Spycop HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ on a farewell visit to people he knew in northwest England, 1996
Special Demonstration Squad officer HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ gave evidence to the Undercover Policing Inquiry for three days in January. Tomorrow he returns for a further two days. As a prelude to that, here are some key points from his January testimony.
Spycops weren’t always tasked to infiltrate groups but instead given the names of individual activists and told to befriend them and report on their activities, whatever they were.
People were often the subject of spycops’ reports because of what they thought, rather than what they actually did. HN1 believed that having a certain ‘ideology’ or way of thinking was an indication that you might be drawn into taking more serious action at some later date, and so it was worth watching you.
HN1 admitted that the police were selective in who they targeted, betraying their prejudice and political allegiances. They didn’t bother recording information about some groups who regularly committed violent criminal acts – e.g. hunt supporters – but instead focused their energy and resources on the non-violent people who were opposed to hunting, even when they committed no crime.
POSH HUNT SAB – AN UPPER CRUSTY
HN1 was very unwilling to be drawn into any criticism of either hunt supporters or the police, suggesting that he likely has links with the Establishment and people who take part in hunting.
Spycop HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ while undercover, February 1994
He displayed an ‘upper class’ accent, especially on the first day of his evidence, and words you’d expect to hear from a public-school boy.
Was this as example of him ‘mirroring’ the Inquiry’s Chair or trying to establish his credentials as someone with a certain type of influential friend? He sounded noticeably less posh as the days wore on.
HN1’s conduct during the hearings annoyed everyone. This included his repeated references to the Inquiry’s barrister of 20 years’ experience, Emma Gargitter, as ‘Emma’. It was in marked contrast to him unfailingly addressing the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, as ‘Sir’.
He has been afforded an extraordinary level of privacy, and ‘special measures’ designed to prevent anyone from identifying him and his current role. This has led to a great deal of speculation but, contrary to the bare-faced lies of the police’s ‘designated lawyer’ Oliver Sanders, nobody has gone as far as creating an AI image to show what he might look like nowadays.
DEFENDING DECEIT
HN1 deceived activist Liz Fuller into a relationship. We don’t even know if he is still married to the same woman he was with when he cheated on her with Fuller. He continues to claim that what he had with Liz was both ‘genuine’ and ‘monogamous’, and often spoke about how ‘Matt Rayner’ and his real persona were two separate men.
When Gargitter read out the words of the Met Police’s official apology to the women affected by these deceitful relationships – not just those they deceived in their cover identities but also these police officers’ wives – he insisted that his wife didn’t need this apology, and suggested that they had reached a private understanding of their own.
Despite the Met’s use of the word to describe what he did, he refused to accept his actions had been ‘manipulative’ in any way.
‘RAYNER’ AND COLES SIMILARITIES
Spycop HN2 Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’ while undercover in 1991
He seems to have had a lot in common with HN2 Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’, who was deployed at the same time as him into many of the same groups, although there is obviously no love lost between these two.
They both appear to have over-inflated opinions of their own abilities and intelligence. Both seem convinced that anyone who hears them will be convinced that they did a great job, instead of viewing them as responsible for abhorrent human rights abuses.
They both use long words to say very little (HN1’s favourites included ‘intellectual’ and ‘cerebral’).
They both lie (a lot – as you’d expect from professional liars, who were paid and trained to do this by the Met).
They both over-state their achievements.
Like Coles, HN1 had obviously rehearsed some answers before his appearance, and was ready and willing to reel off obvious lies about those he spied on.
Though he had a lot to say at times, he noticeably clammed up whenever Gargitter pointed out contradictions and discrepancies between what he was saying and what he had put in his various earlier statements to the Inquiry, its risk assessors, the Herne inquiry which preceded it, and his the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) reports of the time. His verbose manner suddenly deflated to ‘I can’t explain’ or ‘I can’t help’.
TACTICAL IGNORANCE
He often claimed ‘I didn’t write that’ – especially in regards to reports that were found on an SDS hard-drive in a file bearing his name – and sought to blame his managers for their contents.
Helen Steel at the Royal Courts of Justice
There was general ridicule of many of his excuses, and his references to some mythical ‘grey area’ when it came to the morality and ethics of his operations.
Despite portraying himself as a pro-active, motivated and highly effective spy, he insisted that he knew nothing at all about Helen Steel, the McLibel case or her intimate long-term relationship with his colleague, HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’.
He kept saying that he had ‘no interest’ in Steel, or the groups she was part of, including London Greenpeace (LGP), even though there was lots of overlap between her life and many of the activists he deliberately befriended.
For example, Paul Gravett, who was a friend of Steel’s for many years, visited her home and was part of LGP too. Liz Fuller lived next door to Dave Morris who was an LGP activist and the other half of ‘the McLibel Two’. She regularly looked after his young son, and as a result HN1 spent many hours in Morris’s home while he was out.
We also heard evidence about his influencing HN14 Jim Boyling, who was recruited to the SDS after him and was mentored by him. Boyling went on to form a number of abusive relationships with female activists, and went so far as to marry one and have children with her.
LOWER THAN THE LOWEST
Each time another of these men gives evidence, we think he can’t be any worse than the last one. However it’s fair to say that HN1 managed to hit new lows, even for a discredited squad that contained the likes of Andy Coles, Bob Lambert and Trevor Morris.
One of the most glaring concerns is that each one of these abusive men paved the way for those that followed them, often mentoring and/or holding management roles.
Through the years of its existence, the culture of the SDS can be seen to have become more depraved – the inevitable result of their misconduct going unchecked and the impunity they enjoyed as part of a secret, extra-special, ‘elite’ unit within Special Branch.
HN1 has been given a set of ‘special measures’ to protect his anonymity – implying that he currently holds some significant role that would be adversely affected if people knew the truth about who he was.
We will publish a more in-depth report of HN1’s evidence once he has finished giving it and the Inquiry has uploaded transcripts of all three days.
Spycop HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ at a summer party in London, 30 July 1995
Spycop HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ is back at the Undercover Policing Inquiry this coming week. He’s been given a set of last-minute ‘special measures’ for his questioning in quite extraordinary circumstances.
HN1 is a key figure in the spycops scandal. Deployed into London animal rights groups 1991-1996, he personally committed most of the worst abuses for which the Special Demonstration Squad is infamous.
The Inquiry’s original Chair, Lord Justice Pitchford, assured us that women deceived into relationships would be given the fullest possible account about what was done to them and that this included, at a minimum, the man’s real name.
Pitchford’s successor, Sir John Mitting, has broken this promise. He says that the right of Liz Fuller to know the real name:
‘is outweighed by an even more compelling reason of public interest which cannot be stated openly.’
The most obvious implication is that HN1 currently has some role that would be adversely affected if people knew the truth about who he really is. Which is all the more reason for his name to be made public.
Andy Coles promoting the Children’s Society’s Seriously Awkward campaign to protect older teenagers from sexual exploitation by men like him
We’ve already seen how HN2 Andy Coles had become a pillar of the community in Peterborough before he was unmasked by activists.
He was a school governor, endorsing a campaign to protect older teenagers from abuse and sexual exploitation (despite being a perpetrator of it himself when he was a spycop), and Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire (despite playing a key role in one of the greatest scandals in Metropolitan Police history).
He too would surely have had a ‘compelling reason of public interest’ to be anonymous if we hadn’t exposed him first.
So we have to wonder what undeserved position of civic trust or public respect HN1 is currently in that the Inquiry is so depserate to protect.
SUDDEN CHANGES
On 13 January 2025, the very end of the Inquiry’s hearing was devoted to hearing submissions made to the Chair on the subject of HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ and the extra ‘special measures’ that had been announced on 23 December, immediately before everything stopped for Christmas. The full details were not properly shared or confirmed until after the holidays, on 8 January.
We were shocked to learn that this officer, whose real name is still being kept secret, would no longer be appearing in person. Instead, he would just participate remotely, and would not be visible to anyone other than the Chair and the Inquiry team.
The Chair, Sir John Mitting, had already reached this decision without any consultation with the victims of these police officers’ abuses.
The hearing on 13 January was the first opportunity for ‘non-state core participants’ (the people who were spied on) to respond to this news, and put forward their views for consideration.
First, we heard from Tom Lowenthal, acting on behalf of the ‘Category H’ core participants (individuals in relationships with undercover officers)
Spycop HN1 (left) with Paul Gravett, leafleting outside a branch of Boots
He started by saying that some of the women who were deceived into relationships by undercovers had applied to be able to see HN1 give evidence.
He was immediately interrupted by Mitting, who said there had already been some discussions, and agreement reached ‘on all relevant sides’ that one of these women, Liz Fuller, would be allowed to see and hear his evidence live.
Despite the Inquiry’s previous assurances that women deceived into relationships by spycops will be given the real name, Fuller still isn’t being told. Not only is there the overwhelming ‘public interest’ reason for this, but the nature of this reason is being kept secret too.
Several other women deceived into relationships by spycops – ‘Jessica’, Helen Steel, ‘Alison’ and ‘Lindsey’ – have also applied to see his evidence, and their submissions were read out.
They didn’t have an intimate relationship with HN1, but emphasised that none of these relationships were isolated events, taking place in a vacuum:
‘SDS officers advised, supported and covered for each other in perpetrating these abuses’.
HN1 has said he knew that women activists considered HN2 Andy Coles ‘creepy’. It’s vitally important that Jessica, who was deceived into a relationship by Coles, is given maximum chance to understand what HN1 knew and when about that relationship.
Similarly, Helen Steel would like to better understand the way that HN5 John Dines treated her, and the callous exit strategy that he adopted. She knows that HN1 was with Dines (who was his Special Demonstration Squad ‘mentor’) when her relationship with him ended, and she wants to know how much he knew about this.
HN15 Mark Jenner on holiday/paid overtime in Vietnam with Alison
‘Alison’ was deceived into a five-year relationship with HN15 Mark Jenner, and ‘Lindsey’ was deceived into a year-long relationship with HN104 Carlo Sorrachi. These both took place after HN1’s deployment, and it is likely that his behaviour ‘set the stage’ for those who came later.
The police have already admitted that these relationships were a violation of the women’s Article 3 human rights – ‘no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’, an absolute right that no circumstances can ever justify breaching.
In order to recover from these relationships and make sense of their experiences, the women need to understand more about them. Seeing HN1’s demeanour and facial expressions would provide them with far more insight than an audio-only feed.
The Inquiry has to balance their Article 3 rights against HN1’s own Article 8 rights (respect for his privacy), and Lowenthal believes it would be disproportionate to put his rights above theirs.
Mitting interrupted again to claim that there’s been a ‘misapprehension’, and that it’s actually HN1’s ‘safety’ that is the primary issue.
It’s pointed out that Jessica and Helen have both met HN1 in the past when he was undercover, and the others have seen contemporaneous pictures and videos of him (such as his role as ‘Watery Ophelia’).
All four women have followed all of the Inquiry’s privacy restrictions up till now, at ‘significant personal cost’.
They asked that if their application is rejected that they are supplied with gisted reasons for it. Mitting said he will reflect after he’s heard everyone’s submissions, and then state his reasons.
Next, we heard from Owen Greenhall, representing a number of Hodge Jones & Allen clients
There was also an application made on behalf of three of the non-state core participants and Geoff Sheppard’s Recognised Legal Representatives.
There is supposed to be a ‘presumption of openness’ in any public inquiry, and the burden is supposed to fall on those who seek privacy to prove why this is necessary.
The ‘McLibel 2’: Dave Morris & Helen Steel outside McDonald’s. HN1 was mentored by HN2 John Dines who’d deceived Steel into a relationship, & babysat for Morris’s son thus gaining access to McLibel trial strategy
In other legal cases, it has been felt that the use of a cipher and a ban on photography has removed any risk of an individual being identified. Why isn’t that enough here?
Geoff Sheppard is unable to attend the Inquiry venue but asked that his lawyers be allowed to view the evidence of HN1 – due to his involvement in Sheppard’s conviction and imprisonment, and the disputed facts around these issues – so they would be in the same position as the lawyers representing HN1 himself, rather than being disadvantaged.
What possible risk is there in allowing legal representatives to see him give evidence?
It was noted that there are explicit statutory restrictions to ensure that lawyers are able to see defendants in serious criminal cases.
It was also noted that there are multiple images of HN1 in his undercover role available online, and many of those he spied on saw him a lot and knew very well what he looked like.
Paul Gravett is one of those who saw a great deal of HN1 over those years, and had a fairly close relationship with him. Claire Hildreth has also given very moving evidence about the very close relationship she had with him.
Finally for this group, Dave Morris is concerned that HN1 abused his position (as babysitter to Dave’s child) to gain intelligence about the McLibel case.
Kirsten Heaven appeared next, on behalf of the entire ‘cooperating group’ of Non-State, Non-Police Core Participants
A group application had been submitted in writing asking that those with a ‘direct interest’ in this Tranche of hearings be given access to HN1’s evidence.
There was no reference to HN1’s ‘safety’ when this issue was first raised, or even the week before the hearing.
There has been no sight of any evidence (not even a ‘gisted’ version) to support his seemingly late application for these new ‘special measures’.
Kaden Blake had already given evidence about how she felt learning that he had stolen the identity of her deceased brother, and gathered personal information about her family in order to build his cover identity.
She said:
‘it is a further insult to us that HN1 applied for anonymity on the basis of his right to a private life.’
Matthew Rayner, who died of leukaemia aged 4 and whose identity was stolen by HN1, in his father’s arms
Heaven pointed out that HN1 misled the police and the courts during his deployment, and has not been entirely candid with the Inquiry itself up till now. He didn’t even admit to his sexual relationship with Liz Fuller until December 2017.
There is footage of HN1 performing in a play in the garden of someone’s private home in the presence of young children, showing his physical appearance, height, mannerisms and demeanour, and raising the bizarre possibility that he will be questioned about this incident (and the video shown) in a hearing where he himself cannot be seen.
Core participants are extremely disappointed that HN1’s human rights are being given precedence, given the way he which he violated their rights. Granting these special measures would only serve to further insulate him from public scrutiny.
The non-state core participant group was applying for permission to see him on screen. This would be critical to ensure equal treatment, to maintain public confidence in the Inquiry, and to allow those who view his evidence to assess his credibility for themselves.
Mitting brushed aside what was said about the lateness of the application for special measures, declaring:
‘I am not troubled about timing matters. This Inquiry must proceed, difficult decisions have to be made from time to time.’
Oliver Sanders, HN1’s lawyer responded
Sanders countered all of these arguments by telling Mitting that he and his Counsel will be able to assess HN1’s demeanour for themselves, and the rest of us don’t matter.
Someone’s demeanour is ‘always a somewhat subjective manner’ he said, standing with his arms crossed in front of him.
He pointed out that Mitting will be hearing from some other officers in entirely closed hearings (as if that makes it acceptable for HN1 to be granted this level of secrecy).
Spycop HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ while undercover, February 1994
Sanders then suggested that HN1 has only been proceeding on the basis that special measures would be granted, and added that it would be ‘unfair to him and unsettling for him’ to change arrangements at the last minute.
He talked about how concerned his client is about his identity being revealed, then made the extraordinary claim that ‘there’s been an AI-generated image circulated on Twitter or X today’ showing how HN1 might look nowadays.
This is obviously nonsense. If the possibility of AI images derived from old photos were enough of a problem to warrant withholding someone’s current appearance, it would surely apply to everyone else who’s been granted a similar level of anonymity.
More to the point, we have been scouring the internet ever since and can find no evidence of such an image to back up Sanders’s allegation. His Chambers have not responded or commented on this. It appears that he just made it up and lied to the Inquiry.
Mitting responded to this, saying he wanted a ‘closed private submission’ from Sanders. Off they went to discuss it all in secret.
Twenty-five minutes later they returned, and he asked Sanders to respond ‘in open’ to one particular submission: the one made by Geoff Sheppard’s legal team (Owen Greenhall and James Wood KC).
Sanders argued that there was no basis for allowing Sheppard’s lawyers to see HN1 give evidence, and it wouldn’t ‘add anything’ to Sheppard’s pending appeal case.
James Wood KC responds
Given the opportunity to respond to this, Wood re-stated what Greenhall had already said: that this is a ‘wholly exceptional step to take’, and one that would not be permitted in any criminal proceedings.
The final decision
Mitting said there has been a risk assessment of some kind into the ‘safety’ of HN1.
He told us something we already know: that even HN1 has conceded that Liz Fuller and her lawyers should be allowed to see and hear his evidence, and this would not constitute too much ‘risk’ to him.
However, in response to the rest of the day’s submissions – from core participants with a real interest in HN1 (such as Paul Gravett) and several deceived women – he had decided that they and their lawyers would not be allowed to see him, only hear him.
Mitting gave his reasons:
• Giving evidence is unlikely to be an easy task for HN1.
• Mitting has to elicit the ‘best evidence’ he can get from each witness.
• He’s therefore very reluctant to do anything which might ‘disturb’ a witness.
• He says that ‘widening’ the group that can see the witness will ‘inevitably pose perceived risks’.
• He thinks he can assess HN1’s truthfulness and accuracy without anyone else’s assistance.
He does not say why these things don’t apply to all other witnesses.
In Mitting’s view, Geoff Sheppard’s pending Court of Appeal case engages criminal law so he had decided it was desirable to allow James Wood KC to see this ‘critical witness’ in order to assess his credibility.
In saying this, he accepted the deceived women’s point that seeing is very different to just hearing, but he implicitly believes Sheppard’s appeal against a criminal conviction is a far more serious thing than what officers did to the women.
