hagan once again insinuates that a left-wing group is trying to get control of the campaign for nefarious purposes:

‘Socialist Workers Party are attempting to court Mrs Reel. However, their efforts are meeting with little success as Mrs Reel has indicated that she has concerns over the objectives of some political groups and she has been warned specifically about the Socialist Workers Party.’

Sukhdev is affronted at the very suggestion:

‘Nobody courted me. I’m a woman who speaks my mind.’

She says it’s untrue for Hagan to say she’d been warned about the SWP, and adds that she never had concerns about any group trying to exploit her campaign for another agenda. The family knew what they were campaigning for and wouldn’t have let anyone hijack the campaign, not that anyone tried.

The report claims that Grover’s address to the march was met with a lack of interest.

‘The Movement for Justice viewpoint was that the demonstration was a pitiful reflection of a year’s campaigning and how Mrs Reel’s case is being squandered by her reliance on Grover, whose main attention lies elsewhere.’

Tish says Grover was fully committed to the campaign at the time, as he has been continually from 1997. She says if the spycop was reporting that the campaign was dwindling to negligibility, there was no reason for the surveillance to continue. And yet it did.

Hagan’s report concluded:

‘Movement For Justice have grown weary of Mrs Reel’s fear of being seen to cause trouble so do not intend to waste too much time on this case.’

This is another slur on MFJ, implying that they were agitating for gratuitous confrontation and disorder.

Tish points out that it also confirms that the campaign was entirely peaceable, using law-abiding methods. There was no reason to be spying on them, apart from the fact that they were challenging the police’s lack of investigation and racism, and challenging police activity is seen as subversive.

Asked why Hagan spoke about the campaign in such terms, Sukhdev pointedly replies:

‘I don’t know why he wrote that. No, I don’t know. I think he needs to be here and you need to ask him.’

This is a dig at the Inquiry, which is refusing to compel Hagan to give evidence because he was diagnosed with PTSD in 2015 and says testifying would make him feel worse. Many victims of spycops suffer from PTSD and other psychological impacts of the abuse they received and are attending the Inquiry and reliving their trauma, yet this perpetrator is allowed to be absent.

INQUEST

On 1 November 1999, the inquest into Ricky’s death opened. It lasted six days. The family had been denied Legal Aid and had to fund their own representation.

Sukhdev and Balwant Reel arrived with Suresh Grover and Sukhdev’s brother, who had been supporting them throughout. Grover was familiar with the process of inquests. But he and Sukhdev’s brother were told to wait in another room. Sukhdev and her husband Balwant were alone in the middle of an unfamiliar procedure.

The coroner told her that he knew she’d attended the Stephen Lawrence inquiry a year earlier, and asked her who it was there that had put the idea in her head that Ricky had been murdered. He then joked that as Ricky’s friends had gone and got kebabs in Richmond they obviously couldn’t have been significantly hurt.

Tish Reel says they’d seen the bias coming and managed to mitigate:

‘We had to lobby extremely hard to get a jury inquest and to get funding for representation at that inquest, because jury inquests were not the norm.

And the reason we lobbied so hard is because we knew already, and by this time Grieve and his team were already on board and the signs were there that even the second investigation, like the first, was flawed and was racist in its approach.’

It became obvious at the inquest that the police investigation had been dire.

The family had gone to great lengths to supply the police with all relevant material. But at the inquest, investigative officer Bob Moffat – called to give evidence even though he’d retired – kept saying that he hadn’t seen certain pertinent documents, or that the Reels hadn’t told him specific facts that were contained in the documents.

It was clear from the police’s testimony that the second investigation under the Racial and Violent Crime Task Force was actually being directed by Moffat from the first investigation, and by his narrative that Ricky’s death had been a tragic accident as he tried to urinate in the river. The police wanted a verdict of accidental death.

It was also clear that there were lines of enquiry that hadn’t been followed, potential witnesses who had been ignored. The police had simply sat on the information for two years.

Moffat had arranged for a third post-mortem to be carried out on Ricky’s body, without the family’s knowledge. He had ordered that the entirety of Ricky’s skin be removed.

The family only became aware of this third post-mortem at the inquest. Although utterly horrified and astonished, Tish said it finally made one thing make sense:

‘We always wondered why, at Ricky’s funeral, which was only three weeks after he was found, when we went to go and see him, because he’d been in cold water he looked like Ricky, but when we saw him at the open casket funeral he was unrecognisable.

I couldn’t watch, I couldn’t stand by his – I promised myself I’d stay with him and I couldn’t, because I couldn’t look at what happened. I couldn’t understand the deterioration of his body.’

Witnesses had told the inquest that they and their families had been threatened and pressured not to testify. The three friends who were with Ricky on the evening of the racial attack said they had received death threats, and one had been kidnapped and assaulted on 3 November, the day of Ricky’s funeral. This is not what anyone would expect from an accidental death involving nobody else.

Tish says:

‘We had no confidence whatsoever in the police before we went into the inquest, we had even less when we left and they asked the jury to find accidental death verdict. But fortunately, because we had a jury, that was rejected.’

The jury returned an open verdict, meaning that the death is suspicious but the jury cannot conclusively reach any of the other available verdicts.

The inquest had a lot of publicity. There was a candlelit vigil on the first day, the public gallery was packed. And yet we haven’t seen a single spycop report mentioning it. Tish draws the obvious conclusion:

‘That, to me, speaks volumes – that there are documents that existed and have been shredded or haven’t been disclosed.’

AFTER THE INQUEST

After the open verdict, the family met with the Metropolitan Police on 4 February 2000. The police said they were prepared to investigate, but only if information was brought to them. They wouldn’t be proactive. This left it to the family to find leads, despite not having the skills or technology that the police are provided with.

The head of the first investigation, Bob Moffat, took it personally that the jury had rejected his theory of Ricky’s accidental death.

Some time later, Sukhdev was contacted by a reporter asking why she had given permission for Bob Moffat to print pictures of Ricky’s body in the third post-mortem. This was the first she’d heard of it.

Tish is incensed:

‘He had taken those photographs, stripping Ricky of his dignity completely, into his retirement, kept them at home with his personal belongings, where he and his family live. And he had contacted the reporter asking her to publish those photographs.’