Mitting added that someone’s demeanour is often said to play an overstated part but cannot be discounted entirely.
‘They were doing the deception. Why should they be allowed to be anonymous while people like me had their faces all over the newspapers? These people were not innocent. They knew what they were doing.’
TL;DR:
Liz Fuller can watch ‘Matt Rayner’, the man who deceived her into a relationship, give evidence.
So can James Wood KC.
Everyone else can just listen to his voice, and be glad that it’s not a ‘closed’ (private) hearing.
Once Mitting’s made his mind up, he doesn’t like changing it. And he doesn’t like asking anyone else what they think first.
The real name of HN1 is not being disclosed to any of his victims, not even the woman he deceived into a sexual relationship during his deployment. This is despite the Inquiry’s earlier promises that these women would always be given the real name of the spycops who abused their rights in this way.
Although Gravett provided a witness statement and over 40 exhibits to the Inquiry last year, but despite the Inquiry’s policies and assurances, at the tmie of writng these still have not been published. However, you can read the transcript of this second hearing.
He was questioned by John Warrington, Deputy First Junior Counsel to the Inquiry.
RECAP
This was the Monday of the ninth week of ‘Tranche 2 Phase 2’, the new round of hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). This Phase mainly concentrates on examining the animal rights-focused activities of the Metropolitan Police’s secret political unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, from 1983-92.
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.
Spycop HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ while undercover
Gravett was involved in the Islington Animal Rights group, later known as the Hackney and Islington Animal Rights campaign (HIARC), from its formation in 1982 until its disbanding in 1993.
HN5 John Dines described Gravett and Denise Bennett as two of the ‘leading members’ of the group in a 1990 report, a description which Gravett accepts. He says he got more involved in things like producing the group’s newsletter towards the end of the 1980s.
All of HIARC’s activities were lawful. They did a lot of leafleting locally, and attended animal rights demos together. They held monthly public meetings, and also planning meetings (sometimes at the same venue, sometimes at people’s homes). Gravett recalls that most of the group had jobs. He and other members took part in various kinds of direct action, but as individuals, not as HIARC.
The Inquiry heard about some of the demos the group organised. HN10 Bob Lambert had reported that the group organised an entirely peaceful demo outside a central London hotel in September 1986 following reports of mistreatment of a cat. In his report, Lambert said that although most of those who attended were supporters of Animal Aid, ‘a handful of ALF activists were also in attendance’.
In this first report, Lambert claimed that they discussed committing criminal damage at the hotel. Gravett says he does not remember this.
In another report, detailing a HIARC meeting held shortly after this demo, Lambert claimed that Bennett asked everyone else to write letters of complaint and phone the hotel to jam its switchboard. Gravett remembers that they often wrote letters of complaint, but doesn’t recall anything about jamming the switchboard.
He points out that Lambert lied a lot in his reports, and did in fact invite people like Bennett to go out fly-posting with him.
A third Lambert report, dated 1988, lists five pickets planned by the group over the following month. Gravett points out that none of these resulted in arrests.
By 1988, the group was demonstrating at a variety of places, including fur shops, fried chicken outlets and butchers’ shops. The only trouble that ever occurred was when the activists were attacked – for example a woman was head-butted by one of the butchers.
Gravett has a clear memory of another incident, which took place at the same location in May 1988:
‘someone trying to chuck a bucket of blood over you is not something you really forget, even 30 or 40 years later’
HN5 John Dines wrote in his reports about protestors from HIARC repeatedly being on the ‘receiving end of physical attack’ from members of staff at Maldor Furs in Hackney. Gravett remembers that the police were generally very unsympathetic when animal rights activists reported such attacks, and didn’t usually take action against those responsible.
Spycop HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’ while undercover in the 1980s
In his reports, Lambert seems to have been keen to highlight any disagreements within groups. He claimed that Gravett was often ‘out on a limb’ because of his ‘uncompromising stance on direct action’, and that one couple of ‘former ALF activists’, disillusioned with the type of actions being taken against the fur trade, resigned from HIARC in early 1988 as a result.
Gravett is clear that there were a ‘variety of opinions’ within HIARC, but says they tended to try to work together on the local issues they could agree on. He says the two individuals named in Lambert’s reports were only part of the group for a short time, and moved on to a different group.
He denies that there was a push to make the group more supportive of, or involved in, direct action at this time. He does remember the group discussing (and agreeing to support) animal rights prisoners. One such prisoner was Geoff Sheppard, a good friend of Gravett’s who was imprisoned thanks to a wrongful conviction secured by Lambert.
Gravett explained that local laboratory Biorex, infamous for carrying out animal experimentation, closed down in 1989. It had been a focus for the group’s campaigning efforts, and after it closed ‘the group started to lose its direction a bit’.
LONDON BOOTS ACTION GROUP
Spycop HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ (left) with Paul Gravett, leafleting outside a branch of Boots
In 1991, HN5 John Dines reported that Gravett was planning to set up a new grass-roots campaigning group, with a focus: London Boots Action Group (LBAG). HN2 Andy Coles attended the inaugural meeting that November. HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ was also involved from the outset.
Gravett explains that this group used ‘civil disobedience’ tactics with the aim of persuading the public not to buy from Boots and therefore reducing the company’s profits.
They held pickets outside the Camden Town branch of Boots every single Sunday, and at other branches mosrt Saturdays, handing out leaflets. These were usually entirely peaceful demos. Arrests were uncommon, but sometimes happened for things like obstruction of the highway.
Those who were part of LBAG sometimes went to other animal rights demos together – the Inquiry was given the example of a demo against live exports at Dover in 1992.
LBAG’s July-August 1992 newsletter was attached to a report by Rayner. On the front page are photographs of six named Boots directors. Gravett cheerfully admits ‘that’s my work’, and points out that these details were publicly available.
John Warrington, the Inquiry’s barrister, asked why these men’s details were included in the group’s newsletter. Gravett explained that these were the men responsible for running Boots, and therefore for the way animals were being abused. He says it was:
‘important to know who is responsible for the company’s actions. There are people behind it. It’s not a faceless, vast faceless corporation. There are real people there. But also you have to put it in context that this was to publicise a picket of the Boots Annual General Meeting.’
Warrington asks if publishing these individual senior directors’ details was done in order to enable people to take personal action against them. Gravett rejects this suggestion and says if LBAG had intended to ‘take it to that level’ they would have found out and published their addresses as well, but never did.
Rayner claimed that the Boots AGM would be ‘a golden opportunity for animal liberationists to express their anger and revulsion’. His next report said that 100 protestors turned up on the day.
Spycop HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ while undercover, February 1994
They were described as spending two hours hurling abuse outside the meeting. One activist, Brendan McNally, as a Boots shareholder, was able to get inside to ask the company awkward questions.
In 1994, Rayner reported that McNally had now acquired 50 shares in Boots and distributed them so that around 20 activists were able to get inside the AGM that year and disrupt it with a ‘continuous barrage of questions’, despite Boots’ efforts to prevent this.
However, there seems to be no SDS report of the 1993 Boots AGM, even though there was more disruption at this one than at the other two in the years either side of it. Gravett remembers that AGM well, and recalls that ‘tensions were running high’.
Boots had just been forced to withdraw a new drug, Manoplax, due to its side-effects including ‘a significantly increased risk of death’, proving the unreliability of animal testing when it came to safety. The company was having financial difficulties as a result. It wasn’t just the animal rights shareholders who were unhappy with the company and heckling at the meeting.
Gravett remembers that 12-15 LBAG activists were ejected from the meeting, including him. The AGM received a lot of press coverage, and it’s strange that there is no Special Demonstration Squad report of the event. Weren’t ‘Andy Davey’ and ‘Matt Rayner’ there? Gravett says ‘it would be remarkable if they weren’t there’ – this annual demo was the main focus of LBAG.
Anti-Boots demos also took place outside of London. The Inquiry was told about a march and rally in Nottingham which included a visit to the company’s laboratories, where some campaigners reported climbed up to the roof and got inside through a first floor window. Gravett says this wasn’t something that happened at LBAG’s demos in London and was ‘very rare’.
In May 1993, Rayner reported that LBAG were planning a demo at the home of one the Boots directors. Gravett disputes this. ‘Home visits’ were a perfectly lawful style of demonstration in those days, but he says LBAG did not adopt this tactic till much later, when it was part of ‘London Animal Action’ (LAA).
Gravett reminded the Inquiry that ‘Matt Rayner’ did take part in a ‘home visit’ to a director of Selfridges, and Bob Lambert is also known to have attended such demos.
Gravett explained LBAG’s ethos and aims, and what were considered appropriate tactics for the group to discuss and use. The group held lawful demonstrations against Boots, and their policy was to only discuss lawful or ‘low-level unlawful’ activities at LBAG meetings which were after all open to the public, and often included new people.
If any individuals wanted to take other forms of direct action, the expectation was that they would only discuss these with people they knew and trusted, outside of the group’s meetings.
Gravett goes on to explain that LBAG’s ethos was to support ‘ALF-style direct action’ but not carry it out. He explains that this ‘support’ might take the form of carrying reports of ALF actions in the newsletter, putting ALF Supporters Group leaflets on a stall or inviting people like Robin Webb, the ALF press officer, to speak at meetings.
LONDON ANIMAL RIGHTS COALITION
Another new group, the London Animal Rights Coalition (LARC), held at least three meetings in 1994. A police report says 75-100 people attended its inaugural meeting on 13 February of that year.
Robin Lane, ‘EAB’, ‘Andy Davey’ and others are described in reports as ‘organisers’ of LARC. Gravett confirms that ‘Andy Davey’ – now known to be spycop HN2 Andy Coles – was indeed one of the founders of the group.
LARC met in May 1994, then again in August. According to the SDS reports of that month, there was lots of discussion (and some unresolved disagreement) within the animal rights movement about the future of LARC and LBAG. Some people, including Gravett, had suggested amalgamating them, rather than having two separate groups doing pretty much the same thing.
According to one of these reports, someone called ‘Andy’ was said to be responsible for producing both groups’ newsletters, and the proposal to merge the two. Although it described him as ‘SNU’, meaning ‘surname unknown’, the report later suggested that this was in fact ‘Andy Davey’.
LONDON ANIMAL ACTION
Following an LBAG planning meeting in September, Rayner reported that the group had decided to adopt a new name which more accurately reflected their activities and aims: ‘London Animal Action’ (LAA). This enabled them to incorporate the London Anti Fur Campaign (LAFC). The first LAA demo would be a picket of Noble Furs on 3 October.
Like LBAG, LAA held open, public meetings every month. Gravett helped find a venue for these meetings after the Endsleigh Street building was sold off. He also arranged for the group to use the same Caledonian Road office as London Greenpeace.
More than 20,000 people marched in London on World Day for Laboratory Animals, 25 April 1992
A year later, LAA was described in a police report as remaining ‘a motivated and coherent group’, with ‘30-50 regular activists’ (and 150 members ‘on paper’).
According to Rayner’s report, the group is well-equipped, and still has over £1000 in the bank thanks to subscriptions and donations at stalls. It goes on to describe LAA as a ‘potent and effective force’ in the national animal rights movement.
Boots sold off its pharmaceutical division to another company in 1995, which meant the end of its direct involvement in vivisection. Gravett attended the AGM that year, to check that this was actually the case. He confirms that on that day, he was approached personally by the Chairman of Boots, James Blyth, who was keen to make sure that this move would signal the end of the animal rights campaigning against the company.
Gravett was LAA’s treasurer. The group’s finances were described in a December 1994 police report as ‘remarkably healthy’. After making a donation to the ALF Supporters Group (ALF-SG) they still had £3000, £1000 of which would be ‘returned to LAFC’.Up to £1000 was to be used for printing and computer equipment (something that many grassroots groups didn’t have in those days).
It is clear that the Inquiry wishes to explore the issue of the ALF-SG’s funding. Gravett is adamant that by the 1990s, there was a very clear policy of keeping the ALF-SG and its funds completely separate from the ALF’s actions.
The donations given by LAA would have been used primarily to support prisoners, and also for the production of the ALF-SG newsletter and promotional materials.
Lots of different people were involved in LAA, and Gravett says that although the group never carried out ‘ALF style direct action’ itself, there was broad support for such activity.
LAA did organise ‘home visits’.
Gravett is then asked about another action, reportedly carried out by two ‘ALF activists’ who poured paint stripper on a car owned by a fur dealer in 1996. Supposedly they saw his address listed in an LAA newsletter. He is asked if LAA ‘appreciated’ that publishing such details meant there was a risk of such actions. Gravett responded by saying that this was someone who made a living out of the ‘torture and murder of millions of animals’.
TARGETING THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
In his witness statement, Gravett lists the various animal rights groups that he was involved in, all of which were infiltrated by undercovers. He said:
‘I’m not surprised the State took an interest in the animal rights movement…
‘There were huge vested interests in animal exploitation, in its continuation, and we were a threat to that. I don’t mean a threat in terms of violence; I mean the ideas of animal liberation’
He stood for the idea that animals have inherent worth, and are not merely objects to be used, and pointed out that this species-ist ideology ‘underpins our society’.
Gravett says he was not prepared for the extent to which these groups were infiltrated, spied upon and reported on. He conceded:
‘Maybe I was a little bit naive’
The undercover officers that he knew personally all carried out unlawful actions.
‘These people lived with us and amongst us for years.’
Gravett was involved in organising and setting up many of these groups, and so feels guilty that he therefore played a part in enabling the spycops to make contact with genuine activists.
He is aware of the horrendous impact that both HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ and HN2 Andy Coles had on such people as ‘Jessica’, Geoff Sheppard and Liz Fuller, and says this continues to ‘weigh heavily’ on him.
HN5 JOHN DINES & LONDON GREENPEACE
In the afternoon, the hearing learned more about HN5 John Dines, who stole the identity of John Barker, an eight year old child who died of leukaemia, as the basis of his undercover persona.
Gravett thinks he first met Dines around 1987 when they were both active in London Greenpeace as well as animal rights and the wider anarchist scene.
‘Disarm Authority Arm Your Desires’ – 1990 Poll Tax riot poster designed & distributed by spycop John Dines to raise funds for those who, like him, were arrested at Trafalgar Square
In May 1991, Dines reported the details of London Greenpeace’s bank accounts. At the time, Gravett was responsible for the group’s finances – he recalls that Dines was also a signatory on one of these accounts.
Though it’s alarming to think of spycops taking on such a pivotal active position in a group, it had long been standard tradecraft to be treasurer. A few years later, in 1995, a Matt Rayner report (MPS-0741078) gives details of a London Animal Action account on which he and Gravett are signatories.
Gravett remembers that Dines was ‘one of the more active members’ of London Greenpeace. He attended their regular meetings, helped run stalls at events and even organised two benefit gigs for the group in November 1989.
The first-ever Anti-McDonalds Fayre took place in 1988, at Conway Hall. John Dines put his name down on the venue’s ‘contract hire form’ as a contact for the group. Gravett says this illustrates how quickly he had risen to a position of trust.
Gravett did most of the work to organise this first Fayre, but other people helped on the day.
Another exhibit is a list of key tasks, and the names of those responsible for them. Gravett points out that of these six people, two are spies (Dines and a private spy employed by McDonald’s); two are in relationships with spies; and only two (himself and one other activist) are not.
Dines dabbled in graphic design, and it’s possible that he helped produce publicity for the 1989 Fayre.
He produced a flyer for an anti-poll tax demo which took place at Scotland Yard in October 1990, but his most famous poster was the one he made after the 1990 poll tax riot, with the words ‘Disarm Authority – Arm Your Desires’.
How much influence did Dines have in the group? Gravett said Dines was definitely someone whose views would have been listened to:
‘I respected him.’
He recounts how Dines visited him at his home (when he still lived with his parents, and again later), and says they were quite close. Dines entered into a relationship with a friend of Gravett’s, Helen Steel, and socialised with activists.
‘I’d say he was a popular guy. People seemed to like him. He was level-headed, for an anarchist’
Dines often spoke in favour of direct action. He used his van to give people lifts to actions, like grouse shooting in Yorkshire, as well as helping people move house.
SDS officer HN5 John Dines ‘John Barker’ whilst undercover
In 1989, Dines reported that a booklet called ‘Business as Usual’ was being put together by Gravett and others. This would be similar to the ‘Diary of Action’ that the ALF-SG had previously published, but listing all kinds of direct action rather than being limited to animal rights, and with more incitement than the ALF-SG ever included.
In his witness statement to the Inquiry, Dines has described it as a ‘crude’ and ‘pretty basic’ publication, and claimed his only contribution towards it was the supply of press cuttings relating to animal rights actions. He added that he felt his role was so ‘trivial’ that he didn’t bother telling his SDS managers about it.
This is another example of the now-familiar pattern – spycops who exaggerated things in their police reports because they thought nobody outside the Squad would ever see it, and then understate things in their statements to the Inquiry in order to try to wriggle out of being accountable as liars and agents provocateur.
At the time, the ALF-SG paid for a press cuttings service (which would regularly send press cuttings related to ALF-style actions all over the UK) and Gravett had access to these.
He remembers Dines asking him for this information, and says that as far as he knew, Dines was entirely responsible for the publication – there wasn’t anyone else involved in producing ‘Business As Usual’.
‘He’s underplaying it. As far as I remember, it was his brainchild’
There are other examples of Dines reporting on what Gravett and other activists were doing in those days. Gravett rejects the allegation that he was promoting the use of etching fluid on windows in 1989:
‘He was doing it to make stuff up, wasn’t he? He was just making things up to present people as more threatening or dangerous than they really were. In that case it was me. It could be someone else another time’.