Moffat had gone to the Mail on Sunday with a sense of grievance.

He told them that he had been hounded out of his job because he insisted Ricky’s death was an accident, and the family just couldn’t face the truth but were being indulged because they were Asian.

It was published under the headline ‘It is political correctness gone mad’.

Despite the jury disagreeing with Moffat’s theory, the Mail published the story sympathetically to Moffat.

On seeing the article, Sukhdev had suicidal impulses. She was intensely fearful of the impacts on her children if they saw it, or if people they knew saw it.

She couldn’t believe this was being done by the people who should have been finding Ricky’s attackers, but were instead carrying out a vendetta against victims:

‘If this the type of policing in this country, then who needs police officers?’

Suresh Grover saw the photos and contacted lawyers. Police then went to Moffat’s house and found the photos, yet no charges were ever brought against him.

During the hearing’s morning break, Tom Fowler discussed the evidence so far with ‘Alison’ from Police Spies Out of Lives:

FINDING OUT ABOUT THE SPYING

On 18 July 2014, the Reels met with officers from Operation Herne, the police’s internal investigation into spycops, at the office of the Reels’ MP and ally, John McDonnell [MPS-0738102].

The family are especially angry, not just about the spying but also about the false assurances they were given at the meeting.

They were told they weren’t directly spied upon, but officers infiltrating subversive organisations such as MFJ and the SWP had incidentally reported on the Reels in about ten reports. The family later found out that was all lies: they had been directly spied on and there were many reports that proved it.

Tish says the emotional impact was colossal:

‘It was re-traumatising, it just felt like we weren’t people. The way the police treated us during the initial two investigations completely dehumanised us because we had brown skin. It felt like that was happening all over again.

We couldn’t understand why it had taken so long for this information to come out. And we felt humiliated, we felt stripped yet again of our dignity, of whatever miniscule pieces of peace we’d managed to put back together in our lives, it completely derailed all of that.

I can’t, I can’t, it’s too – it’s so difficult to put into words the impact that that had.’

The impact on Sukhdev broke something inside her; she says the room went black. When she came to, she was repeatedly assured that it was only ‘collateral intrusion’, she wasn’t spied on personally.

‘I remember there sitting with my daughter and pulling my cardigan, I thought they could see through to me, I thought I was sitting there naked because of their spying, and since that day I keep on seeing eyes everywhere. I don’t know how I got home…

I didn’t think that things like this could happen. Especially to a family who has lost a child, who has never been given a time to grieve. 28 years I’ve been sitting here attending meetings, one after another, dealing with the paperwork, hell of a paperwork this Inquiry has produced and the case and everything.

I haven’t sat down for one day in the 28 years since then, I still put his dinner plate on the table thinking he will come and eat his dinner.’

She is near to tears as she says this.

Tish said that it made it even harder to reconcile the two sides of the police’s actions. The police were the only people with the financial resources, technology, training and skills to do a proper investigation.

On the one hand, the police were saying that they didn’t investigate certain elements because of a lack of resources. On the other, they were putting teams into spying on the family and analysing what they found.

DIRECT TARGETING, FOR A WIDE AUDIENCE

When they were told about the spying in 2014, the Reels asked to see the secret reports that mentioned them. The police refused, saying they concerned secret matters regarding public disorder.

Now that the Undercover Policing Inquiry has disclosed them, it’s plain to see that they contain nothing of the sort. Mentions of public disorder are conspicuous by their complete absence. It was just another lie the police told the family in 2014, hoping that the truth wouldn’t come out. Even as they pretended to come clean, they were merely enacting the next stage of an exercise in damage limitation and reputation management.

Despite assuring the family that there was nothing personal in the reports – which Tish describes as being done ‘as if it was a professional courtesy to us, hand-holding, reassuring’ – the documents actually describe Sukhdev being very emotional and crying, and details about her personal health.

At the meeting in 2014, the family were also assured that the information was kept within Special Branch, that there were rigid barriers between them and the wider Met. That was another lie.

We now see documentation [MPS-0748390] proving that a line of communication was specifically made between Special Branch and Grieve, at the Met’s Racial and Violent Crime Task Force while the latter was conducting the second investigation into Ricky’s death.

A document from September 1998 [MPS-0720946] has a handwritten note from Colin Black, Commander of Operations for all of Special Branch including the SDS, talking about the SDS’s off-the-record briefings to Richard Walton of the Racial and Violent Crime Task Force. These briefings included details of family justice campaigns that were being spied on:

‘I have reiterated to him that it is essential that knowledge of the operation goes no further. I would not wish him to receive anything on paper.’

Tish says the deliberate avoidance of writing it down is proof of guilt:

‘They knew that their actions were not justified, they knew that this was not collateral damage, that this was a very deliberate, orchestrated chain of decision-making here, and they knew it wasn’t justified, they knew it wasn’t lawful, they knew we weren’t any threat to public disorder.’

The SDS prepared a document on 10 September 1998 [MPS-0748392] containing extensive profiles of the Stephen Lawrence and Ricky Reel campaigns. It detailed their history, personnel, allies and plans.

It stated that it was produced for the Commissioner, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Grieve, and Superintendent Thornton. This is the proof that it all went well beyond Special Branch and right to the top of the Met.

Unit manager Bob Lambert’s ‘SDS intelligence update September 1998’, mentioned earlier [MPS-0720946], not only contained details of spying on the Reels, it also said Hagan would be spying on the Reel campaign for months to come. The family definitely were directly targeted.

Sukhdev summarises the conclusion of Lambert’s report as saying to Hagan:

‘Here it is, the budget. You do what you want, make sure you destroy that campaign, make sure you do whatever you can, do whatever you want to destroy that campaign and cause as much damage as you can to the family.

That’s how it came across to me.’

THE DRIVE HOME

More than that, Hagan drove Sukhdev home from a meeting – just the two of them, alone in a car. It wasn’t necessary for him to do that, but a conscious and deliberate decision. It could scarcely be more personal and direct.

In 2013, the nation was shocked to learn that the Stephen Lawrence campaign had been spied on. The Home Secretary commissioned Mark Ellison KC to investigate. The Ellison team met with Hagan [MPS-0738122], who had spied on the Lawrences. He told them about his spying on the Reels, notably about the occasion when he drove Sukhdev home.