We moved on to hear about the McLibel case, in which the burger corporation sued London Greenpeace for their leaflet ‘What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?’.
London Greenpeace’s ‘What’s Wrong With McDonalds?’ leaflet, co-wrtten by spycop Bob Lambert
Gravett was served with a writ, but eventually made the decision to back down and apologise to the corporation rather than trying to fight them legally.
Having done this, he was forced to take a deliberate step back from any overt involvement in the campaign, so he is certain that he was not involved in organising public demos in support of the ‘McLibel Two’ (Helen Steel and Dave Morris) in April 1991 – something Dines claimed in his reports.
He believes that it may well have been Dines who organised the demos. Certainly, we’ve seen that Lambert frequently organised things and then wrote police reports attributing his actions to other activists.
Gravett recalls that John Dines was a ‘trusted comrade’, present at many of the conversations and early court hearings. This explains why he was able to report on the legal advice they received and other developments in the case. He had deceived Helen Steel into a relationship and was soon living with her, giving him the closest possible insight into her thinking and strategy for the case.
Later in 1991, some animal rights activists had their homes raided by the police following allegations that there was a plan to contaminate bottles of Lucozade (which was made by pharmaceutical firm SmithKline Beecham in those days).
Gravett remembers that nobody was prosecuted for this. Charges were dropped and some people received compensation as a result. Was it a genuine plan or was it a hoax?
Gravett says he thinks there was ‘some sort of hoax involved’ and believes it’s possible that the whole story was invented by Dines.
Paul Gravett (centre) & spycop HN10 Bob Lambert ‘Bob Robinson’ (right) handing out the McLibel leaflet Lambert co-wrote, McDonald’s Oxford St, London, 1986
Also in 1991, Geoff Sheppard was arrested at a demo outside the Horse and Hound Ball. He was accused of throwing a bag of flour at one of the ball’s attendees, and convicted for this. Gravett knew that he was innocent – the flour had actually been thrown by Dines.
He watched Dines give evidence in court as ‘John Barker’, stating in Sheppard’s defence that someone else had thrown the flour, but not admitting to doing it himself.
Gravett was asked why he and Sheppard didn’t tell the police or Crown Prosecution Service who had actually been responsible. He makes it very clear that neither of them would ever have grassed up a fellow activist.
Like other spycops, Dines included all kinds of sensitive information about people’s personal lives in his reports. One example provided by the Inquiry relates to the accidental death of an animal rights campaigner in 1991. His report lists the names of those who attended her cremation and funeral. This was someone Gravett knew well, and he condemns the reporting as ‘disgusting’.
Dines also reported on Gravett’s personal relationships. Asked how it feels to know that details of his private life had been reported, Gravett says it feels ‘a bit uncomfortable, and ‘a bit invasive’, but points out that
‘what’s happened to me is nothing compared to some of the other people targeted’.
As already mentioned, one of those people was his long-time friend and comrade, Helen Steel, who Dines deceived into a relationship.
Gravett remembers them living together as a couple, happy, affectionate and ‘at ease with each other’. He and his girlfriend went round for dinner at their place.
He also remembers Dines and Steel saying they were going to live in Yorkshire (maybe in late 1991) and going up there to visit them in 1992. However, John wasn’t there. He’d supposedly gone off somewhere, suffering from ‘mental health issues’.
Gravett says he was concerned to hear about this ‘breakdown’, and felt sorry for him. This was someone he liked, trusted and considered a friend.
Dines had presented himself as someone with radical politics, who wanted to change society and take direct action, who got very involved in organising campaigns, and then suddenly vanished.
HN2 ANDY COLES ‘ANDY DAVEY’
Gravett says that in LBAG’s early days he was responsible for running the group and producing its newsletter himself. However, by the summer of 1993, he had a part-time job and was planning to start a university course so decided it would be good to get more people involved. He remembers that Coles offered to help at this time.
He’s recently come across a copy of one of the issues produced by Coles (having lent his own set to a journalist who never returned them). He says it’s noticeable how different it is to the ones he’d made himself in the past. Though it looked a bit more ‘professional’, having been produced on Coles’ computer, Gravett described the content as ‘fairly dull’ and ‘pedestrian’, lacking the ‘buzz’ and ‘excitement’ of earlier issues.
‘If you want to put it in a musical analogy, my newsletter would be more Chumbawamba, his would be more Coldplay!’
In his statement to the Inquiry, Coles has claimed that he didn’t produce this newsletter, but just wrote a couple of articles for it. He says he tried to make them as ‘boring as possible’.
Spycop HN2 Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’ while undercover in 1991
Gravett insists that after the last issue he put out (July-August 1993) Coles was responsible for producing at least four or five issues, and points out that they weren’t well-designed, using an illegibly small font size. But he doesn’t disagree about the content being ‘boring’!
Coles owned a personal computer, and kept it in his bedsit. Gravett recalls spending ‘most of a day’ there in 1994, computerising the LBAG membership list. He says he can’t remember whether Coles suggested doing this, or if he asked Coles to help do it. Either way, the entire list (with everyone’s joining dates as well as their contact info) made it into an SDS report that August.
Coles has also claimed to have been involved in London Animal Action, in producing its newsletter, helping with its membership list, and even organising its meetings. However, his deployment ended soon after LAA began, so Gravett thinks he’s mixed the two groups up.
Coles even produced a report about his alter ego, ‘Andy Davey’, at the end of 1992. Gravett is asked if it’s accurate. He says he was ‘quietish’ in meetings but more talkative outside of them, giving the impression of being ‘too eager to please’.
Also known as ‘Andy Van’, because he had a vehicle, Coles once helped Gravett move house, and so visited two of his homes. He also gave people lifts to protests and actions, which was useful, but the only one Gravett can remember attending was a ‘low level’ action at London Zoo, carried out under the banner of the ‘Animal Liberation Investigation Unit’.
Gravett didn’t particularly like Coles. He remembers feeling sorry for him, and says they weren’t all that close. He didn’t go to the cinema with him or socialise with him in the way that he did with other undercovers that spied on him, and says that, in contrast to HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’, Coles was distinctly unpopular.
When Coles announced his departure from the animal rights scene, he invited people to join him for a farewell dinner in a restaurant. Gravett was the only one who turned up.
THE CREEPY REPUTATION OF ANDY COLES
Gravett remembers meeting ‘Jessica’ when she and a friend came along to a meeting – this was probably in late 1990 or early 1991, he thinks. She was around 18 at the time, and quite shy, but he got to know her and they became friends; he liked her. (Jessica gave evidence to the Inquiry in December.)
Gravett wasn’t aware of her being in a relationship with ‘Andy Van’. However, Geoff Sheppard knew about it because of a letter she’d sent him while he was in prison.
After the undercover policing scandal broke in 2010, activists uncovered more and more spycops. Coles was unmasked in 2017 and Gravett made contact with Jessica via social media. They met up in person to talk more.
He remembers her being in a state of shock, saying ‘he was my first proper boyfriend’ (something he hadn’t realised) and her being ‘very, very, very upset’.
Back in the 1990s, another woman activist had confided in him about an experience that she had with Coles. She’d described him turning up at her flat one night and trying to sexually assault her. This was shocking to Gravett at the time, this kind of behaviour was not normal in the circles they moved in.
‘I regret not knowing more about him at the time’
He says if he’d known about this incident before Coles left, he wouldn’t have gone to the farewell meal, or felt sorry for him at all. As it was, at the time he didn’t feel like he was losing a ‘friend, or anyone who was important to me in that sense’.
‘since he was outed, has just been totally reprehensible. It’s disgusting’.
HN1 ‘MATT RAYNER’
HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ was deployed from 1992-96, and infiltrated all of the groups that Gravett has spoken about at this hearing.
Gravett remembers exactly when he first encountered HN1. This was 19 November 1991, the very first meeting of LBAG. Gravett has a very clear memory of ‘Matt Rayner’ writing his name down on the attendance sheet along with an unusual location (Salisbury).
He also recalls the same ‘Matt’ turning up to help at an animal rights stall that Gravett was running in Brixton Town Hall, on 7 December 1991.
For the Inquiry, John Warrington asks if he is sure about this, as the Inquiry has some documents which suggest his deployment didn’t start until January 1992. Gravett is extremely clear about the dates.
‘Absolutely, 100%. No doubt.’
When a bank account was opened for London Animal Action in the autumn of 1994 Gravett asked Rayner to be a signatory on it. He continued acting as a signatory until he left the group ‘to go abroad’ in 1996.
‘I got along well with him, I liked him, trusted him. You know, I think we were close friends and we did socialise outside the group as well’.
Gravett recalls trips to the cinema, theatre, and a football match, as well as going to the pub together.
He remembers the farewell party the group held when he left London. They chipped in to buy him a camera, which Gravett presented. He made a speech, and hosted an after-party at his flat. Rayner was there till the morning.
Rayner had a vehicle, and would give people lifts to demos and meetings across the country. Gravett remembers an animal rights meeting in Bristol and a circus protest in Kent.
There was also a trip to Liverpool in 1993, for the Grand National in Aintree. Gravett had talked about this at an LBAG meeting a month earlier, saying there had been a national call-out. He recalls that Rayner’s hand ‘shot up’ to volunteer to go, and a group of eight or nine activists travelled there together in his van.
‘By then he’d been around a long time, one of those people you sort of trusted’.
There was a lot of discussion during the journey about the group’s plans to take direct action in order to disrupt the race. They planned to get inside and run onto the course.
In his witness statement to the Inquiry, Rayner has denied knowing that activists planned to disrupt the race. Gravett says he’s lying. Why else would they be going there?!
Gravett decided he didn’t want to get arrested, and Rayner said he also wanted to avoid arrest as he was driving, so they both stayed outside the track, at the entrance.
There were a number of false starts, then the race was eventually abandoned completely. It’s the only time this has happened due to animal rights protests. It’s been estimated that this action cost the racing / betting industry around £75 million. This was due to the presence of activists from London, who had travelled there in a van provided and paid for by the Special Demonstration Squad.
Those who invaded the course were arrested, but not charged, as what they’d done was only a civil offence. Gravett remembers being in the van with Rayner and another activist, listening to the radio reports and laughing with glee. Gravett has written about the day on his blog.
Gravett didn’t go to demonstrate against the Grand National the following year, but knows that two SDS officers, Rayner and Coles, drove people there. This has been confirmed to him by some of those they drove, and by a woman activist who hosted them locally.
Protests against the Grand National continue – these people were at the 2023 race where a horse was killed & more than 100 protesters arrested
In his witness statement to the Inquiry, Rayner lies about this too, claiming he only went there in 1993.
In 1995, Rayner was arrested in Yorkshire, having travelled there to disrupt grouse-shooting on the ‘Glorious 12th’ of August when the season starts. This time he was driving a car, and its passengers included Gravett and three others from London. They were part of a convoy of dozens of hunt sabs from all over the south of England. Sabs from the north of England were simultaneously targeting grouse-shooting in Cumbria.
Gravett witnessed this arrest, out on the moors. He remembers Rayner getting very involved in ‘a sort of melee’ between the sabs and the local police, quite late in the day. Gravett was the only one of the remaining four who could drive, but he’d never driven this car before. He recalls that it wasn’t easy to reverse off the moor back onto the road, but he managed and drove it to the police station to wait for Rayner’s release.
In his written statement to the Inquiry, Rayner claims that:
(a) because he was the driver, he did not ‘decamp’ from the car
(b) he didn’t get involved in any ‘physical or violent confrontation’
(c) he got ‘caught up in a crowd’, and that everyone present was arrested
(d) he thinks the local police must have driven his car off the moor
(e) he doesn’t know where the activists who he’d given a lift to ended up, or how they got back home to London.
Gravett almost laughs at this series of obvious lies.
He remembers that there was pushing and shoving going on, that Rayner was an active participant in this and it most certainly was a ‘physical’ confrontation. Only a small number of sabs were arrested. He is adamant that they waited for Rayner at the police station and then he drove them back to London very late that night.
GEOFF SHEPPARD’S ARREST
Gravett confirms that he knew fellow animal rights activist Geoff Sheppard well (Sheppard gave evidence to the Inquiry in November 2024, covered in thesetwo reports).
The two had been friends for many years, but Gravett knew nothing about him being in possession of a shotgun or ammunition before he was arrested for this in 1995.
He adds that he wasn’t surprised that Sheppard hadn’t told him about this:
‘He wouldn’t think it right to tell me anything unless I needed to know it’.
He remembers a conversation they’d had years earlier, soon after Sheppard was released from prison in 1990 for his involvement in the Debenhams incendiary device campaign. He said something about being offered a shotgun by someone he’d met inside, but it was a very theoretical conversation; neither of them had any plans to use such an item.
Geoff Sheppard (left) and Paul Gravett in the 1980s
In his statement, Rayner claims that he found out about this shotgun in 1995, and tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade Sheppard to get rid of it. Gravett doesn’t believe this is true.
He points out that Rayner knew what close friends he and Sheppard were, so if he was truly serious about persuading him, he would have spoken to Gravett and asked him to help.
It was Rayner who told Gravett in the summer of 1995 that Sheppard had been arrested. Sheppard was sentenced to a further seven years in prison as a result of this arrest.
Gravett visited him on remand and after sentencing. He thinks Rayner probably visited him too – pointing out that it ‘would have been odd’ if he hadn’t – but they didn’t go to the prison together.
Rayner’s reports also go into detail about Gravett’s love life in 1995. He comments now that the spycops didn’t just report on activists’ personal lives but sometimes interfered in them, including his own.
Gravett first met Liz Fuller in the early days of LBAG. She was quite involved in the group.
He remembers seeing her and Rayner together at a Boots demo in October 1992. He knew for sure that they were a couple in early 1993.
He wasn’t close to them so didn’t know if they lived together or not. Liz has told him they were still together in May 1995, so he believes this sexual relationship with her lasted for more than two years, not the one year Rayner eventually admitted to.
RAYNER’S DEPARTURE WASN’T THE END
The ending of Rayner’s deployment was extremely elaborate and took about 18 months to execute. It began in the summer of 1995 when he said he’d changed jobs and started working for a wine company. A year later, he told a few close friends of his growing disillusionment with activism after being raided by the police and the breakdown of the relationship with his girlfriend.
Then in the autumn of 1996 he said he was moving to Bordeaux, France where his supposed employer had a branch. He undertook a tour of the country saying goodbye to comrades.
After he left, letters arrived from him, postmarked Bordeaux. He suggested to Gravett that he could visit him in France (a possibility noted at the time by Bob Lambert, who by then was an SDS manager) and wrote to him at least three times after leaving London.
Some time later he pretended to move again for work, to Argentina. The letters kept coming.
Gravett says now that he believes these letters, sent from both countries in 1996 and 1997, served various purposes.
‘He was writing to me obviously for the reason that we were close, and he felt he had to do it because it might have seemed strange if he hadn’t. But at the same time those letters were also a method of keeping me under surveillance from afar. And they were also, in them, hints that Special Branch was still watching me.
‘One of them, I think it’s the final one, makes reference to an arrest of some matter with me, non-animal rights’
In that letter posted from Argentina, Rayner said:
‘I was pretty shocked especially when I heard that both you and I think Brendan had been arrested. I haven’t yet heard about what happened at court but obviously I hope you all got off…
‘And what’s this about you being arrested for GBH and mistaken identity? Sounds like you’re becoming a really dangerous person Paul – best you come out here and cool down in Argentina!’
This was a year after Rayner had left London. It’s a lot of effort for the police to go to. Knowing that Rayner was actually a spycop, the details about other arrests do indeed take on a sinister tone and show he was still being watched.
Spycop HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ on a farewell visit to people he knew in northwest England, 1996
When Gravett first learnt about the existence of the SDS, he wondered about ‘Matt Rayner’. He still had his diaries from that era, which included the dates of his birthday parties, so was able to search for him using this date of birth.
After finding a death certificate for the real Matthew Rayner, he made contact with Liz in 2013 or 2014.
He remembers that ‘she was surprised’.
He had previously found Rayner ‘a very credible person’ and he even stood up for him once, when another activist voiced suspicions about him. He says this person (‘George’) was someone he ‘was inclined not to believe’, who couldn’t provide any evidence to back up their claim that Matt was ‘dodgy’.
Gravett talked about how the impact of finding out that someone he liked and considered a good friend for such a long time was in fact spying on him. He points out that although he now knows the real names of the other undercovers who reported on him, he still doesn’t know the real name of ‘Matt Rayner’. He strongly believes that this should be made public.
HN26 ‘CHRISTINE GREEN’
Spycop HN26 Christine Green (with hood up) hunt sabbing while undercover
HN26 used the cover name ‘Christine Green’. Gravett knew her too. She was also very active in LAA, going to demos and meetings. After Rayner left London, Gravett actually asked her to become a signatory on the group’s bank account. He points out that of the five signatories the group had, two were police officers and a third was a private spy.
Green also had a relationship with an activist, albeit one that didn’t follow the trajectory of those of her male colleagues. Thomas Frampton was a hunt sab and, around 1998, drove a coach load of activists to a demo at Hillgrove Farm, a notorious breeder of cats for vivisection.
Gravett knew him, and that he also used the name Joe Tax. He knew that he was in love with Christine, and says ‘it was common knowledge that they were a couple’, and that they often attended LAA meetings together.
Green left the police and is understood to have continued her relationship with Joe as ongoing life partners.
HATEMAIL
There were a few more questions for Gravett before the hearing ended.
Asked how he’d have reacted if he’d discovered at the time that his comrades in the animal rights movement were police officers, he responded:
‘Good question. We’d have thrown them out. I don’t think there would’ve been violence, but they would’ve been excluded’.
He says he obviously can’t speak for everyone, and points out that people’s lives were ‘ruined’ by these undercovers’ actions so it’s impossible to say how everyone would have reacted.
Gravett adds that it’s obvious from the evidence he’s given that he was in routine contact with spycops for most of his adult life, and that their infiltration extended to his private life, not just his public, campaigning life.
He goes on to add that there’s one more issue he raised in his statement, to do with SDS management. In 1994 he had a relationship with a woman activist, which they kept secret, and didn’t tell anyone about. She received an envelope containing a second envelope addressed to him – this contained an anonymous letter signed ‘Friends of the Burger’.
At the time he was nonplussed and had no idea where or who this might have come from. He almost threw it away but is now glad that he didn’t.
He points out that the tone is ‘mocking’, it says ‘long time, no see’ and this, along with the burger reference, has convinced him that it was sent ‘as some sort of sick joke’ by Bob Lambert, who was by then an SDS manager.
He and his partner were both very upset by it at the time.
With his questioning over, Gravett was given the opportunity by his own barrister to add anything else. He urged the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, to allow core participants to see HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ give evidence. He added that even if nobody else is allowed to see him then Liz Fuller, as someone so personally deceived into a relationship by him, should be allowed to.
Mitting says that he will be hearing submissions about it afterwards.
It is as yet still unclear if Gravett will be invited back to give more evidence in Tranche 3 (examining the Special Demonstration Squad 1993-2008), even though he was spied on during this time.
Hunt saboteurs running among fox hounds. Pic: Andrew Testa
At the Undercover Policing Inquiry, Monday 9 December 2024 was devoted to the evidence of two witnesses, ‘Callum’ and ‘Walter’, who had been involved in hunt saboteur activity in the 1980s.
There were a lot of restrictions on what could be reported in order to protect the identity of the witnesses. They were in the hearing room behind a screen. We’re doing separate reports for them.
RECAP
This was the Monday of the seventh week of ‘Tranche 2 Phase 2’, the new round of hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). This Phase mainly concentrates on examining the animal rights-focused activities of the Metropolitan Police’s secret political unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, from 1983-92.
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.
Hunt Saboteurs Association commemorative patch: ’60 years saving wildlife 1963-2023′.
After hearing from ‘Callum’ in the morning, the Inquiry took evidence from another hunt saboteur, ‘Walter’, in the afternoon. His voice was modulated to disguise it.
Walter has provided the Inquiry with a lengthy witness statement and 60 exhibits. Despite the Inquiry’s stated policy of publishing documents as soon as a witness gives evidence, and despite it being months since he gave evidence, at the time of writing Walter’s documents are still unpublished.
Junior Counsel Rachel Naylor asked him questions on behalf of the Inquiry.
Walter said he was brought up to care about animals, and to side with the underdog. He recalls attending some meetings in Brighton and learning about the cruelty being done to wild animals by hunting them.
He first went hunt sabbing in 1984 and moved to Lewisham, in South London, the following year. He has been active in a number of different local hunt sab groups over the years, including the Brixton hunt sab group.
Asked about ‘non-violent direct action’, he explained that he means intervening in some way to keep the dogs away from whichever wild animal is being hunted at the time, and help it to escape. He emphasised that sabs would avoid physical confrontation whenever possible. They would use self-defence when it was the ‘only option’.
THE HUNT SABOTEURS ASSOCIATION
As well as local sab groups, he also played an active part in the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA), a national organisation that has existed since 1963. It has always held Annual General Meetings, had an (unpaid) executive committee, and – as even spycop Bob Lambert admitted – had been ‘entirely lawful’ in pursuit of its aims: to promote the use of non-violent direct action to protect wildlife, and lobby for legal change.
The HSA relies on donations from the public, and most local sab groups are self-funded. The HSA’s magazine, Howl, comes out several times a year and is sent to individual subscribers and local groups. HSA membership was and is open to everyone opposed to hunting, not just those actively engaged in sabbing.
TACTICS
Cover of ‘The Traditional Art of Hunt Sabotage: A Tactics Manual’
The HSA have always published booklets of tactics that could be used to sabotage different types of hunting. Walter provided the Inquiry with a copy of the 1988 edition [UCPI 0000037140].
Many of these tactics involved using things that would put the hounds off the scent of the animal they were chasing – for example: spray bottles of diluted citronella essential oil, things like ‘Anti-Mate’ (an aerosol spray designed to deter the unwanted attention of male dogs), and ‘scent dullers’.
In the early 1980s some sabs experimented with using dried blood to set false trails, or ‘drags’. Sabs also carried hunting horns and whistles, and used calls to distract or misdirect the hounds.
Walter listed some other items that would be used – for example things to tie up gates and slow down the hunters, CB radios (so the sabs could communicate with each other – there were no mobile phones!).
He explained that some of the tools listed – including ‘rookies’, rook scarers – would only be used in limited circumstances. The sabs took care not to do anything that would scare or harm the horses and hounds. The booklet advised hunt sabs to follow the Countryside Code at all times.
It also recommended that sabs:
‘chat to supporters – do not antagonise them… Avoid tactics which do not directly help the hunted animal, such as interfering with the supporters’ cars, etc’.
Walter thinks that was to avoid any ‘flashpoints’ being created, recalling that:
‘sometimes just our presence could be seen as provocative to the hunt’s people’.
The booklet suggests that it’s best to be polite towards the police – ‘annoying them does not help’ – but always take a note of their numbers.
It advises keeping together and walking away if confronted by the hunt’s heavies:
‘running only encourages them (it probably reminds them of the chase!)’
He considered self defence to be acceptable, and believed that you should do whatever you needed to do to get out of a situation safely.
We learnt that ‘pre-beating’ and ‘pre-spraying’ referred to other tactics adopted by sabs, to either encourage wild animals to leave an area before the hunt began, or to lay scents that would distract the dogs when they showed up.
According to Walter, sometimes a press release would go out, for example before the start of the hunting season or before a big event in the calendar (like the Boxing Day meets), but sab groups didn’t usually advertise their regular actions, just report on them afterwards.
As a broad and lawful organisation, there was little in the way of security precautions. In those days the office was usually in someone’s house. Walter admitted:
‘It was very lax, to be honest’
REPORTING ON THE SABS
Much of the hearing was spent examining secret police reports. As we’ve seen in so many other hearings, undercover officers frequently exaggerated activity in order to make it sound like they were spying on serious criminal plotting.
Walter had been reported on by several spycops. One them, HN87 ‘John Lipscomb’ (known as ‘Hippy John’), said that Walter was wary of speaking openly on the phone, and often used public phone boxes. Walter explained that this wasn’t just to protect him, it was sometimes because of the risks faced by people in the hunting community who shared information with him.
Spycop HN10 Bob Lambert aka ‘Bob Robinson’ whilr undercover
Another of the spycops, HN10 Bob Lambert, reported [MPS-0740065] in 1987 that ‘sixteen Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activists’ had met at someone’s home in Kent on 25 January. This report claimed that ‘all present enjoy a dual role’, and that as well as being ‘leading members’ of various local sab groups, are involved in a ‘criminal campaign’.
Walter flatly rejected the suggestion that he was an ALF activist.
According to Lambert’s report, the HSA was virtually bankrupt at this time and those present agreed that its only useful purpose was ‘in terms of publicity’. Walter says that in those (pre-internet) days the organisation served a vital function in terms of communication between the different local groups.
There was mention of a new ‘South East Anti-Hunt Alliance’ being formed. Why was a ‘regional alliance’ needed? Walter said maybe there were ‘some local politics at play there’.
It’s reported that the sabs were planning to combine forces for a ‘joint hit’ on the ‘infamous Crawley and Horsham Hunt’, as a way to counter the increasing violence of its hired heavies. The date of this coordinated action (28 February 1987) would only be communicated by word of mouth, so the hunt and police were taken by surprise.
Walter is clear that entering into pitched battles is not what sabbing was about, although in the case of this, known as ‘the most volatile hunt in the South’, sabs had to be ready to defend themselves.
In this report Lambert admitted that however ‘determined’ the sabs are, they
‘are unlikely ever to initiate violence, and, secretly, would be extremely pleased to encounter no opposition on the day in question’
In the report Lambert submitted after the event it is clear that there was no violence on the day. Walter recalls that the sabs were all kept away from the hunt by the police (who deployed a roadblock and even a helicopter against the sabs’ convoy of vehicles).
In another report [MPS-0740567], HN87 John Lipscomb alleges that Walter has drawn up a list of names and phone numbers of three individuals attached to the British Field Sports Society and distributed this to other animal rights activists ‘for special attention’. Walter says this is simply not true. He was ‘surprised’ to see this allegation amongst the material disclosed to him by the Inquiry.
The report specifies what is meant by ‘special attention’:
‘making abusive telephone calls, sending unsolicited mail and in some instances, causing criminal damage to property’
Walter recalls that this went both ways – hunt supporters often did these things to hunt sab groups.
THE LEGENDARY BRIXTON HUNT SABS
Hunt saboteurs around and on one of their Land Rovers. Pic: Andrew Testa
Walter was involved with the Brixton hunt sab group from 1992-1997. He remembers them as ‘legendary’.
It’s clear that they successfully created a legend about themselves and their reputation often went before them. He says they were effective and ‘tactically aware’ – they tried to get to the hounds – rather than just trouble-makers.
The Inquiry has already heard from Brixton hunt sab ‘AFJ’ that the group didn’t ‘proactively pursue’ violence, but were prepared to deal with it if it erupted. Walter says that’s a fair description, the Brixton sabs were ‘robust’.
According to another of the spycops, HN2 Andy Coles, the Brixton group had a ‘fearsome reputation for being violent’. Walter says they weren’t necessarily violent but they did have ‘a fearsome reputation’ and that was that they were ‘not to be messed with’.
Coles has also accused the HSA of being a public order problem and involved in criminality. Walter strongly rejected this suggestion.
(We have illustrated this report with photographs by renowned documentary photographer Andrew Testa, who spent time in the field with the Brixton sab group.)
HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ also reported on hunt sabs in this period, and mentioned confrontations taking place between the ‘harder end’ of the movement and terriermen.
Walter says that there was a mixture of people involved in hunt sabbing. Terriermen considered that they had a ‘carte blanche’ to do what they liked to sabs (and foxes) and the police used to turn a blind eye.
Walter says that the people he knew were prepared to defend themselves, but did not go out looking for violence:
‘at the end of the day they’re there to save the fox’
He recalls ‘running around in fields all day’, getting wet and covered in mud, and points out that nobody joined hunt sab groups and went through all that just in the hope of a punch-up.
DID HUNT SABBING OFFER A ‘GATEWAY’ TO THE ALF?
The Inquiry moved on to examine the relationship between hunt sabs and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in more detail.
Hunt saboteur face to face with hunt supporters. Pic: Andrew Testa
In one report [MPS-0742170] Lambert has written about an incendiary attack on the home of a prominent member of the Crawley and Horsham hunt, and claimed that all such criminal actions against hunters were the work of hunt sabs, even if carried out under the name of the ALF or the ‘Anti Hunt Militia’.
Walter remembers seeing this attack reported in the media at the time (December 1986). He had no idea who was responsible, and doesn’t see how Bob Lambert could have known either.
This same incident is also mentioned in the other 1987 Lambert report we saw earlier [MPS-0740065]. It contains the names of two individuals who Lambert suspects of being involved. According to him, they were keen to see more actions of this kind, and circulated the addresses of other possible targets. One of the hunt’s heavies is said to be considered a ‘prime target for some form of criminal damage’.
However, Walter was at this meeting, and says he was not aware of people talking about targeting this man’s home address, and if he had, ‘would not have been comfortable’ it.
He goes on to say that he doesn’t remember such addresses and details being circulated at any meeting he attended, or any discussion of committing criminal damage at the Parham racecourse used by the hunt for their ‘point to point’ races. He doesn’t know of anyone operating under the banner of the ALF.
WALTER’S HOUSE
HN87 John Lipscomb had provided a ‘pen portrait’ of Walter in an August 1988 report [MPS-0742609].
Brixton hunt saboteurs inside their Land Rover with grilled windows and CB radio (and furry dice!). Pic: Andrew Testa
This describes him as ‘one of the most respected animal rights activists in South East London’, and claims he is involved in various other movements, ‘notably squatting’.
Walter isn’t sure why it says this. His house had been a squat in the past, but when he lived there it was managed by a housing association. He knew a fair few squatters, but wasn’t one himself. Again, this seems like a spycop’s exaggeration and lies to make activists seem more detached from mainstream society and acting on the fringes of the law.
Lipscomb’s report also claims that his house is ‘regarded as an open house to activists requiring accommodation’, and ‘has the potential for operating as an ALF cell on its own, as three of its occupants are active campaigners’.
Walter rejects this allegation – yes, it was a vegan household, and they sometimes hosted activists from overseas, but nobody was doing ALF actions from there.
Lipscomb also claimed [MPS-0744157] that it was ‘common practice’ for hunt sabs to give false details to the police if they were stopped or arrested, and they would often use the addresses of Walter’s house and a squat in Sudbourne Road, Brixton for this. Walter says they were generally happy for people to use their address in order to get bail, but this wasn’t as organised (with lists of names being provided to the houses) as Lipscomb alleged.
In the SDS Annual Report of 1995-96 [MPS-0728967], there’s a mention of ‘organised hunt sabotage’ and a special police unit called the Animal Rights National Index. It says the ‘penetration’ of hunt sab groups ‘continues to pay dividends’ and suggests that the intelligence gathered is useful for other police forces, as well as for identifying ALF activists.
Walter says he is aware that the SDS used these reports to try to justify their funding for the following year – this is one of the main reasons they were written. He says it was no secret that the police took an interest in hunt sabs.
HORSE AND HOUND BALL
Brixton Hunt Saboteurs in the field, 25 January 1992. Spycop HN2 Andy Coles aka ‘Andy Davey’ in foreground, indicated with red arrow
The Inquiry was then told about a demo at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, where the annual Horse and Hound Ball was being held, on 5 March 1992.
According to a report by HN2 Andy Coles [MPS-0730957], 80-100 people turned up to demonstrate their opposition to hunting. He claimed the demo had been organised by the HSA. Walter says it definitely wasn’t, as they focussed on direct action, i.e. hunt sabbing, not this kind of demo.
He says he took part in some demos at these balls but is not sure if he was at this particular one. He is surprised at the high number of people who are said to have attended. According to the report, several bags of flour were thrown towards attendees of the ball. There were some scuffles and some of the activists (including ‘Jessica’ and Andrea McGann) were arrested.
The next Coles report [MPS-0742251] is of a meeting held at the end of April to prepare for the forthcoming trial of Jessica and one other person. Besides these two defendants, another five people are listed as attending, including Walter, although he doesn’t remember being there then.
In his witness statement [UCPI 0000035074] Coles claims that the group ‘spent the evening working out how best to prepare a defence’ and discussed:
‘how to concoct matching stories of what they could claim to be eye witness testimony where they could contradict police evidence and establish both activists’ innocence of the charges’
Coles says he told the group that he hadn’t seen anything, as he’d been injured himself (hit with a police radio) so was able to avoid acting as a defence witness in the court case.
Walter points out the inconsistencies in Coles’s story – for example, if there had been a lawyer present, it’s highly unlikely that anyone would have talked about concocting false evidence, and in any case this wasn’t commonly done.
CRIMINAL INJUSTICE ACT
Spycop HN2 Andy Coles aka ‘Andy Davey’ while undercover in 1991
Andy Coles was arrested at a hunt sab at Good Easter in Essex, just a few weeks after the enactment of the Criminal Justice Act & Public Order Act in November 1994.
This new law criminalised a lot of sab activity – it became a criminal offence to trespass if interfering with a landowner’s activity, and an offence to fail to leave land when directed to do so.
Walter recalls that the Essex police had a reputation for being particularly ‘anti-sab’ so it was assumed that they would be keen to enforce the new Act at the earliest opportunity.
The sabs wanted to show that they planned to continue sabbing and would not be deterred by the introduction of the new crime of ‘aggravated trespass’. They anticipated violence from the hunt and obstruction from the police, and wanted to turn up in mass numbers.
We saw the ‘intelligence’ submitted by Coles after the event [MPS-0745541]. Walter doesn’t agree entirely with its contents: he says the mood was ‘expectant’ rather than ‘confrontational’, and thinks the number of sabs reported as attending (22 from Brixton plus another 350) is inaccurate.
According to the report, Walter was driving one of the Brixton sabs’ vehicles that day. Coles has also claimed that he was driving a Land Rover belonging to the group. Walter says they had a number of Land Rovers, so this is possibly true.
Walter recalls that the Brixton sabs covered their vehicles’ windows with grilles to stop them being broken by hunt supporters. Despite having this small fleet, they often had more people wanting to go out than they had spaces for.
According to the report, the Brixton sabs got out of their vehicle at some point and were arrested almost immediately, among them ‘AFJ’ (who gave evidence to the Inquiry the week after Walter). Walter says on the day ‘it was just ridiculous’, with people getting nicked as soon as they left the highway.