Hagan said that the leaders of MFJ met with Sukhdev, and he gave her a lift home afterwards. As with the rest of his description of his deployment in the interview, Hagan downplays this incident a lot.

He says he didn’t offer but was asked to do it (he doesn’t specify by who), that he ‘didn’t exploit the situation’, and that he refused her offer to come into the house because he knew that if she knew his real identity she wouldn’t want it.

Sukhdev is dismissive of this mitigated version of events. She is certain that she didn’t ask Hagan for a lift, and that he must have grasped the opportunity to get information from her.

It’s a perspective supported by Hagan’s own admissions. In another interview with Ellison in 2013 [MPS-0721973], Hagan defended reporting deeply personal information:

‘All intelligence is good.’

In his written witness statement to the Inquiry [MPS-0748738], Hagan reiterates his belief that ‘all intelligence is good’ and says he would have discussed the drive with his handler officer at the time. Yet no record of this has been located by the Inquiry.

If we don’t have a report about an event as significant as Hagan’s one-on-one conversation in the car with Sukhdev, it’s highly likely that the evidence of other key incidents is also missing.

Sukhdev talks about seeing Hagan’s admission of driving her home:

‘I don’t have the words to describe it, I really don’t. I felt sick. Humiliated. He took advantage of my vulnerability. He was writing reports that was no use to the inquiry, in the reports it was mentioned that I was relatively stressed, I had health problems, that my health was deteriorating. So he clearly knew I was vulnerable at the time…

Every time I think of this I see Sarah Everard in front of my eyes, and that’s the one thing that doesn’t let me sleep at night. She was in a police car, unmarked police car, and I think I was in a police car with a police officer who pretended to be a supporter of this campaign. Why did he not tell me who he was?’

Overcome by emotion, Sukhdev asks Tish to take over.

Tish talks of the imbalance of power, with only Hagan knowing what was really going on, and that we only have his word for it that he didn’t come into the family home that night.

Whatever the specifics, he took advantage of a vulnerable woman who was upset from talking about the death of her son and how the police had failed her. Hagan, from that same police force, chose to get Sukhdev on her own and spend time with her. They obviously will have talked about the family and the campaign. These were conscious choices on his part. It is targeted surveillance.

Finding this out has had devastating consequences for Sukhdev:

‘I invited him in. That’s what I was like before. I trusted everyone and I would say come home, and talk to people. I don’t trust anyone any more. He’s destroyed me, this Inquiry, all the revelations of what was going on, has destroyed my life, I’m not the same person anymore.’

Tish describes the horrendous damage that the spying has done to her mother:

‘I lived with her for many years after this, and I stay at her house sometimes with my children. She wakes up in her sleep screaming, and it’s kind of blood curdling and it wakes my nephew up, he lives with her and he’s seven, eight now. She screams in her sleep, but she doesn’t know she’s doing it. And one of us has to run in and wake her up.

You can hear in her sleep she’s saying, she’s talking about eyes, and when I wake her up she’s still half asleep and she’s talking about eyes following her.

And that’s the impact of this, it’s enduring, it’s not going to go away. It doesn’t impact just her, it has impacted generations – her, me, her grandson, are being impacted, still being impacted by the actions of those officers almost 25 years ago.’

If it hadn’t been for the Undercover Policing Inquiry, the Reels would have taken the ‘only incidental collateral reporting’ assurances in 2014 at face value. For 28 years, every time they’ve been told something conclusive, it’s turned out there was more to it. It makes them wonder what else there is that’s still not been disclosed.

Sukhdev’s brother remembers meeting Hagan at one of Ricky’s memorial lectures. Hagan was asking lots of questions about Ricky, the Reel family and the campaign. This is plainly direct targeting. There is no risk of public disorder. The incident is not recorded in any of the documents that the Inquiry has shown the family. What else is missing? How much more spying was there?

During the hearing’s lunchtime break, Tom Fowler discussed the eivdence so far with Dave Morris:

DESIGNED TO DECEIVE

The Operation Herne officers who met the Reels in July 2014 spoke to several families similarly spied upon. Soon afterward, Operation Herne published a report and made a public statement. It claimed that neither the Reels nor any of the other families were directly targeted.

On 18 August 2014, a month after they’d met the Reels, Operation Herne officers met Hagan [MPS-0738094]. Hagan told them that the public claim not to have directly targeted families was untrue, not least because of his drive with Sukhdev. It was something he’d already told the Ellison Review team in 2013 [MPS-0738122].

Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt, who would later issue the apology to women deceived into relationships by spycops, explained to Hagan that he was already aware of the driving incident, and had been careful not to make particular suggestions. The Herne officers had meticulously phrased it, saying they hadn’t seen any SDS documents about direct targeting of families.

As Hagan’s admission to Ellison was only oral, the statement was technically true. Clearly, the police were deliberately misleading the families and the public.

The Reels themselves remained unaware of Hagan’s drive with Sukhdev until they recently received documents from the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

‘For 11 years they kept us in dark, not only us but the whole public. So their lies have continued, they started lying to us in 1997 and to this day they have been lying…

We had a meeting with the police only last year, Assistant Police Commissioner, and he lied to us as well, in Scotland Yard, saying “we don’t have the files”.

So this culture of the police lying, especially to Black families, not giving them justice, it just continues and I don’t think there is a police officer in the Met Police good enough, qualified enough, decent enough to give Ricky justice. I don’t think there is.’

Sukhdev is once more welling up as she concludes:

‘And I hold my head high now to say yes, my son, I can finally look in the mirror which I haven’t been able to do for the last 28 years, I can look in the mirror and say I’ve done all I can to get you justice, but the justice has been denied to you by the police.’

APOLOGIES FROM POLICE

On 2 January 2016, the Met sent the Reels an apology for the spying. Sukhdev dismisses it as inadequate.

On 31 October 2025, the Met sent another one [UCPI0000039435]. It sets out the apology that was detailed by the Met’s lawyer at the start of this Phase of the Undercover Policing Inquiry. It added that, without having heard what was coming at this set of Inquiry hearings, ‘it was considered premature to issue a full and personal apology at this stage.’

This apology turned out to be identical to one sent the same day to Michael Menson’s family, which his sister described as a ‘cut and paste job’.