The report claims that two of the sabs had beaten a police officer and taken his telescopic truncheon off him. Walter says that this doesn’t sound accurate and he remembers things differently:
‘People were very much thrown by the level of aggression from the police. There wasn’t any pretence of warning going on. They had their truncheons out straight away and were hitting people all over the legs and upper body all the time. It certainly wasn’t my experience that people were singling officers out. Because ultimately they are the police. They are always going to win in those sorts of situations.’
Spycop Andy Coles was arrested that day under his false name of Andy Davey. He gave a false address (Plato Road) as well as a false false name (Chris Jones)!
Walter is asked if he knew the real Chris Jones (who worked at 56a Info-shop) at the time?
‘I may have known them but I wouldn’t have known necessarily their surname’
He recalls that the Brixton sabs faced ‘relentless police interest’, and arrests were almost a ‘daily occurrence’.
‘HIPPY JOHN’ THE SPYCOP
HN87 John Lipscomb was deployed from June 1987 to November 1990. Most of those he spied on knew him as ‘Hippy John’. He went out sabbing with Walter’s local group, and sometimes was among those from the group who slept over at Walter’s house the night before. Walter says most of those involved were in their late teens to early 20s (HN87 was in his 30s).
Asked about the impact this undercover had on his sab group, Walter recalls him putting a vehicle out of action, ‘either by ineptitude or by design’, by borrowing it to take to Cropredy Folk Festival and not topping up its oil and water.
Walter explains that ‘it was useful to have drivers’. It tended to be the older members of the group who drove, as they were more likely to have licences, and the insurance only covered over-25s.
Asked if Lipscomb just drove or also took part in sabbing, Walter replied that he thinks it was both.
The undercover boasted of sitting in a fox-hole and blocking the terriermen from reaching the fox, in order to impress Walter. It seems to have worked – Walter agrees this was a brave thing to do.
Hunt saboteur being carried face down by police. Pic: Andrew Testa
He says that another sab, someone from Dartford, had a very close, platonic, friendship with ‘Hippy John’ and was ‘devastated’ to discover that this man had in fact been spying on him. According to Walter, that person is now far less ‘easy going’ than he used to be, and far more suspicious of people.
Walter isn’t sure about how much time ‘Hippy John’ spent at the Sudbourne Road squat in Brixton, or how often he slept there.
Asked if he knows of Lipscomb having sexual relationships while undercover, he mentions ‘ELQ’, a woman who was in her early 20s back then. Walter says she was a ‘positive member of the group’, and a good friend of ‘Hippy John’.
Walter reached out to her in the last year for what he describes as ‘a very awkward conversation’. He was concerned that she might still have been unaware of Lipscomb’s true identity, and suspected that they may have been more than just friends. She confirmed that Lipscomb slept over at her house, but he still doesn’t know if anything more happened between them.
Walter says there were various social situations when Lipscomb ‘seemed to be with certain individuals in the group’ – mostly young women – but he doesn’t know for sure what happened between them.
He goes on to add that there were rumours about John and one particularly young woman, but he never spoke to her about these at the time. He recalls that she was very young, maybe under 16, and there were issues around taking her out sabbing, and the need for some form of parental consent.
CREEPY COLES
Spycop HN2 Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’ (2nd from left) on a peace march at RAF Fairford, 1991
Then there’s HN2 Andy Coles, undercover as ‘Andy Davey’ but known as ‘Andy Van’ by most of the sabs.
Coles claims that he was ‘close friends’ with Walter. Walter says he struggles to recognise him from any of the numerous published pictures.
He’s aware that ‘Andy Van’ existed but only has a ‘sketchy’ recollection of him and finds it hard to think of any memories. He says the Brixton sabs were quite cliquey, and Andy was not in their clique.
He recalls hearing about Coles driving when some chickens were liberated, and the van being stopped by the police but then let go. This prompted some discussion about how lucky the activists involved were.
He says it was very rare that they ever heard about illegal activity committed by activists. He knew that Andy was the driver but not much else about his role in it. He didn’t realise that Jessica was involved in that liberation action until more recently.
He knew Jessica from around 1991 onwards. He remembers that she was friends with someone that he knew well.
He repeated that he wasn’t in the habit of discussing people’s relationships. His clique was ‘rather insular’ and he didn’t tend to socialise much outside of it. He says he was a ‘bit aloof’ and didn’t tend to know much about anyone’s relationship status.
About Coles, he recalls that there were:
‘a number of people who basically thought he was a bit creepy and were uncomfortable around him’.
One of these was Andrea McGann.
After the Inquiry finished asking him questions, his own lawyer, James Wood KC, had a few more. In response, Walter was able to confirm that ‘Andy Van’ also used his own van for sabbing, and took other people in it. But on 19 November 1994, the date when ‘AFJ’ and Coles were both arrested, he drove a vehicle belonging to the Brixton hunt sab group.
OTHER UNDERCOVERS
Spycop HN5 John Dines aka ‘John Barker’ in the early 1990s when he was an undercover sergeant in the Special Demonstration Squad
The Inquiry also heard about HN5 John Dines, who used the cover name ‘John Barker’ (deployed 1987-1991). Walter has provided a photo that shows him at a hunt. He is able to describe his physical build and ‘statement’ haircut.
Walter doesn’t remember seeing Dines defend himself physically, but remembers that hunt supporters tended to avoid him ‘because he looked like he could defend himself’.
Walter also remembers HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ (deployed 1991-1996). He doesn’t know if Rayner or Dines drove sabs around as they were involved in other groups, not his.
Finally, he also remembers HN26 ‘Christine Green’ (deployed 1995-1999), both as a ‘fellow sab’ and as the partner of a hunt sab who was a friend of his.
He knew that she was in a relationship with Thomas Frampton (also known as Joe Tax) and recalls them turning up together. He thinks this may have been in late 1996, but isn’t certain. He remembers her asking people lots of questions:
‘She was always inquisitive.’
He described her taking an active part in sabbing as part of the West London sab group, and doesn’t think she stood out much or would have had much impact on the actions of this group.
‘Christine Green’ was involved in a controversial raid at Cross Hill mink farm in the New Forest in August 1998. In 2018, the Met apologised to Hampshire police for letting it go ahead and withholding details of those responsible in order to protect Green. Green, in turn, says it’s ‘scandalous’ of the Met to identify her but not the superior officers who did the things they’re apologising for.
Walter heard about ‘Bob Robinson’ – spycop HN10 Bob Lambert – many years ago, and recognised him as someone who had been sabbing. Once he’d been made aware of Lambert’s true identity, he and others quickly realised that there were likely to be other officers from the spycops units who’d infiltrated hunt sab groups.
He was surprised to learn of the extent of this police operation. He has now seen how much information about him (including details of his employment, his shift patterns etc) was collected and recorded.
He believes that he was ‘on the right side of history’ and this is ‘an outrage’; he’s angrier now than he was before.
THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT
The Inquiry has heard a lot about the Crawley and Horsham Hunt and how it operated, and how violent it was towards hunt sabs. Walter recalls them hiring thugs from the local rugby club to act as ‘security’ for them. He wryly noted:
‘It was open season on saboteurs’
He recalls that the senior Master of this hunt was an extremely influential member of the Establishment, a personal friend of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and a senior member of the Freemasons.
Journalist Paul Foot who exposed the Economic League’s industrial blacklist
He knows that Thatcher took a great deal of interest in the work of Special Branch and he wants to know if she was involved in the tasking of the spycops at all. It strikes him that the hunt sabs were disrupting a favourite hobby of many of her friends.
The spying also affected Walter personally. It’s long been established that every constabulary’s Special Branch passed personal details of ‘subversives’ to secret employment blacklisting organisations. This wasn’t police upholding the law, it was police breaking the law to maximise corporate profit.
When the largest such organisation, the Economic League, was uncovered in the early 1990s, the list of people that had been blacklisted became known. Walter was shown the list by investigative journalist Paul Foot – his name was on it.
He recalls going for an interview for a librarian role in the 1980s and being asked about his views on hunting. This seemed suspicious at the time, and he has wondered since about Special Branch’s links with the hunting fraternity and their involvement in blacklisting.
He wasn’t offered the job – he says there ‘was a breakdown in trust’ and he walked out of the interview.
He goes on to say that as hunt saboteurs, they always knew that ‘two tier policing’ existed. Hunt sabs were ‘vilified by the Establishment’, frequently attacked, and routinely arrested by the police. The spycops witnessed a great deal of violence suffered by sabs and other activists and did nothing to challenge it.
He talked about the ‘disgusting’ behaviour of the police, and pays tribute to all his fellow hunt sabs, who he calls ‘the bravest, most ingenious, genuine people’.
He went on, even more strongly:
‘The injustice, the rape, and the abuse that the police carried out undercover is a disgrace, one they never thought they would have to answer for.’
Ahead of three days of questioning spycop HN2 Andy Coles, the Undercover Policing Inquiry spent a day taking evidence from ‘Jessica‘ who Coles groomed into a year-long relationship when she was a vulnerable teenage animal rights activist in the 1990s.
Over the past few weeks, a lot of evidence has been held back due to privacy issues, but Jessica insisted that an audio stream of her evidence be made publicly available to the public, so you can hear both the morning and afternoon sessions on YouTube.
She did not ask for any of the painful details to be held back, because she wants to ensure that there are no restrictions on the evidence given by Coles. He does not deserve and should not get privacy protection when he gives his evidence.
‘Jessica’ was questioned by Emma Gargitter for the Inquiry. She has produced a written statement [UCPI 37092] which was introduced into the evidence.
RECAP
This was the Thursday of the seventh week of ‘Tranche 2 Phase 2’, the new round of hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). This Phase mainly concentrates on examining the animal rights-focused activities of the Metropolitan Police’s secret political unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, from 1983-92.
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.
Emma Gargitter began with questions about Jessica’s early life and involvement in animal welfare. She was adopted as a baby and she was bullied as a result. She recalled how every time she fell out with her friend he would bring it up, saying:
‘what’s wrong with you, even your own mother didn’t want you.’
We were shown a Special Branch report about Jessica from after she met Coles that describes her as
‘first coming to the attention of this Branch in June 1992 when secret information received, reported she is an animal activist.’
That same report notes that they had tried, and failed, to trace her birth details. It was clearly very distressing to her that they tried to do this.
She had an older brother who was killed tragically by a drunk driver while out on his bike. She was 11 years old.
‘It changed everything for all of us… my family was never the same. It destroyed our family…and I had to find my own way through that… Kids can be horrible. I was then bullied because my brother had died.’
Gargitter asked how well 11-year-old Jessica was able to find her own way through that. Jessica replied that, up until more recently, she thought she had kind of done OK. But looking forward to events when she met Coles, she realises how damaged she was.
Would teenage Jessica have appeared vulnerable or more robust? She said that at the time she thought she appeared quite OK. She had learnt that if you seem weak you get bullied more, so she would pretend things didn’t bother her, but looking back she says,
‘I don’t think I was fooling anybody.’
Following the death of her brother she suffered a series of family bereavements that made her very insecure:
‘I didn’t know who would be next. I thought I would die at the same age my brother had. I didn’t want to get close to people because it would be worse when they died. That was my attitude.’
Then she had a breakdown in college. She described suffering from severe social anxiety, she couldn’t go into a room if there were too many people there, and then she was humiliated by a maths teacher for answering a question too quietly.
That she was bullied by an adult was just too much. She stopped going to classes and they threatened to kick her out of school, so she went to the doctor and was given medication. She managed to finish school, but she needed that help.
ANIMAL RIGHTS & HUNT SABBING
Saboteurs from the New Forest and Winchester protect a fox earth from the New Forest Foxhounds
Jessica explained that she had lots of pets as a child and she started volunteering at weekends and after school at an animal rescue centre when she was about 13.
She would go to demos with people from the rescue centre and heard people from groups like the British Union Against Vivisection (now known as Cruelty Free International) speak at those demonstrations.
She had seen leaflets from the Hunt Saboteurs Association about hunting and she thought it was appalling. She went hunt sabbing for the first time when she was 13 or 14, to a Boxing Day hunt meet.
She was by far the youngest person there, and she didn’t enjoy it. She felt sick, thinking something was going to get killed, and she was angry at these people who were hell bent on ripping some defenceless animal to bits. Saving that animal was an immediate and worthwhile thing.
After the hunt, the other sabs told her she shouldn’t come back until she was a bit older:
‘No one would take responsibility for me… I was maybe a bit lairy… I had a lot to say for myself.’
However, she returned to sabbing when she was 17 or 18, through her involvement in the Islington Animal Rights Group. She learned to drive when she was 17 and saved up for a car. She had a red Mini and she would pick people up to go sabbing. If there was no one else going she would go alone. Once she and just one other person sabbed the Surrey Union hunt.
In the beginning they used citronella in aerosols or spray bottles to mask the fox’s scent. You would see where the animal ran and then spray across the track to confuse the hounds and give the fox a chance to get away. They also had hunting horns, and the ‘gizmo’ that would play the sound of hounds in cry:
‘You could play it in a field and the whole pack would come running.’
The reaction of the hunters was not good. There was a lot of violence and she has been in quite a few scrapes. Just being there could lead to unprovoked attacks. The worst threat was the riders riding hard at you. One particular rider could make her horse kick, and she would make it rear up and kick people. Jessica saw one woman have her arm broken like that.
One of her friends was ridden down and taken away in an ambulance with broken ribs. The Surry Union hunt master was charged with ABH for riding someone down and causing lacerations to his head. There were a lot of injuries. This was also around the time Mike Hill was killed. The threat was always there.
She pointed out that the sabs never carried weapons. You knew you would be stopped and searched by police, and anything that could be considered a weapon would be taken away.
‘It really wasn’t us who caused it. It got in the way of sabbing. You didn’t want to be fighting with somebody while the hounds were killing.’
Q. Did you ever see a sab react?
‘Yes, I’ve responded myself.’
She explained that the last thing any of them would do is to go out intentionally looking for it, but that just standing there and letting yourself be hit made it worse. She had a friend who was a pacifist and he got a kicking every time.
Gargitter then asked about the Brixton hunt sabs. Coles reported that Brixton had a reputation for being violent. Were they more robust defending themselves?
Jessica said that they weren’t violent. It was mostly about numbers: there were a lot of them, they were city people and they wouldn’t be pushed around. She explained that a lot of it was about reputation.
‘We used to say “what time are Brixton going to get here?” because that would make the hunt worry.’
On a mass hit – where several different sab groups went to the same hunt – you’d get a lot of people showing up and they were all supposedly ‘Brixton’.
HN87 ‘John Lipscomb’ described Brixton sabs damaging hunters’ vehicles. Jessica never saw or knew about anything like that.
SPYCOPS – HN1 ‘MATT RAYNER’
Jessica says she had good friends in the West London hunt sab group, and would sometimes go out sabbing with them. HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ (real name restricted) usually went out sabbing with them too. She remembers being driven in his van, and that he was known by the nickname ‘Chiswick’, but she doesn’t recall anything specific that he did.
Spycop Christine Green (with hood up) hunt sabbing while undercover
Her address book from this time contains Rayner’s name and number. She thinks she probably got his details in order to arrange to be picked up for hut sabs, but is not sure that she ever called him.
She also knew him from London Boots Action Group pickets, handing out leaflets and holding the banner. He wasn’t memorable, he was just one of the group, but she did recall being told not to trust him once. Nothing specific, just ‘be careful, don’t trust him’.
She doesn’t recall thinking he was a police officer, just ‘dodgy’. She thinks she even called him that to his face once. She doesn’t believe he was ever confronted with the suspicion, and the longer he was there, with time, it died down.
She was away working in France when Rayner drove a vanload of animal rights activists to the Grand National horse race. Despite many other years trying, this is the one time activists actually stopped the race – all thanks to a spycop being an agent provocateur!
She also describes some other chicken raids (e.g. Leyden Street where people ran in during a demo and grabbed chickens), saying that both Rayner and Coles may have been involved in these events. Jessica wasn’t involved herself, but people called her to help rehome the chickens.
HN26 ‘CHRISTINE GREEN’
Jessica also came into contact with HN26 ‘Christine Green’ (real name restricted), but not until 2017, after she found out about Coles. Joe Tax (Christine’s partner) was a close friend of Jessica’s and she went to see him to talk about what she had discovered. She hadn’t seen him in years.
She had heard, from other hunt sabs, that Joe and his girlfriend had split up and he’d started a new relationship with a woman who then moved to Spain. Joe went to Spain to find her in around 1997-98. Asked if this was common knowledge Jessica replied
‘If I would’ve known I think anyone would have known.’
She had no idea that ‘Christine’ had been an undercover cop. Joe and ‘Christine’ were still together in 2017.
HN2 ANDY COLES ‘ANDY DAVEY’
Jessica left her parents’ home in early 1992, aged 19. She moved into a shared house in East London with her friend and lived there for about six months. She had the front top bedroom, which was furnished with a small table, and two single divan beds, only one of which had a mattress.
She acquired a dog while she was living there, in August 1992 from the Deptford Urban Free Festival.
‘We went to the festival with one dog, and we came back with two dogs and a pigeon’.
A number of dogs appeared in the reports and photographs, and Jessica told the Inquiry that, if needed, she could still name them all. She also described how she and her housemates would pool their unemployment benefits to feed the cats.
Brixton Hunt Saboteurs in the field, 25 January 1992. Spycop HN2 Andy Coles in foreground, indicated with red arrow.
Her friend had the room directly below hers where there was a portable black and white TV. That room became a kind of communal room where people would gather and watch TV even when her friend wasn’t there.
Coles claims there was a TV room in the house, but Jessica thinks he’s actually referring to her friend’s bedroom. There was no spare room, as all the rooms in the house were occupied.