Tish and Sukhdev agree that both letters are worthless, merely a private formality issued when the police had been caught out. Tish explains:

‘An apology is meaningless; it’s the action, it’s the lessons that are learnt, it’s the change in behaviour that matters to us, and to all the people that still contact us to say that what happened to us is still happening.’

TISH’S CLOSING SPEECH

With questioning over, Tish and Sukhdev were invited to make some concluding remarks. It was as powerful as anything we’ve heard in the long history of the Undercover Policing Inquiry.

This video has Tish’s closing statement in full:

She summarised the whole story. The family’s campaign was gruelling work, and has passed trauma down generations to kids who weren’t even born when Ricky was killed. But the family need and deserve the answers that the police are so determined not to give. It has meant retelling the story over and over again, reliving the trauma.

Tish dismissed the spycops’ suggestions that the campaign was somehow secretly controlled by devious subversives. She pulls attention back to the real point. The police spied on a grieving family because they feared the truth.

The police subjected the family to racism from the day Ricky went missing, and it runs through everything right up to today.

After the police’s first post-mortem, Tish and her sister washed Ricky’s clothes and found ripping that turned out to match his injuries.

‘We were just a normal family, we didn’t know anything about forensics, nothing at all. We didn’t even know to ask the question ‘have you done forensics on these clothes?’ Why should we?…

So we washed his clothes. All the forensic evidence was lost. That was the police’s job not ours, and that’s why campaigns like ours are set up.’

Sukhdev is in tears as Tish talks of apologising to Ricky for putting him through the indignity of a second post-mortem.

The Reels discovered that anti-terrorism police had collated a map of CCTV coverage in Kingston. The family used it to secure the CCTV footage. The police they dealt with apparently didn’t know about their own map. Footage seized at the family’s behest was destroyed without being viewed.

‘We had no control over the fact that someone took Ricky’s life, but the control we could and should have had in ensuring that Ricky’s killers were brought to justice was taken away from us by police officers who were racist, incompetent, and more interested in spying on us than actually looking at who did this and will they do it again.’

She is emphatic that the police targeted them because they stood up and were a threat to police credibility. The police were particularly worried that they were being supported by others, and that similarly affected families were working together. The SDS wanted to see division between the families.

The Met claimed to have learned lessons from the Stephen Lawrence case, but they absolutely had not. Instead, they doubled down on efforts to shut down any family who called them out for being racist or incompetent.

Tish says that the victims of police spying are coming to the Inquiry at great personal cost. She isn’t here for the campaign for the truth about what happened to Ricky. This Inquiry won’t help with that at all.

But she has a responsibility to find out why it happened, to show that it wasn’t incidental collateral spying but a direct attack on a family at its lowest ebb. She’s here to try to ensure it doesn’t happen to others in future.

She points the finger at Hagan. He has refused to attend the Inquiry as he has PTSD. Tish says that many of the witnesses have severe trauma. Sukhdev lost her son, forever, and reliving it is clearly excruciating, yet she’s on the stand. If she’s at the Inquiry then Hagan should be too.

The public gallery applauded.

SUKHDEV’S CLOSING STATEMENT

After this, Sukhdev read a prepared concluding statement. This video has it in full:

She opens with a description of how the loss and the police’s actions have devastated her daily life:

‘For nearly two decades, I have lived with grief, near and constant stress. I suffer from nightmares in which I see eyes watching me all the time.

I have insomnia, panic attacks and constant anxiety. The stress contributed to serious health problems and I’m not the same person I was before 1997.’

The police targeted her because they feared the way she challenged their failures. They lied to her when the fact that she’d been spied upon was revealed. Their actions were shaped by institutional racism and institutional sexism.

She lists the others who were spied upon, not just the family justice campaigns but women deceived into relationships and social justice campaigners, all of them treated as enemies of the state. Bereaved families should have been supported; instead they were targeted and undermined.

‘I want this Inquiry to do what the police have failed to do. Tell us the truth. I want it to acknowledge that my family was targeted and infiltrated. I want it to name the officers involved and explain what happened to all the documents which are missing.

I want to know whether intelligence about us was shared with the coroner or any other bodies and I want to see those reports, please.’

She says we won’t get the change that’s so desperately needed unless the truth is established, and the Inquiry has the courage to make bold decisions, conclusions, and recommendations.

But if the Inquiry minimises the profound wrongdoing, shields those responsible, or produces a report that just gathers dust, then a dangerous message will be sent. It will tell the public that even when the police gravely abuse their power, they get away with it. It will deepen the cynicism and disillusionment that many already feel, and will be yet another betrayal.

We are at a key moment when we decide what we will tolerate from those who police us. It is time to expose the cruelties and then consign them to the past.

There were tears in the public gallery as she finished her speech:

‘Above all, I want justice for Ricky. My son was a kind young man, he deserved to live, he deserved a proper investigation, he deserved respect. So did we.

I am speaking out not only for Ricky but all the families who have been spied upon and misled. We deserve accountability and we deserve change.

I ask this Inquiry to ensure that no other parent has to carry their child’s coffin, simply when he was killed because of his colour. And no parents stand where I’m standing today.’

There was an emotional ovation from the public gallery.

When it subsided, there was a shout of ‘call Dave Hagan’. The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, was flummoxed by this. Then he adjourned the hearing.

It had been a hugely emotional experience for those watching.

The next day, the Inquiry heard evidence from Bernard Renwick, brother of Roger Sylvester who was killed by police in 1999, and whose campaign for justice was also spied on.

At the end of the session, Mitting commended Renwick in terms that can only be seen as a conscious insult to Sukhdev and Tish Reel:

‘Mr Renwick, thank you for taking the trouble to make a witness statement and to attend the hearing, and to give oral evidence in the calm and reasonable manner that you have.

It is invariably impressive to hear people who have gone through great personal tragedies, like you and your family, be able to speak about them in a manner that doesn’t betray bitterness and rancour and excessive emotion, but calmness and reasonableness.’

At the end of the hearing, Tom Fowler discussed the day with Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group:

Tranche 3 Phase 1, Day 20
27 November 2025

INTRODUCTION

On the afternoon of Thursday 27 November 2025, the Undercover Policing Inquiry heard evidence from two witnesses whose names are being kept private, ‘MSS’ and ‘MWS’.

They are the sister and brother of Michael Menson, a Black musician who died in 1997 following a horrific racist attack. They are here to give evidence about the family’s subsequent campaign for justice, which was spied on by the Special Demonstration Squad.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry (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.

MSS and MWS have made two witness statements each to the Inquiry [MSS: UCPI0000038377 and UCPI0000039437, MWS: UCPI0000038379 and UCPI0000039441]. At the time of writing the Inquiry has yet to publish any of them.

The Inquiry’s page for the day has a transcript of the live session. In order to protect the family’s privacy, the video coverage was broadcast as audio-only.

MSS and MWS were questioned together by Lennart Poulsen, acting as Counsel to the Inquiry.

MICHAEL’S PERSONALITY

Poulson began by asking about Michael’s life and his character, to understand the kind of person he was.

‘MSS: I was struck by his quietness, his gentleness… maybe as siblings we were laughing at another sibling and he was never involved in that, he would never join in any kind of teasing or anything…

Even though I was his older sister he would check in… that’s my childhood memory of him, always being thoughtful.

One of my brothers broke his leg and I remember Mike being really, you know, caring of him…

We were kind of all a bit weird and all loved school, and he enjoyed that. I remember him going to school one day when he wasn’t very well, he was just desperate to go…

He was a singer, we sang in a church choir… he often sang the solo… but was always really unassuming about that.

I remember an occasion where I was singing a solo and I had to sing the word “psalms”. And it begins with a p, and for some reason I kept reading it with the word p, and he came and helped me practise so I could get it right, just even though it would have made much more sense for him to have done it because his voice was better…

Those little things were examples of what he was like as a child and as a person…

We had a little car washing round, we’d go round with our bucket of water and wash cars for our neighbours and things, we just did gentle things.

We were quite a quiet family. We didn’t do lots of activities, but we entertained each other and played with each other… there were some traditional Ghanaian stories that we’d sometimes be told and we particularly loved and we’d rehearse them with each other.

He did well at school. He just wasn’t any trouble, ever.’

Michael became part of the music group Double Trouble who enjoyed considerable success as performers and producers, including the massive 1989 hit Street Tuff with Rebel MC. The family were surprised but delighted.

‘MSS: You could really see him come alive… We are a family of kind of quite high moral values, and a religious family, and he wanted to make sure that his music career was still in line with us as a family, and including us.

I remember myself and some of the siblings going to recordings. He was inclusive and joyful and I think to some degree he just was really grateful for the success that they had’

Michael suffered some mental health difficulties in his late 20s. The family would have to take him to hospital. He was sad and confused about it, desperate to get back on track in life, and always saying sorry. His sister says he was always determined that his mental health problems would not defeat him.

On 28 January 1997, Michael Menson was attacked by a racist gang. They robbed him, doused him in highly flammable accelerant and set him on fire. He was taken to hospital having suffered extremely severe burns.

THE FAILED POLICE INVESTIGATION

The police visited the family home that same night and told them Michael had set fire to himself. However, MWS was able to visit Michael in hospital.

‘MWS: My initial conversation with Michael was to see how he was, and I was shocked, he was lying in the hospital bed on his back, he was alert, awake, lucid…he said that he’d been attacked by some boys… near a phone box, he had tried to put himself out.

He asked “why did they do this to me?” He said he had walked to try and put himself out, he had rolled around on the ground and some people came to his aid.’

To this day, the family have not received an explanation as to why the police never took a statement from him in the two weeks before he died.

‘MWS: using the payphone at the hospital I called the Edmonton police… asked them to come to the hospital, told them what Michael had told me. And it was vastly different to what I had been told at the house… I urged them to come and investigate what was going on…

I was told that the information would be passed on to the appropriate team. I made multiple calls … sometimes multiple times in a day, in the morning or in the evening or in other parts of the day.

At all stages I was expecting them to arrive at any moment and ask Michael themselves…

Until this day I don’t understand why that opportunity wasn’t taken and I’ve not [been] provided with any adequate answer as to why that might be.’

There are police reports [UCPI0000038691 and UCPI0000038692] that say a Detective Roger Williams did visit the hospital, but he did not speak to Michael. MSW says he never saw him.

Michael lost consciousness after a week in hospital, and he died on 13 February 1997.

‘MSS: I was working overseas at the time… by the time I travelled he’d been unconscious for a few days and he never regained consciousness… I went straight to the hospital and we stayed there until he died…

Human memory isn’t perfect, but what I remember, the images that are in my mind, is coming home and… we looked on the news. It was the day that the Stephen Lawrence inquest was reported on and I remember the police coming and on that day, the next day, one of them turning to the television and then turning to me and saying, “Oh don’t worry this isn’t another Stephen Lawrence”…

I remember the first time I heard it and just looking at them and thinking we haven’t even said anything, we have been saying why on earth did you not go to the hospital to speak to Mike himself when he was lucid? And why did you not go to the hospital and speak to the staff when he was alive?’

MSS explained that when she saw the coverage of the Lawrence inquest she almost felt guilty because it meant they’d get the kind of proper police response that had been denied to the Lawrences:

‘“Guilty” isn’t quite the right word, but of course now they’re going to investigate, they’re going to redouble their efforts, they’re really going to prove the narrative wrong…

There were racial motivation for them not investigating Stephen Lawrence’s murder. I just thought there’s no human way that they won’t think, okay, “let’s show everyone wrong, let’s prove them wrong”. And I felt guilty that we were sort of benefiting from the timing. Only to find that actually it was absolutely not the case.’

The police were defensive and evasive. They suggested that the family just couldn’t accept that Michael had done this to himself, insisting there was nothing to suggest that anybody else was involved and they were running their investigation on that basis.

MWS met with DCI Scott about five times:

‘He didn’t enjoy being asked questions about how they were investigating and examining Michael’s death, what they were doing, what resources were being deployed, what information that had been received…

The meetings became extremely defensive on their part… they didn’t accept that we would dare to question them and question their authority and their assessment of what had happened.’

THE FAMILY TAKE THE INITIATIVE

We were shown a document [UCPI0000038692] that records how DCI Scott told the family that if they made a complaint it would result in the police ceasing to pursue the investigation. Officers would ‘lack motivation’ if they were criticised by the family.