Jessica knew Coles as ‘Andy Van’ as (like numerous spycops) he had a van and was generous in giving lifts. Everyone called him that. She met him in late 1991 whilst she was still living with her parents, but ‘he was just a face in the crowd’.
She started to notice him when he began coming round to her East London address. The house always had people coming and going, but he would come round alone, and always later in the evening.
Jessica had just left home. She was unemployed, money was tight, and neither she nor her friend drank alcohol. Occasionally they would go to the pub and have a lemonade, but mostly they just hung out at home and watched telly, so the chances of finding them at home were high. Coles showed up quite frequently for several weeks, so often that there was a collective sense of ‘here we go again’.
It was inconvenient, because he came round late and stayed for quite a long time so it could be quite awkward. She recalls discussing it among the housemates: who invited him? And it turned out nobody did.
Jessica had no sense that he was romantically interested in her. It just wasn’t something that was on her radar. So, when he kissed her it came completely out of the blue. They were alone, watching TV and
‘I either turned to him or he said something which made me turn to him and then he just lunged straight at me and kissed me…
‘It was so awkward. Had he said something at any point, I would have been able to say I don’t think about you like that, but it was the shock and just the unexpectedness of it.’
It was excruciating hearing Jessica describe something almost all women will recognise from awkward and awful sexual experiences when we were young:
‘My overriding feeling was that I didn’t want to hurt his feelings…
‘I’d like to say now that I would have slapped him. But when I think about it, even now, I still get that awful, awkward feeling. I wish it had been different. I wish that I had done something different’.
After that first kiss, he would stay over, and when he did so it was in her room, in her bed. She never went to his place and didn’t know where he lived. She can’t remember when they first had sex, but she is sure it would have been him that initiated it. She was, and still is, very uncomfortable with physical intimacy.
Coles lied to Jessica about his age, telling her he was 24. In real life he was 32 and married. It never occurred to her that he was older than he said he was.
Jessica described herself as a ‘young 19 year old’:
‘I was naive and quite stupid, to be perfectly honest.’
In his cover identity, Coles was supposed to be 28. Jessica was 19 and looked younger. The fact that he told her he was 24, and told his bosses she was 20-25, shows deliberate effort to cover the age gap. What other reason can there be for him to do this, apart from that he knew it wasn’t right and was trying not to alarm those around him?
Had she known Coles was in his 30s, would she have reacted differently?
‘Yes… that’s not right… there’s no reason to be trying to go out with someone that much younger… it’s creepy. It’s inappropriate… it sounds terrible to say, but, you know, old age… at 19 someone like that is old.’
Coles was Jessica’s first boyfriend. She didn’t talk to her friends about him much. She was embarrassed by him: he was unpopular and awkward and a bit odd.
She says there wasn’t much emotional intimacy either:
‘I can’t remember very much about him. I think I was a pretty awful girlfriend… It was not love’s young dream… it wasn’t how I expected it to be.’
She explained that Coles always used condoms. They did have a conversation about it once:
‘I didn’t quite know what my expectations were of a sexual relationship, I don’t know, I think I just imagined that it would be different and I think I wondered if maybe it was because he was wearing condoms.’
She suggested they try without, but he told her he had to wear them because he had already had one child and wouldn’t risk having another. He told her his daughter was called Sophie, she was around two years old, and he wasn’t allowed to see her.
Jessica was shocked and she had a lot of strong feelings about this. At first she was relieved that he didn’t see his daughter, and then she felt bad because if he wanted to see her, that was sad.
Coles has denied all of this. He claims he stayed over at Jessica’s house, one time on the sofa and then she offered him a mattress in her room (where he stayed 3-4 times). Jessica replied: that never happened. He stayed more than 3-4 times and always in her bed.
Coles also tries to claim that Jessica flirted with him, chased him, and that she once said ‘you can fuck me if you like’. On this she was very clear:
‘He is a liar. An absolute liar… I don’t talk like that. It’s awkward, but also, it’s crass… I wasn’t upset with him, I didn’t throw myself at him, I didn’t chase him. That is lies.’
THE ANIMAL LIBERATON FRONT
Coles has said that Jessica was identified to him as ‘an ALF girl’ by another activist, ciphered as ‘JRA’.
Jessica points out how unlikely this is, and how stupid and dangerous it would be to describe someone as ‘an ALF girl’, even if they were (which she wasn’t). The ALF was involved in illegal activity so there was a culture of secrecy. Activists didn’t brag about it or identify themselves to others.
She says she didn’t really know JRA, although they were on ‘nodding terms’. Asked how she would define the ALF she replied:
‘Someone that regularly breaks the law to rescue animals or sort of non-violent direct action to shops and places that sell fur.’
Jessica doesn’t believe she was associated with people involved in ALF actions. The house where she lived received the ALF Supporters Groups newsletter, so she knew some of the names, but Geoff Sheppard (who had been to prison for planting incendiary devices in Debenhams shops) was the only one she knew personally.
Yet, Coles claims he got close to Jessica because he thought it would get him closer to an ALF cell.
Q. If a police officer was looking to find individuals involved in the ALF, would befriending you be likely to get him access to those people?
‘No.’
Q. Did you have contacts with animal liberationists elsewhere in the UK, outside of London?
‘He’s mischaracterising it. I had friends who were interested in animal rights that were from other places. He’s tarting it up.’
She and a friend got involved in Hackney an Islington Animal Rights, through an advert in Time Out. They went to London to go to the meeting and met Paul Gravett. He was friendly.
She explained that they were younger than everyone else, and most of the older members treated them as kids, but Paul and Geoff always gave them the time of day.
They took part in London Boots Action Group picketing shops protesting against the company’s vivisection, distributing leaflets and sometimes holding a banner, chanting ‘Boots torture beagles’.
They might get in trouble for obstructing the public highway, but basically they were walking up and down outside the shop handing out leaflets. She doesn’t think it was a front for people who wanted to get involved in ALF activity:
‘You would go, and hand out leaflets for hours and then go to the pub.’
We were shown a report from June 1992 that says Jessica had ‘expressed an interest in ALF-style liberations’ and claims that ‘now that she has moved to London and is living with other animal rights activists she is likely to commit criminal acts.’
Coles alleges in his report that she has a ‘radio telephone’ from her dad. She said this is inaccurate. There was a device, an early model carphone, that was used on hunt sabs, but it had nothing to do with her father, and was never at her house. She says she doesn’t think she did express an interest in ALF-style liberations, but she do one once.
THE GREAT HOOKLEY FARM CHICKEN RAID
‘He created a “cell”, if that’s what you want to call it, that I was in…
‘I had to be persuaded to do it. It was nerve wracking and it is nothing I would have done if it weren’t for him.’
Coles organised the action. He was the driver; it was his vehicle; and he asked a lot of people to be involved. He called a meeting, and there were too many people at it so lots of them thought it was silly and dropped out.
‘You wouldn’t do something like that with a big group of people some of whom you didn’t know. But I was in a relationship with him so I and my friend ended up going.’
People wore face coverings, and the aim was not to be discovered. They were given instructions, and told to pass the chickens in bags along a line, in a human chain.
‘I was scared to death… Everything about it is scary, getting caught, doing it, I am quite an anxious person and I was really anxious about everything’
Asked if Coles appeared anxious, she said ‘No’.
We were then shown an article about the action, written Andy Coles, and a photo in which Jessica can be seen liberating chickens. Coles says she is the person on the right, but she clarifies:
‘No I’m the one on the left. I know that because I was the only person stupid enough to wear my favourite jeans… That balaclava is made from a pair of socks.’
She told us how they grabbed chickens and put them in bags and poultry crates until no one could carry any more. Coles claims he was only the driver and photographer on that action (as though that would mean he wasn’t involved).
Jessica explains that is nonsense. Everyone mucked in, because the more hands you had, the more birds you could save. The chickens were loaded into Coles’ van, which was always the plan.
On the way home, they were pulled over by the police, with load of people and about 80 loose chickens in the back. Everyone was panicking and the chickens are making a racket so she and others started coughing in an ill-considered ineffectual attempt to cover it up.
Coles talked to the police, who could clearly see it was a van full of people and chickens, but they let them go.
‘We thought luck was on our side.’
We were shown a report from 4 December 1992 that claims people named in the report were old school friends of Jessica and that they got her involved in the action. Jessica denies this, she says they were not old school friends and it was Coles who got her involved in the action.
THE PRINCESS OF MONACO
In the summer of 1992, Jessica had been in a relationship with Coles for a few months when she received a job offer to to move to France and take care of dogs and cats for the Princess of Monaco. It was a fantastic opportunity.
She consulted with Coles before taking the job, because they were in a relationship.
‘I felt he had a say. I asked him “what do you think I should do?”’
He told her she should go.
‘That may be the one decent thing that he did.’
As far as Jessica understood, they were a couple at that time. The arrangement was that he would come and visit her there, and she can’t remember any formal goodbye.
While she was in France they had a long-distance relationship. They spoke occasionally on the phone, although they didn’t have much to say to each other, and wrote each other letters.
She remembers one his letters was mostly ordinary, about what he had been doing, but it had one line at the bottom that was odd and totally out of character, about oral sex.
‘I remember thinking: “Am I meant to think that’s sexy? ‘Cause it’s not.”’
While Jessica was in France, in September 1992, Special Branch created a Registry File on her, something done for people that are deemed to be worth monitoring in an ongoing way.
The only ALF action she had ever done was Coles’s chicken farm raid. A police note, dated October 1992, says that the photo on file is no longer a good likeness as ‘she now has very short hair and is much less feminine in appearance’.
She points out that this is untrue. She has photos from the time that show her hair was half way down her back, but more importantly, why is Special Branch reporting about a hair cut she never had? It is ridiculous. She wasn’t even in the country at the time. It doesn’t really make sense, unless oles was just trying to find something to report irrespective of whether it was true.
Coles started to complain about her being away and suggested that they ‘start seeing other people’. This made her angry. He wasn’t suggesting that they split up, just that they see other people.
She went back to the UK in December 1992 to see him and stayed at his place in Stanthorpe Road, Streatham for a week. She felt she was being unfair to him by being away:
‘It sounds so gross to say it but it was like he’s a man and it’s not fair on him and he has needs.’
Q. Did he ever say anything that caused you to feel that?
‘I think he had to have done… I couldn’t have come to that by myself.’
We were shown letters Jessica wrote from France to her best friend. One says, ‘it’s really weird but I’m still going out with Andy’.
In another, she tells her friend about how Andy had suggested that they should see other people because otherwise ‘he wouldn’t be getting enough sex.’ It appears to have been over between them by then.
In May 1993 Jessica was injured in France and she returned to the UK in June after spending some time in hospital. Again, she stayed at Coles’s place in Streatham, which she described as quite boring, a bit of an empty box.
In August 1993 her French job ended. She thinks that by then it was over between her and Andy.
She met someone else (at Coles’s house), identified to the Inquiry as ‘NM’. Suddenly she was looking forward to being with someone. There was some kind of chemistry and spark with this new man, and it highlighted for her that it wasn’t right between her and Coles. She told Coles, and he just agreed.
It was a very amicable ending, and she thought they were so grown up. A report of Coles’s from 1993 describes her as having a ‘romantic liaison’ with ‘NM’. Asked how she felt reading that in a police report she replied:
‘What purpose did it serve? It’s just… none of his business.’
A report from March 1994 describes her as ‘NM’’s girlfriend. It suggests that he was involved in ‘illegal ALF activity’. Jessica points out that there is no other reference to this and nothing specific in the report at all:
‘it’s all so vague… it’s just speculation’.
She makes clear that the only activities she and her new partner were involved in were demonstrations and hunt sabotage. Nevertheless, their house was raided by the police after someone who didn’t live there supposedly gave their address when they were arrested on an action they didn’t attend:
‘half a dozen guys in hazmat suits with masks on and like a policeman at the door and like police vans everywhere and they came in and lifted up the floorboards in some rooms… it always felt like there was something a bit suspicious about it.’
They broke things and took items away, including a housemate’s computer with her dissertation on it.
She speculates that it may have been Coles who gave the police their address. He certainly reports on their reactions to it.
THE HORSE & HOUND BALL
The report says the protest was organised by the Hunt Saboteurs Association, that there were 80-100 people in attendance, and that it was ‘loud and aggressive’.
Spycop ‘Matt Rayner’ (left) with Paul Gravett, leafleting outside a branch of Boots
Jessica disagrees with most of what the report says. The HSA didn’t organise things like that. It was a London Animal Rights thing, organised by word of mouth, and there were only 20-30 people there.
It was loud, but not aggressive, and they were packed into a fenced off area. A letter written by Coles at the time about being injured in the line of duty supports Jessica’s version.
He describes 30-40 people and a ‘loud and animated protest’ and describes receiving head injuries from the battery end of a police radio. Jessica doesn’t recall him being there.
Someone threw a bag of flour at people getting out of a limousine, echoing events from the previous year’s ball, where flour was thrown by undercover officer John Dines, leading to the arrest and wrongful conviction of someone else.
Jessica was violently arrested. She recalls being dragged over a crowd-control barrier and landing on her head, then being marched with her arm twisted up behind her back to a van. She doesn’t know what happened. She can only remember the pain. She thought the officer had broken her arm.
She asked to see the police surgeon. He turned up in a tuxedo, having been at the ball. After her release she went to A&E and was diagnosed with torn ligaments in her shoulder, elbow and wrist, and a broken collar bone. In the tradition of people assaulted by police officers, she was charged with assaulting a police officer.
In the run up to her trial, Coles filed reports about their defence strategy, Jessica’s intention to plead not guilty, and a meeting she had with potential witnesses that he describes as being ‘to concoct evidence’. It seems quite common for spycops to be reporting on defence strategies to the prosecution.
In court, she was found guilty and received a suspended sentence. She was told it was a good result that she wasn’t going to prison. However, it was the first time she had appeared in court, she couldn’t believe that the police had blatantly and deliberately lied under oath, and she couldn’t let it go. Despite being given no penalty by the court, the injustice of it outraged her. She appealed her conviction and was acquitted.
REACTION
Asked about her reaction to the discovery in 2017 that Coles had been an undercover police officer, she explained that Paul Gravett alerted her to a report about the infiltration of the groups they were in. Ten minutes after discovering that spycops even existed she found a picture of Andy Coles:
‘It made a lot of sense of our relationship. I didn’t doubt it.’
Asked how it felt:
‘There’s no feeling like it. Huge parts of my life… I didn’t have the control and the agency over them that I thought I did. I’d been steered and manipulated into a relationship that wasn’t really what I wanted but I went along with.’
Jessica broke down at this point.
‘The worst part… was my age, to know that at that age, someone so much older not who he said he was… it made me feel disgusting… it’s disgusting… I can’t come to terms with it properly.’
It has had a significant impact on her mental health that continues to this day.
Jessica has since discovered that her then housemate (now deceased) Andrea McGann and three other women all had unpleasant experiences with Andy. Three of the women describe him ‘lunging’ at them to kiss them, and one woman, peace activist Emily Johns, described him showing up at her house late at night, apparently angling to be invited to stay over for sex.
Robin Lane has also told her, and the Inquiry, that he had set Andy up with one of his friends for a one-night stand, and she described him being ‘a bit rough’.
It exacerbates everything, having to prove that she is not lying:
‘Why would anyone want to do this? I have had to sit here. I’ve had to completely humiliate myself… I’m not lying about it. Why would I?’
The fact of him being a school governor and Conservative councillor in a position of power also made it worse:
‘It felt like my responsibility to warn people what he is like… I don’t want anyone else to feel the way that I have felt since finding out.’
After she had finished giving her evidence to the Inquiry, she was thanked by the Chair, Sir John Mitting, who said:
‘Thank you for attending today and giving evidence in circumstances that I know are not easy for you. And that I am aware is a considerable understatement. I know that yesterday’s arrangements were uncoupled and that increased your difficulty. Thank you for surmounting them and giving evidence as clearly as you have done.’
The ‘uncoupled arrangements’ is a reference to the fact that Bob Lambert’s evidence ran over so much that yesterday it was unclear whether Jessica would be able to give her evidence today, and Mitting even threatened not to hear it at all if she didn’t comply with whatever new timetable they same up with. This is as close to an apology as this Inquiry gets.
By the end of the day on Thursday, Jessica was very upset, and when she was asked if there was anything she wanted to add, she replied ‘I just want to get out of here’.
However, by Wednesday of the following week she was feeling a little better and she returned to make her final points.
She began by noting:
‘I found the Inquiry very re-traumatising it’s opened an awful lot of old wounds and personally it’s been quite damaging’
She explained that she has persevered, engaging with the process, and assisting the Inquiry,
‘because we need to know the truth.’
She told the Inquiry that she wishes to see her Special Branch ‘Reference File’. (Those who were spied on have been asking to see their files ever since this process began, and pages from Jessica’s file was referred to on several occasions by Gargitter in her questioning, yet Jessica has not seen the whole file.
Jessica then highlighted Coles’ attitude towards the theft of dead children’ identities. She reminded the Inquiry that her own family lost a child, and read some of the most awful sections of Coles’ Tradecraft Manual, on stealing dead children’s identities, noting ‘that perfectly describes my brother’.
She made the point that one of his recommendations – that it would be best to use the identity of someone who had been adopted and then died in childhood. She notes that Coles passed on his ‘tradecraft’ to futures officers. She noted that Jim Boyling’s identity was based on an adopted child and that Mark Jenner claimed that his father had been killed by a drunk driver, and she specifically asked Mitting to find out whether her brother’s identity ever was used by an undercover officer.
Finally, she told the Inquiry that the Metropolitan Police have accepted there is credible evidence that the sexual relationship between her and Andy Coles did happen.
The Met have apologised to Jessica, and said Coles would be facing the most serious disciplinary charges if he were still a serving officer. Coles refused to answer questions when interviewed under caution, and subsequently told the Peterborough Telegraph that the Met had actually exonerated him.
Jessica ended her evidence to the Inquiry by pointing out that the only person who still disputes the relationship took place is Andy Coles:
‘and he is a liar.’
Jessica has been to Peterborough to give talks and distribute leaflets about Coles’s spycop career and his ongoing denial of the facts.
Andy Coles as Cambridgeshire’s Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner
From today, Wednesday 18 December, ex-spycop Andy Coles will be giving live evidence to the public inquiry into political secret policing.
Like his former boss Bob Lambert last week, Coles stands accused of serious misconduct whilst deployed, and he has important questions to answer.
Here is a summary of the issues at stake.
INTRODUCTION
Coles was deployed into peace, animal rights and environmentalist groups in and around London from Spring 1991 to February 1995.
The Undercover Policing Inquiry has already heard from a number of people targeted by Coles about how he deceived at least one woman into a long term sexual relationship, and acquired a reputation as ‘creepy’ for his repeated, unwanted sexual advances to women.
Witnesses told the Unquiry that Coles, in his undercover role as ‘Andy Davey’, set up his own Animal Liberation Front ‘cell’ and organised a raid to on a battery chicken farm.
Like many Special Demonstration Squad officers, he is known to have been arrested in a false name, and lied to the courts.
Andy Coles while underover in 1991
In February 1995, just as his undercover deployment was ending, Coles put pen to paper and authored the Special Demonstration Squad’s Tradecraft Manual, setting out many of these abhorrent practices for future undercover officers to follow.
Like many of the most appalling officers investigated by this inquiry, he was promoted and went on to train and manage police officers, before going into politics.
The truth about Coles’ past was uncovered in May 2017, when his more famous brother, the Reverend Richard Coles, accidentally outed him by describing his brother’s undercover work in his autobiography Fathomless Riches.
Following media exposure, Coles immediately resigned as Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire. However, he refused to resign his roles as a Conservative city councillor for Peterborough and as a school governor, and he remained in that public office until he was voted out in 2024.
He is still President of Peterborough Conservatives.
CREEPY LECH
On Thursday 12 December we heard harrowing evidence from ‘Jessica’ of how she met Andy Coles as a vulnerable and young-for-her-age 19-year-old.
She described how he would just come round to the house she shared with friends inconveniently late at night, and just sit around. She recalled discussion among the housemates: who invited him? And it turned out nobody did. Then one day he just kissed her, completely out of the blue. They were alone, watching TV:
‘he said something which made me turn to him and then he just lunged straight at me and kissed me… It was so awkward. Had he said something at any point, I would have been able to say I don’t think about you like that, but it was the shock and just the unexpectedness of it…
‘My overriding feeling was that I didn’t want to hurt his feelings… I’d like to say now that I would have slapped him. But when I think about it, even now, I still get that awful, awkward feeling. I wish it had been different. I wish that I had done something different’.
After that first kiss he would stay over, and when he did, it was in her room, in her bed. She never went to his place and didn’t know where he lived. Coles was Jessica’s first boyfriend, and she didn’t talk to her friends about him much. She was embarrassed by him: he was unpopular and awkward and a bit odd.
She says there wasn’t much emotional intimacy either:
‘I can’t remember very much about him. I think I was a pretty awful girlfriend… It was not love’s young dream… it wasn’t how I expected it to be.’
Coles lied to Jessica about his age. In real life he was 32 and married. His undercover identity was that he was 28. Jessica was 19 and looked younger. Yet Coles told Jessica he was 24, and told his bosses that she was 20-25.
It never occurred to her that he was significantly older than he said he was.
She told the Inquiry:
‘that’s not right… there’s no reason to be trying to go out with someone that much younger… it’s creepy. It’s inappropriate… it sounds terrible to say, but, you know, old age… at 19 someone like that is old.’
Several otherwomen have reported fending off ‘creepy’ and unwanted advances by Coles, often describing similar incidents where he ‘lunged’ at them.
His colleague and contemporary undercover officer HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ has said in his witness statement that he was aware at the time that other activists thought Coles was ‘creepy’.
Coles’s conduct, the ways he described women in his reporting at the time, and even his behaviour and statements on the issue today, all show him to be a misogynist with contempt for women.
OUTRIGHT DENIAL
Coles is unique among the undercover police known to have abused women they spied on, in that he has publicly and flatly denied that the relationship took place.
When interviewed by police under caution about his relationship with Jessica, he refused to answer questions. In February 2020 we learned that the Metropolitan Police had seen enough evidence to convince them Jessica’s complaint was credible.
In July 2023, the Met admitted that the relationship did happen, and that it should never have happened. They unreservedly apologised to Jessica, and have condemned what Andy Coles did to her as:
‘abusive, deceitful, manipulative and wrong…totally unacceptable and grossly inappropriate… an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma’
The Met said that if Coles were still a police officer he would have been charged with gross misconduct, the highest level of disciplinary charge which, if found guilty, usually results in instant dismissal.
‘the Metropolitan Police has taken no further action against me’.
With each piece of evidence that shows he’s lying, Coles has chosen to double down on his denial, compounding the insult and injury to Jessica.
Andy Coles has backed himself into a corner. If he admits the truth, it won’t just be about his abuse of Jessica 30 years ago – he’d also be admitting to having lied to friends, family, colleagues and voters in Peterborough for the last few years.
Spycop Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’ (2nd from left) on a peace march at RAF Fairford, 1991
However, lying to the Inquiry under oath is a criminal offence. Coles’ account to date has been implausible and inconsistent, and we hope that the Inquiry will use these three days of questioning to vigorously challenge his version of events.
INVENTING THE ALF
Last week the Inquiry also heard from ‘Callum’ that Coles’ claim that he ‘slogged his guts out’ to become second in command of the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group was nonsense. There was no hierarchy, and Coles had a minor informal admin role.
He would have seen address labels when he was doing the quarterly envelope stuffing for the newsletter. That was the limit of his work. In any case, the ALF-SG was a public, wholly law abiding group. Coles basically spent three years watching Callum do legal activity.
Having apparently failed to find any bona fide ALF activity to report on, Coles decided to create some. The Inquiry heard how he called a large and bizarre meeting where he invited people to take part in an illegal action (most of them very sensibly declined). He then went on to organise a raid at Great Hookley Farm to rescue battery chickens.
He was described as ‘central to the action’. He drove people, assigned them roles and encouraged Jessica and her friend to attend. He also took photographs and wrote an article that was used to encourage people to take further, similar actions.
Brixton Hunt Saboteurs in the field, 25 January 1992. Spycop HN2 Andy Coles in foreground, indicated with red arrow.
Like other undercover officers, ‘Andy Van’ would regularly drive people to and from planned demonstrations, hunt sabs and other actions where it was anticipated illegal activity would occur.
There is evidence of Coles’s involvement in numerous petty crimes, as well as lying to the police and the courts. He will have to be examined on all of these allegations over the next three days.
MISLEADING COURTS
Coles is known to have reported on meetings discussing defence strategy for criminal trials; withheld evidence from the defence; failed to report police violence against protesters that he witnessed; given the name of another activist to the police when he was arrested, and lied to the courts.
Home Office instructions expressly forbid undercover officers from being involved in anything that is likely to lead to a court being deceived. If officers do find themselves in such a situation, the Home Office unequivocally orders that they must be exposed or have their deployment ended.
However, in his post-deployment debrief Coles is quoted as as saying:
‘Misleading a court is something done by criminals and government ministers alike – we shouldn’t be squeamish about the ends justifying the means in our own case.’
TRAINING AND TRADECRAFT
Perhaps the most damning evidence against Coles is the fact that he personally wrote the now infamous ‘Special Demonstration Squad ‘Tradecraft Manual’, including tips on how to conduct the sexual relationships that Coles now claims he never had.
He wrote deeply offensive instructions to undercover officers on how to assume ‘squatters rights’ over the identities of dead children for their cover and ‘establish the respiratory status of the dead person’s family, if any, and, if they were still breathing, where they were living’ in order to shore up their backstory.
Another section contains advice on having ‘fleeting and disastrous’ relationships with the opposite sex, where he notes that ‘[i]n the past emotional ties to the opposition have happened and caused all sorts of difficulties, including divorce, deception and disciplinary choices.’
The damage done to the victims of these deceitful relationships is not mentioned in his text.
As a councillor, Andy Coles promoted the Children’s Society’s ‘Seriously Awkward’ campaign to protect older teenagers from sexual exploitation even though he was a perpetrator of it when he was undercover
Coles’s career and the contents of the Tradecraft Manual are particularly significant because he is known to have gone on to train not only future SDS officers but also the first recruits to its successor organisation, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit.
This new secret police unit employed officers such ‘Rod Richardson’ who, on Coles’s instructions, stole the identity of a dead child, and Mark Kennedy and Marco Jacobs who deceived multiple women into abusive sexual relationships.
Until 2011, Coles was Head of Training for the Association of Chief Police Officers’ Terrorism and Allied Matters committee, which oversaw the deployment of Kennedy.
FURTHER CAREER
After leaving the police, Coles became a Conservative city councillor for the South Bretton and Fletton & Woodston wards of Peterborough, and the Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire.
When the truth came out in May 2017, Coles resigned as Deputy Police & Crime Commissioner within hours. He refused to explain why.
He only admitted even having been an undercover officer a year later, when the public inquiry had named him.
He lost his council seat in the local elections in May of this year. However, he is still the President of Peterborough Conservatives.
Men who abuse their public roles to violate women should not be in positions of civic trust. Men who lie about it, doubly so. He must resign.
After spycop Bob Lambert finally finished his seventh day of questioning, it was the turn of activist Claire Hildreth.
Testifying to the Inquiry is particularly impactful for those who were spied on, having to come into a public forum and painfully examine some of the worst things that ever happened to them.
It takes a lot of mental preparation, and Lambert’s stalling tactics meant that for most of the day Hildreth was unsure whether she’d even get to take the stand.
Even now, the spycops are doing what gives them personal advantage and don’t care about the negative consequences for others who’ve done nothing wrong.
RECAP
This was the Wednesday of the seventh week of ‘Tranche 2 Phase 2’, the new round of hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). This Phase mainly concentrates on examining the animal rights-focused activities of the Metropolitan Police’s secret political unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, from 1983-92.
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.
Hildreth was active in the London animal rights movement in the early 1990s, and was spied on primarily by Special Demonstration Squad officers HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ and HN2 Andy Coles ‘Andy Davey’.
Hildreth moved to London in 1991. In Jan 1992, she moved to North Kensington as a housing support worker. A colleague took her to a World Day For Laboratory Animals event where she picked up a London Boots Action Group (LBAG) leaflet which called for a boycott of the chain of chemists due to their use of vivisection.
Hildreth was part of the group, whose main activity was leafleting outside Boots shops, until she left London in 1996. She is still committed to the causes of animal welfare, environmentalism and social justice.
SPYCOPS EXAGGERATING AND LYING, AGAIN
Andy Coles infiltrated LBAG, and attended their meetings. One of his reports, dated 16 July 1993, says a new LBAG committee had been formed. Hildreth is named as part of this ‘committee’, title its newsletter officer, assisted by Coles. Hildreth says the term ‘committee’ is overstating the case, it was just basic admin, and the group was essentially self-organising, and they would share tasks like chairing meetings.
Spycop ‘Matt Rayner’ (left) with Paul Gravett, leafleting outside a branch of Boots
Coles claims in his witness statement to the Inquiry that he volunteered to assist, as he had access to the Animal Liberation Front’s computer and also produced their newsletter. Hildreth says there was no ALF computer, and he didn’t create the newsletter. She adds that his report’s mention of Paul Gravett being involved is wrong too.
Coles claimed to run the membership list of LBAG. Hildreth says that’s another lie. She doesn’t remember Coles being involved much at all. He was based in South London and didn’t really come North much.
A report by HN1 ‘Matt Rayner’ says Coles was a ‘formal member’ of LBAG, but Hildreth says there was no such thing as formal membership.
However, she says that Rayner, in contrast, was very active. As was standard for Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) officers, Rayner and Coles had been equipped with vans. Rayner made himself useful driving people to demonstrations and related errands.
LONDON ANIMAL ACTION
Hildreth was involved in London Animal Action (LAA) from the group’s founding in October 1994. The group was founded to campaign on all aspects of animal abuse, not just Boots as the previous group had done. Rayner reported on 8 August 1995 says LAA members are ‘openly supportive of ALF action and many are involved’. She says this isn’t true.
At the request of the Inquiry’s Chair, Sr John Mitting, Hildreth defined ALF activity as breaking the law, largely by criminal damage, to draw attention to animal abuse or to liberate animals. Mitting complimented her on being so concise and accurate.
Rayner reported that the LAA attended events over a wide geographical area (because he drove them, Hildreth points out), and that LAA’s presence increased the chance of an ’emotional and confrontational’ response at an event. She says he’s being ludicrously over-dramatic.
LAA shared an office with London Greenpeace, and Rayner reported that Hildreth co-managed the office. Once again, she took issue with the mischaracterisation, as if everything was formalised and regimented. She says the office wasn’t really ‘managed’ as such, LAA would use it, and not much more than that.
Rayner singled Hildreth out in a report as a ‘capable, aggressive and dynamic’ LAA activist who ‘can be considered an ALF activist’. She took especial umbrage at this, explaining that she never threatened anyone, and that being a bit loud isn’t the same thing as being aggressive. Furthermore, she explained, it’s misogynist, he wouldn’t say that about a man with the same disposition.
She added that she wasn’t ALF either. Clearly, the ALF was such a bogeyman to the spycops and the wider establishment that officers were keen to say they’d found the activists.
LIVE ANIMAL EXPORTS
From January to October 1995 the port of Brightlingsea was the scene of large and sustained protests against the export of live animals. A Rayner report on an LAA monthly planning meeting in March of that year described their active support for the protests, and that a rota of drivers had been drawn up to take members there.
One of the listed drivers is Rayner, another is HN26 ‘Christine Green’. Hildreth says she mostly remembers Rayner doing it, and that she can’t really remember Green.
Rayner says he was an LAA bank account signatory. Hildreth says she can’t remember if that’s true, but says it’s likely, it fits with what he was like.
We’ve seen from earlier Inquiry hearings that spycops would often take on the role of treasurer in a group. It gave them access to information about who was donating money, and often to subscription and membership lists, along with people’s bank account details. Also, like the van driving, it was a practical role that didn’t require any political knowledge or insight.
The Inquiry showed two reports containing details of Hildreth’s living arrangements . One, from May 1993, said she was about to go on holiday for a month and plans to live in a squat afterwards. She says it’s not true, and indeed it wasn’t something she could have done because she had a residential job at the time. She went on holiday, but not for a month.
That detail and the squat reference seem to be gratuitously making her look like a slacker. Rayner absolutely knew the truth about her address as, ever helpful with his van, he had helped her move house. She points out that as well as being untrue, none of this reporting had any relevance to animal rights.
MISOGYNIST AND LIAR
Andy Coles’ recent witness statement to the Inquiry (para 172) reiterates his claim that he was LAA organiser and newsletter author, shared with Hildreth and one other person. She says he didn’t do either of those things and had minimal involvement in the group. She wouldn’t want to work with him anyway, she tried to avoid him, so it’s possible he did things when she wasn’t there.
Coles also says he held the LAA membership and subscription list. This is yet another exaggeration, Hildreth explains. He had no formal role but, like anyone who spent time in the office, he did have opportunity to get hold of copies of the lists.
Brixton Hunt Saboteurs in the field, 25 January 1992. Spycop HN2 Andy Coles in foreground, indicated with red arrow.
Hildreth says she went hunt sabbing with Coles once, but never felt comfortable around him. He was a bit odd, and would say odd things, e.g. a story about his dog: that its original owner had died and the dog had started eating its owner’s body.
She said Coles was a misogynist, and that his witness statement to the Inquiry this year shows he still is. At the time, she warned other women who knew him that he couldn’t be trusted around them.
She was much closer to Rayner, and told him that Coles gave her the creeps and was less respectful of women than other men. Rayner seemed unsurprised. In his witness statement of 2022, he recalls her saying at the time that Coles was creepy; ‘it felt like she described him with a shudder’
Hildreth remembers a night out in Camden with seven or eight other women and them talking about Coles and how unsafe he made them feel.
Asked about ‘Jessica’, who was deceived into a relationship by Coles at the time, Hildreth knew her as a campaigner rather than as a friend. It was clear Jessica was young, in her late teens. Hildreth said it was also clear that Jessica was in a relationship with Coles but she was never close enough a friend to have discussed it.
The Inquiry brought up Hildreth’s 2018 statement to police, in which she said it wasn’t obvious to her that Jessica and Coles were a couple, and suggest her memory has been influenced by subsequent knowledge. Hildreth seemed to concede the point.
Regarding other relationships, a Rayner report of 11 May 1993 said Hildreth had consoled Liz after a traumatic life event. His participation in that was the beginning of his deceiving Liz into a relationship. However, Hildreth can’t remember this at all.
MISSING MATT
Rayner was already in LBAG when Hildreth joined. He was always a generous person and she looked forward to time with him. Beyond their activism, he spent a lot of time with her at her home, and they socialised together.