‘MSS: I remember a sense of real disbelief that we were being told this, but also a real anxiety; what if this was the case, what if unintentionally we hampered things…

But in the end we decided this is insanity… And we couldn’t run the risk of just waiting, just being fobbed off by them and holding off from complaining. It was a risk that we had to take, because nothing was being done.’

They engaged a solicitor, Mike Schwarz at Bindmans, to try to make the police do their jobs and investigate Michael’s death. DCI Scott was furious. A report was sent to Assistant Commissioner Dunn describing the family of Michael Menson as ‘openly hostile’.

‘MSS: It’s shocking, but also, it’s really deeply hurtful. Rather than recognising that we were people who were asking legitimate questions in a legitimate manner, as time was running away… they chose to characterise us as hostile.

Not at any point did they do what any thoughtful sensible person will have asked, which was ask why, why is this family upset?…

It felt like they were manipulating our vulnerability and trying to make us feel afraid to speak up and to ask, to talk about it.’

The hearing took its lunch break, during which Tom Fowler discussed the evidence with Zoe Young from Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance:

MSS and MWS also gave evidence about how the police sought to undermine their family.

‘MSS: I think they intentionally tried to, you know, divide and rule, pick us off, pick me off… perhaps because I was… a public servant, maybe they thought well, this person will get it, maybe I was just gullible… the way they pulled me aside, like you’re reasonable… was incredibly manipulative.

It was only when I spoke to some of my other siblings I thought, this is absolute manipulation and we need to stand up against this…

I feel disgusted. I do absolutely admit I do feel ashamed, because it wasn’t as if instantly I thought no, this is nonsense. I did weigh it up, I contemplated, could there be any truth in this? Could we be unintentionally impeding things?…

They must just have looked at me and thought, you know, she’s a soft touch. “She’s a soft touch, we’ll pull her over on our side and we’ll get her to promulgate our narrative”. And that does not feel good.’

MEDIA APPEALS

The Menson family asked the police to appeal for witnesses, but they were told it would only hinder the investigation.

‘MSS: It became clear to us that they were more intent in getting information from us – what were we thinking, what were our concerns, what was our fears – rather than actually giving us information.

They should’ve been supporting us and updating us, but they were just trying to mine us for, sort of our position. And we saw nothing happening…

They said, “oh no, we’ll get so much, we’ll be inundated with information, it will put us off, it will squander resources, it will take us off track”

We thought, this is nonsense, they’re not doing anything, we have to take matters into our own hands.’

The family began to reach out to the media, and made their own appeal.

‘MWS: The reports in the media didn’t reflect at all what we knew. The actions of the police didn’t reflect an investigation, and so we came to the view that we would need to raise awareness, to gain information and collect any remaining available information that was out there.

And that was the sole purpose of the campaign, was to draw attention to the events of that night and to make sure that anybody who could assist us would assist us if they saw a media report or had been given a leaflet or had seen a radio interview.’

MWS says there was never any kind of political objective to the campaign. It was only ever about finding out what happened to Michael.

When the family contacted the media they discovered the police had got there before them. We were shown part of the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) report into the investigation into Michael’s death [UCPI0000038745].

The PCA concluded:

‘Deliberate steers were given to members of the media that Michael Menson had probably inflicted the injuries on himself…

Scott’s behaviour in his dealings with the family over media issues was, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, duplicitous, deceitful and untruthful…

His strategy to play the media low key for much of the first 12 months and principally to concentrate on local circulation was a serious flaw.’

MSS explained how at all times, and particularly throughout the inquest into Michael’s death, the police overtly lied to the family and kept them away from the press.

During the PCA process, Detective Chief Inspector Scott himself was interviewed about this by Cambridgeshire police for ten hours over four days, throughout which he refused to make any comment.

MSS has no doubt that DCI Scott misled and manipulated both the press and her family. She cannot understand why, as it must have been harder to do this than his actual job!

GATHERING ALLIES

The Menson family campaign was supported by Suresh Grover and The Monitoring Group, who had experience supporting families in a similar position.

‘MWS: I met with him. I examined the work that he’s been doing with other families and determined that it wasn’t political… there was caution applied to everybody we met to make sure that we weren’t derailed, either by design or by accident…

The request for information and Michael’s name was always at the forefront, because everything else was secondary…

There’s nobody else to wrest control from us, we took measures to make sure that we were the campaign. He [Suresh] introduced us to other families, which also enabled us to put into context what was happening to us… to see that we are not alone…

I attended many meetings, and I spoke at a number of meetings… Spoke with other families and saw the similarities with the problems they had, and drew energy from that to continue.’

At this point in the hearing, Poulson posed a series of those questions the Inquiry loves to ask about whether there was any disorder, confrontation or illegality involved.

This line of questioning felt particularly inappropriate in the light of the very measured evidence we had heard from the Menson family, of their genuine faith that the police would do their jobs properly and their absolute disbelief at what happened to them.

We were shown SDS reports that mischaracterised a number of justice campaigns as ‘disruptive’ [MPS-0001643], and ‘angry and confrontational’ [MPS-0001717]. The SDS described a demonstration in support of the family of Roger Sylvester who had been unlawfully killed by police in 1999:

‘The potential troublemakers were not members of any group but people from the local community and they proved impossible to control.

An example of this was when an unmarked police car was discovered, parked, with three officers inside it. It was immediately attacked by the crowd and the driver of the vehicle bid [sic] a hasty retreat. This incident highlighted the fact that the crowd were ready to attack the police, given an opportunity.’

MWS is asked what he thinks of this last report:

‘I didn’t see any attacks… I think it’s a fiction.’

In August 1997, the police submitted reports to the Met’s solicitors and the coroner which included shocking and disturbing claims about the family:

‘It has been clear from the outset of this enquiry that the Menson family will never accept any explanation other than murder.

Whether this is done to alleviate any senses of guilt for any perceived lack of family support while he was alive or is merely for future financial gain is unknown.

Without doubt though the family have attacked the police handling of the enquiry from the outset and in addition have attempted to initiate media criticism through their associates in the music and press world.’

THE INQUEST

Finally, in September 1998, there was an inquest into Michael Menson’s death. All the questioning was based on the idea that Michael had inflicted his injuries on himself. However, the jury reached a verdict of unlawful killing.

The police were incensed that they had been exposed and found wanting, and that their attempts to shape the outcome had failed.

DCI Scott refused to change his mindset. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he said he still believed that Michael Menson had killed himself.

We were shown a Channel 4 News interview on the day of the verdict with Mike Bennett of the Police Federation [UCPI0000038704].

Bennett had not been at the inquest to hear the evidence. He criticised the coroner’s verdict, alleged the family ‘crowded out the inquest’ and ‘intimidated’ the coroner, and claimed that ‘it stinks’.

The family’s solicitor Mike Schwarz is also interviewed. He corrected Bennett, pointing out he had been proven wrong and didn’t even attend the inquest. Bennett then criticised Schwarz and insulted the family.

After the inquest, the Metropolitan Police issued a statement admitting serious mistakes had been made during the first 12 hours of the investigation.

‘MSS: This phrase “the first 12 hours”… you do nothing at all for the first 16 days and you keep harking back to the fact that there was some failings in the first 12 hours.

It’s all minimising just how inadequate the investigation was… Let’s deny how wilfully we have chosen to protect ourselves rather than to investigate this crime…

This isn’t accidental… all those choices were kind of uphill choices, they weren’t easy, they actively chose to take a certain line and then stick to it. Despite repeated evidence and outcomes, such as the inquest, outcomes to the contrary…

Language really matters. I’ve talked about ‘hostile’, I’ve talked about ‘obstructive’, but there was all sorts of language like ‘flaws, failings, inept, inadequate’, those imply sort of accidental, incompetent sort of normal human failings of a public servant.

That’s not what was seen here, there’s more than enough evidence to show that these were intentional wilful lies that were told, and for which people have not been held and brought to account.’

On 25 September 1998, Bindmans solicitors submitted a complaint to the Police Complaints Authority. The Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, Dennis ‘Ben’ Gunn, was appointed to investigate the family’s criticisms of the police’s investigation into Michael’s death.

The result of that investigation was the damning PCA report from which we have been shown extracts throughout the hearing.

On 3 November 1998, the family was invited to meet the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw:

‘MSS: We told him… how we’d been treated, how they tried to vilify us and imply that we were either mad or just or sad or guilty, that… we were trying to hide our own guilt or whatever…

He did look visibly shocked, he did look like [he had] a sense of oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening… what I remember was kind of the visceral sense that came from his voice, which was of shock.’

The following day it was decided that Michael’s case would be taken over by John Grieve and the Met’s newly-formed Racial and Violent Crime Task Force. Grieve met with the family, and told them his unit was going to take it from there.

He also told them that, first of all, they knew this was a murder, and secondly, they knew who did it.

‘MSS: When Area Major Incident Pool took over from the local team in Edmonton, they sort of said, “it’s okay, this is what we do, we’re the professionals, step back because we’ll do it all”.

So there was a bit of a sense of oh gosh not again, but also hope, real hope… I also had a sense that, you know, there was a possibility that this may be a bit of a trophy case, you know?

But to be honest… I was willing to live with that if they kind of said, “oh look we are, sort of knights in shining armour, we’ve solved it”. I was willing to live with it if it get to the truth.’

SPYING ON THE MENSON FAMILY

It is notable that when the Undercover Policing Inquiry heard evidence from Doreen Lawrence about the SDS spying on her family, John Grieve’s name also came up.

There is a briefing note about the Macpherson inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s death [MPS-0720946] in which Operation Commander Colin Black comments:

‘SDS is, as usual, well positioned at the focal crisis points of policing in London…

I have established a correspondence route to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Grieve via Detective Sergeant McDowell, formerly of SO12 [Special Branch], and opened an SP file for copy correspondence with CO24 [Grieve’s Racial and Violent Crime Task Force].’

From November 1998 to March 1999, Grieve also ran the second investigation into the death of Ricky Reel. This was another racist murder that the police were denying. Grieve’s investigation in that case was a whitewashing exercise that confirmed the original inadequate conclusions.

It is therefore significant that Grieve led the final investigation into Michael Menson’s murder, given that the Lawrence, Reel and Menson families were all targeted by the SDS.

Two arrests were finally made in March 1999. A third person fled to North Cyprus and was later arrested there. The court found that it had been a racially motivated attack. All three were convicted and sentenced to 10 to 14 years in prison. The family sat through the trials.

MSS explains to the hearing that her brother, MWS, stood firm because he had heard Michael say he’d been attacked. It was so much harder for her and she came close to giving up. She became very emotional describing this, and the Inquiry hearing took an unscheduled break.

MSW, Michael’s brother, first became aware that his family had been subjected to covert surveillance when it was mentioned during the trial of Michael’s murderers at the Old Bailey, in December 1999.

We were shown a Special Branch note on left wing activity in relation to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. It mentions Michael Menson’s case, along with a handwritten note stating that John Grieve would be briefed on SDS intelligence [MPS-0748390]. This report is from some time in late 1998. It appears Grieve was being briefed by Special Branch about the family while he was investigating Michael’s case.

‘Q: How does it make you feel, at the point where you thought you were finally being taken seriously by the police, that it was seemingly the case that they were at the same time spying, or at the very least had knowledge of spying, by undercover officers on your family?

MSS: That sense of disbelief… to sweep in and say, you know, “We know it was murder, we know it was who it was”, but to conceal.

This wasn’t accidental omission, this was, you know, I’ve used the word “manipulation” so many times, but I can’t understand how this is anything other than intentional….

What if the trial hadn’t led to convictions? What if this stuff had got in the way of finding justice? … they risked so much… I cannot understand how people of this seniority think that’s okay.’

We were then shown further extracts from the PCA report, about the police’s attitude to the Menson family in March 1997.

The briefing note about Michael’s death that was prepared for Assistant Commissioner Dunn said of the family:

‘Their current attitude is now one of open hostility.’

On the same day this note was submitted, a message was entered onto HOLMES (the police internal database), which noted that Detective Superintendent Duffy had suggested that Special Branch background checks should be completed on all the Menson family prior to further interviews with them.

The PCA report notes:

‘An inference which could be drawn from that proposed line of enquiry is that the family of a murder victim were having security checks carried out on them with Special Branch to see if they had any involvement in extremist politics.