Spycop ‘Matt Rayner’ on a farewell visit to people he knew in northwest England with Claire Hiildreth, 1996
Rayner’s departure from his deployment was perhaps the most elaborate of any known spycop.
He said he was moving to France and, after a farewell party with comrades in November 1996, took two activists with him to the port, where they saw him get stopped and questioned by Special Branch officers. Presumably this was a stunt to lend credibility to his emigration.
As with other spycops, letters arrived to old friends from the new country, but Rayner kept it up for a year, including a move to Argentina from where a letter arrived saying he had found a new partner. In reality, of course, he’d been back at Scotland Yard the whole time.
Seeing the secret police reports now, Hildreth says it goes far beyond what’s justifiable. After the unmasking of Mark Kennedy in 2010, the first spycop to be publicly exposed, she started to wonder about Rayner. She eventually found out it was true but still couldn’t accept it and was in denial for a long time. It made her feel stupid for being fooled.
Hildreth had missed her friend. She used to Google him, in vain, but always hoped he was doing well and that she’d see him again.
At this point in her testimony, Hildreth stopped, in tears. She then said that Rayner’s recent disclosure, seeing the horrible things he said about people he spied on, had finally made her fully accept the truth.
It was difficult to hear that final part of Hildreth’s evidence, not just for her pain at but because it is so similar to what we’ve heard from other people who were spied on. Whether it was sexual relationships or close friendships, the spycops deliberately created personal bonds that had nothing to do with gathering intelligence.
Finding out someone you were close to was an undercover officer is devastating. It’s a peculiar form of bereavement, the person you loved isn’t just gone but they never actually existed. The person who was actually in your life was only ever a paid actor, tasked to undermine what you hold most dear.
Even more troubling than hearing from people who were spied on describing their loss, we’ve heard one officer after another testify on this and it is clear that it didn’t occur to them what it would do to people when they disappeared. They still seem unable to conceive of what it’s like to genuinely care about someone other than yourself.
Hildreth told the Inquiry that the personal impact is hard to explain to those who haven’t experienced it. Reliving it for the Inquiry has intensified that. The emotional impact is huge. The betrayal of friendship and trust, it’s unacceptable. Truth and the Inquiry have taken a toll on her mental health.
CONCLUSIONS
The Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting, said that they’re learning that retelling these experiences in such a forum is hard for people in her position. He complimented her for being so clear.
With that, Hildreth’s evidence was complete. Her testimony took less than two hours. Lambert had taken a cumulative six days, and Mitting’s final comments alluded to this:
‘If everybody gave answers as directly and in as straightforward a manner as you… my task would be a great deal easier’.
If Mitting wants succinct direct answers then maybe he should stop indulging the tactical ditherers playing Anti Just A Minute wasting hours with hesitation, repetition and deviation. If he interjected more, as other inquiry chairs do, it would keep the whole thing on course.
Rayner is due to give evidence to the Inquiry 15-17 January 2025.
At the Undercover Policing Inquiry, Monday 9 December was devoted to the evidence of two witnesses, ‘Callum’ and ‘Walter’, who had been involved in hunt saboteur activity in the 1980s.
There were a lot of restrictions on what could be reported in order to protect the identity of the witnesses. They were in the hearing room behind a screen. We’re doing separate reports for them.
RECAP
This was the Monday of the seventh week of ‘Tranche 2 Phase 2’, the new round of hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). This Phase mainly concentrates on examining the animal rights-focused activities of the Metropolitan Police’s secret political unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, from 1983-92.
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.
Callum has submitted a 74 page witness statement and 14 exhibits (photos, etc) to the Inquiry.
He started by saying that has been involved in animal rights and hunt sabbing since the early 1980s. Additionally, he was part of the anti poll tax campaign in 1990.
He started hunt sabbing aged 17, having seen a Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) advert in the Daily Mirror and then joining his local group.
Fox hunters’ Land Rover wth a sign saying ‘if the fox didn’t enjoy it he wouldn’t join in’
The HSA was the first animal rights organisation, founded in 1963. It aimed to centralise the movement and share tactics. It was a time long before social media, and the mainstream media didn’t report on it, so street stalls, leaflets, gigs, and zines were the main methods of communication.
The HSA published a magazine, Howl, mostly discussing tactics. The organisation was always very democratic.
Callum explained how sabs would use various methods to distract the hunters’ hounds, such as hunting horns, sprays to cover scent, and recording of hounds in cry to distract.
Sabs did not want to get into confrontations with hunters – to do so would distract from saving the animals. The idea was to stay away from the hunt and observe, so they could accurately judge where to intervene between the hunt and the fox.
Hunters, on the other hand, were often violent to sabs (something that continues to the present day). Callum described how they’d be charged down by horses and whipped. Sometimes hunters would get off and assault sabs. Their terriermen would try to corner sabs and attack them. Hunt supporters also used to get involved, blocking, assaulting, and sometimes hiring people to come and attack sabs.
Callum never saw sabs initiate violence. He was also clear that self defence isn’t violence.
After particularly serious violence or egregious behaviour by a hunt, sabs would call for a ‘joint hit’ – the next time the hunt met, sab groups would come from far and wide to show that such attacks would only mean greater disruption to the hunt.
Sabs didn’t want the police to know their plans in advance because police were invariably on the hunters’ side, and after the Criminal Justice Act 1994 introduced the offence of aggravated trespass, sabs would get pre-emptively arrested.
Callum used to get phone calls from police officers on a Friday telling him if he turned up to a certain hunt that weekend he would be arrested just for being there. This illustrates his point that it wasn’t about what was legal, but that the police took the side of the hunters irrespective of the law.
The cover of Hunt Saboteurs Association magazine Howl, issue 39, Spring 1988
In private documents the police are clearly aware of which side is the violent one, but all the stuff written for external consumption demonises the sabs. The Special Demonstration Squad’s annual reports to the Home Office talk about ‘serious violence’ happening, implying it’s the sabs committing it rather than the other side.
We’ve already heard from spycop Bob Lambert that the HSA was actually ‘entirely lawful’.
LIPSCOMB’S LIES
Callum and other hunt sabs were spied on by HN87 ‘John Lipscomb,’ and we were shown a report submitted by him [MPS0743621], of a discussion of tactics that took place between around 35 hunt sabs in April 1988.
Under the subheading ‘Violence’, the report says that ‘many of the saboteurs present had recently received a trashing from farm hands hired by the Surrey and Burstow Hunt. Callu advocated that all saboteurs should arm themselves with heavy tsicks every time they entered a wood’.
It goes on to note that Callum ‘frequently carries a 12 inch spanner tucked inside his boot’. Callum dismissed the suggestion of the spanner outright, saying ‘the idea is ridiculous’.
He confirmed that he did recommend carrying sticks when going into woods though. He explained that in open country you can see the hunters and avoid them – ‘get at least a fence between you and them’, he advised – but in woodland you can’t tell if people are close by. Entering unarmed and facing the prospect of coming up against a group of terriermen armed with spades, sabs would be less likely to be attacked if carrying a piece of wood.
Having been hospitalised, had bones broken, been stabbed and shot at by hunters and their supporters, Callum was keen to deter further violence. He re-emphasised that seeking confrontation would only have distracted from the point of being there, to save the hunted animals. Avoidance is the first tactic, a fight is bad tactics.
Lipscomb also wrote an end of season summary of hunt sabbing for Special Branch’s C Squad [MPS0743655, 14 May 1989]. In it, he talks about the decline of one hunt sab group as a ‘boost, from the police point of view’.
The report talks of discord between groups, attributed to Callum’s violence. In fact, Callum explained, one person at another group had done a deal with police not wear masks or carry hound whips to steer hounds. Callum’s group didn’t see the benefit, and anyway no group can make agreements on behalf of others. His group still worked with many others.
Lipscomb’s witness statement to the Inquiry says the group sought out violence and were a public order issue wherever they went.
Callum dismissed the claim. He recalled that the sabs needed to find ways to reduce the hunts’ violence, so they would try to counter the impression that all sabs were weedy, feeble vegans, incapable of defending themselves.
They got camouflage jackets and masks to look identical, which didn’t just make them look a bit more intimidating, it also meant the hunters couldn’t easily tell which sabs were women, and they were reluctant to hit women so would err on the side of caution. It also made it hard to identify individual sabs for arrest.
He recounted one incident of him being badly wounded by masked hunt supporters. The police arrived and even the ambulance driver had to tell them to leave Callum alone. The police didn’t take any action or even investigate, until Callum wrote to his MP about this matter.
Callum had seen the unmasked face of one of these attacker, someone he recognised as one of two ‘whippers in’ employed by a Hunt. The police brought the other whipper-in to an identity parade. Callum addressed the man by name and explained why he was innocent. He named the guilty man, but nothing happened. The police never arrested anyone, let alone charged them.
BRIXTON HUNT SABS
Brixton sabs were renowned for their supposed aggression in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Other groups used this reputation, telling sketchy hunters that Brixton were coming, and it made the hunters back off. They were trying to reduce violence, and it worked.
Brixton Hunt Saboteurs in the field, 25 January 1992. Spycop HN2 Andy Coles in foreground, indicated with red arrow
HN87 ‘John Lipscomb’ says in his witness statement that Brixton sabs would trash cars and were a constant threat to public order because of their hatred of rich people and the hunt, and general desire for violence.
Callum scoffed at this. If those things happened it would have been reported, yet there are no such press reports. He says it was all ‘smoke and mirrors’.
In reality, it was just another hunt sab group, no different from the rest. But the word ‘Brixton’ had resonances for hunters. It implied criminality, drugs, city living, Black people – all things that scared rural bigots.
ALF
Hunt sabs were described by police as ‘the link’ between the animal rights movement in general and the Animal Liberation Front.
Callum says there was certainly a link, animal rights was a new community and quite amorphous. Sabbing wasn’t a gateway to the ALF though. One again at the Inquiry, it’s clear the police see movements as being like them, with specialist units and assigned ranked roles. Activism isn’t like that at all.
We were shown a Special Demonstration Squad briefing note written by HN2 Andy Coles, possibly with contributions from others [MPS0245213]. It claims most ALF activists come through the HSA because sabbing is a ‘fertile training ground for militant activism’.
Yet Callum was the only sab in his ALF group, so it’s really not much of a ‘fertile ground’.
He said that his motivation was to save animals and change people minds. He saw ALF raids – going into farms or labs in the dead of night and taking animals away – were very effective. His first two arrests had been for simply leafleting. Being peaceful and law abiding didn’t preclude arrest, so he thought he might as well do more radical action, directly saving lives and with less risk of arrest.
Callum emphasised that it was non-violent. They did the minimum damage to get access, rescued as many animals as they had homes for, then went back in and did graffiti and damage as ‘economic sabotage’. He said that if that counts as ‘violence ‘then the RSPCA kicking a door in to save a trapped dog is also violence.
If they had just taken animals and not done the graffiti as well, a battery chicken farmer might not even have noticed the 100 missing chickens from the thousands at the farm, and it would be no loss as they were only worth pennies each.
They never confronted anyone, if they saw security patrols then they called it all off.
POLL TAX IMPRISONMENT
Callum said that, frustrated at the police’s refusal to act against a hunter who’d severely assaulted him, he intended to use incendiary devices to damage the hunter’s vehicle in the dead of night. This plan would later prove to be his undoing.
Poll Tax protest (Pic: Dave Sinclair)
The Poll Tax was one of the most unfair and hated policies of the Thatcher government. The Prime Minister had called it her ‘flagship policy’. It replaced local council rates – taxation based on property value – and replaced them with a fixed charge per person. A family of four adults in a terraced house would pay four times as much as a single person living in a mansion.
A police report on the huge protest against the Poll Tax in March 1990 says Brixton hunt sabs were there having ‘opportunist’ involvement in fighting with police.
Callum says it’s just further demonisation of the Brixton group. Again, the police are thinking regimentally. In reality, he was there on his own, not with sabs. He remembers the march as well-mannered. But at Trafalgar Square police surrounded the protesters and closed in.
HN5 John Dines – who was arrested undercover on the day – says people were punching, kicking and throwing stuff before the police waded in. Callum laughed at the gall of the claim, it’s well established that the police provoked the protesters, and he pointed out that a BBC documentary had proved that.
The police were doing snatch squads, darting into crowds and pulling someone out for arrest, attacking those nearby with truncheons. Callum saw a sergeant knock a woman to the ground and continue to beat her.
Poll Tax Prisoners News newsletter, September 1991
Callum got between them, the officer swung for Callum, who punched him back. In the ensuing retaliation and arrest Callum sustained a bruised head and cut hand. He was not arrested on the Poll Tax march, but was arrested months later at home. His home was searched and the incendiary devices found. Like so many arrested for the Poll Tax protest, he was given a lengthy prison sentence.
HN87 ‘John Lipscomb’ thinks he identified Callum from photos of the protest he was shown at an SDS meeting. We were shown the SDS annual report 1990-91 that claims that it was evidence from their officers that led to the arrest.
Callum says the spycops’ reporting on him would have had a significant impact on his sentencing, if that had been revealed in court. One again, police withheld evidence from a court case that the defence had a right to see. This is a miscarriage of justice.
AFTER PRISON
He remembers getting a lot of mail sent to him when he was inside, ten letters a day, books and magazines, and a massive pile of Christmas cards. That feeling of solidarity was essential for his mental health.
After getting out, his natural instinct was to ‘pay back’ this support by helping others in the same way.
He pointed out that if you look at any progressive movement there is always some illegality. Even if you don’t agree 100% with what someone’s done, it’s important for their movement to look after them when they’re in prison.
Callum says he has never done anything illegal since coming out of prison. He had a son, and started a career. He wanted to pay back the support he had in prison, so started helping out with the ALF Supporters Group (ALFSG).
He explained that the ALFSG was fundamentally about supporting ALF prisoners. Sections of the constitution were read aloud that make that clear. They tried to raise enough money to support animal rights prisoners in a wide range of ways, such as helping them access vegan food and toiletries while they were inside, money for travel expenses, phone calls, postage, etc.
The £24 a year membership was a lot at the time, so most of their members were older people with good jobs.
They produced a newsletter, but had it carefully vetted by lawyers to ensure there was nothing that could be seen as incitement.
HN2 ANDY COLES
Callum has supplied a photo of a party held to celebrate his release from prison. HN2 Andy Coles is in the photo, and Callum thinks this is the first time they met. However he doesn’t recall speaking to him on this occasion.
Spycop HN2 Andy Coles at the prison release party for ‘Callum’
Callum first spoke to Coles on an animal rights info stall when Coles, as was standard for spycops, had a van and offered the use of it as a way to ingratiate himself. Callum said this was very useful transporting all the merchandise for stalls, or making the lengthy trip to London to collect the ALFSG newsletter from the printer.
We were shown a report by Coles [MPS0745986] saying Callum had returned to hunt sabbing now his probation over, and he was ‘itching to have a go at hunt heavies’ and wants to be generally violent.
Coles’s witness statement to the Inquiry [UCPI035074 page 106, para 224] said he ‘slogged his guts out’ to become second in command of the ALFSG, doing the admin and keeping the membership records with a computer bought from campaign funds.
Callum says Coles is lying about all of this. There was no hierarchy with a second in command, nor a computer bought by the Group. At most, Coles would have seen address labels when he was doing the quarterly envelope stuffing for the newsletter. That was the limit of his admin work.
Coles claims to have helped write the ALFSG newsletter, Callum says that’s nonsense. He could have submitted an article like anyone else, but doesn’t remember that he did.
It’s apparent that Coles lied about other things too – for example he’s reported that ALF activists informed people that they planned to do actions before actually doing them.
Callum was very clear that there was a ‘very strict security culture’ amongst animal rights activists at this time. Nobody talked about the actions they had done, never mind those they hadn’t even done yet. And those, like him, who weren’t actively involved did not need or want to know!
The ALFSG had initially been set up just to support ‘ALF’ prisoners, but mergedtheir prisoner list with the Support Animal Rights Prisoners (SARP) one, and broadened itssupport to include hunt sabs and other animal rights prisoners. The ALFSG was a public, wholly law abiding group. Coles basically spent three years watching Callum do legal activity.
‘I’m surprised he wasn’t pulled out after 12 months because it’s not telling them anything about me… I’m sort of an absence in his reports, which is odd, you know, you think he’d be saying lots about me, what I was doing, but there’s very little about me actually, because I wasn’t doing anything which could bring me to the attention of the police.’
TACTICAL EXAGGERATION AND LIES
Coles said he visited animal rights prisoner Robin Lane with Robin’s wife. It was actually Callum who went. Once again, we see undercover officers taking real events and putting the wrong name in – either claiming they did something so they appear more involved, or else doing something criminal and then attributing to others.
Support Animal Rights Prisoners newsletter, August 1991
This is now looking like tradecraft rather than many individuals stumbling on the same tactic. Either way, it must’ve felt so easy for them, how would the bosses ever know what was true (unless a public inquiry eventually put the documents to the people involved)? Three of the officers we’ve seen who did a lot of this – Bob Lambert, Roger Pearce and Andy Coles – were promoted to Special Branch management roles where they had long and successful careers.
Coles reported a list of people contacting the ALFSG wanting to find out how to become ALF activists. Callum says this is talking as if they were applying to be members of the ALF, which is risible. He said there was only the occasional person doing anything like that, and that they used to politely decline. They couldn’t have done that even if they wanted to. Also, the enquirer’s sense of security was so poor you wouldn