It is unclear precisely why such checks were made, but the description of the family as “hostile” may have inferred that such behaviour had some political motivation.’

Michael’s siblings are asked why they think the police put their family under surveillance.

‘MWS: This was a scheme to collect anything that can diminish us as a campaign and a family and find any information that they can use to discredit us, and use to shut down the family campaign by whatever means that they could find. That’s the conclusion I draw from that.

MSS: This has nothing to do with the case at hand, it was a diversion. We aren’t, we never have been, you know – what if we had been a family with a history as such? It still would’ve been completely irrelevant.

And what their duty was, was to investigate the crime or whatever they thought had happened, to find that out. And instead they were focusing energy and time and resources on this.’

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

MWS explained to the Inquiry the function of the police using the word ‘hostile’ to describe the family. It dehumanised them and, by characterising them as difficult to work with, made it possible for successive police officers to dismiss them.

The PCA report notes:

‘The evidence indicates that the culture which served as the “sense-making and control mechanism” for the police officers dealing with the Menson case was one which sadly displayed the characteristics of institutional racism…

The shared belief system was evident in documents such as the draft report to the Home Office after the inquest and the failure of senior officers to challenge the views expressed.

There was an absence of the control mechanism that should have acted to check and challenge the mindset and/or behaviour of individual officers.

The organisational culture meant that essential critical questions were never asked, misrepresentations were perpetuated and initial failures were compounded rather than corrected.

In this case, it is judged that the initial racist stereotyping led inexorably to institutional discrimination.’

The police had put all their energy into smearing the family. The fact that they were a Black family played a significant role in the police response.

As awareness increased of the issues emerging from the Lawrence inquiry, instead of trying to correct the wrongs, the response became to try to discredit the Menson family in order to protect the Metropolitan Police from criticism.

The PCA report records not only institutional but also overt acts of racism. One officer is quoted as saying:

‘Why are you all making all this fuss? He’s only a fucking black schizophrenic.’

COLLATERAL INTRUSION

Neither MSS nor MWS recall knowing the spycops who reported on them (HN81 ‘Dave Hagan’ and HN43 Peter Francis). Like other grieving families, they have been told that the spying on them was ‘collateral intrusion’. MWS defined this in his witness statement as:

‘The routine gathering of private, often deeply personal information about individuals who are not suspected to have any wrongdoing.

This indiscriminate approach meant that campaigners, their families and even bystanders could find themselves under unwarranted scrutiny with little regard for their right to privacy.’

MSS says she was utterly shocked by the spycops revelations, and by this flimsy rationale for why they were spied on when they were most vulnerable.

‘It felt like a gut punch… no rationale was given to spying on us at a time when we were clearly at our most vulnerable….

It wasn’t collateral because it was targeted and intentional, there was nothing collateral about what I’ve seen.

But, secondly, that isn’t okay… if people are going to undertake undercover surveillance, there has to be a robust system to justify that it’s warranted and that it’s relevant, that it’s necessary, and that there aren’t any other routes. And none of those existed for us…

To exploit our vulnerability and to fish for anything you can use against us, it’s inhumane.’

EMPTY APOLOGIES

We were shown a letter of apology to MSS, signed by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jon Savell, sent on 31 October 2025. It is placed alongside a letter sent to Sukhdev Reel and they are exactly the same.

MSS is furious:

‘What a copy and paste job to send to us! And 31 October, why send an apology now, in the middle of the Inquiry?

Where in the apology does it say what they are apologising for? Where in the apology does it actually give any sense of the scale of this, the who, when, why?

We know that documents were destroyed. There’s a vast amount that we know we don’t know that isn’t referred to there.

So this is a real sort of “I’m sorry you feel that way” apology, which is worse than apology, it makes absolutely no sense.’

MWS and MSS were asked about the long-term impacts of the spying on their family.

MSS explained that covert surveillance affects who you are to the core, and how you engage with the world. She felt real fear around her work, knowing the police were so intent to discredit them:

‘Would other people suffer because the Metropolitan Police Service was so intent in trying to find things to use against us?’

It took personal therapy for an extended period of time to come to terms with what was done, and to believe that people are good.

‘MSS: The costs to us individually and as a family has been huge. I’m not going to go into the detail of that because other family members haven’t been able to withstand this.

But it’s important to know that while partners, families, children, the time that we’ve spent in all of this, the impact of having to go back on this again, that impacts us, it changes, it affects who you are as a person, how you engage with people that you care for or love or are with. And that isn’t okay. That is absolutely not okay.

So yeah, to find ourselves in another inquiry, it’s hard, it’s really very, very difficult’

She also criticised the decision to allow SDS officer HN81 Dave Hagan to get out of appearing at the inquiry:

‘Why are you letting people not give evidence, people who should be called to account, not to give evidence?…

As I understand it, the reasoning is post-traumatic stress disorder. Did they not imagine we have post-traumatic stress from this whole experience that’s gone on for nearly 29 years?…

We are grateful for the invitation to appear at this Inquiry, but it was not an easy decision to make. At all…

We are here because we felt we had a really strong moral imperative to do so, to be willing to go through all of this again.’

They spoke about their expectations for the Inquiry:

MWS explained:

‘We need to know why, we need to know where, we need to know when, who authorised it, the chain of command that reviewed it, what level within the police, and who knew, who agreed it, who was happy to read those reports and who didn’t question.’

MSS said that she hopes the Inquiry is able to get to the truth to help the family come to a place of understanding:

‘One of the biggest pains that people can have is not understanding, not understanding why we as normal, quiet, publicly-minded lawful people were treated in this way…

It’s really important that this Inquiry isn’t another empty exercise. That even though records have been destroyed, even though people are allowed to say, “I’ve got post-traumatic stress, I’m not going to give evidence”, that’s not allowed to end there.

There has to be a way of ensuring that public-serving organisations learn. Nobody’s perfect, but there’s a difference between being imperfect and wilfully being harmful…

Let’s leave, all of us leave this, knowing that we’ve made a difference.’

The Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, thanked them at the end. He said their evidence had made clear to him things which, as dramatic as they are on paper, have now been fully brought to life. He says he leaves with the hope that common humanity will eventually prevail.

At the end of the hearing, Tom Fowler discussed what had been said with Eveline Lubbers of the Undercover Research Group: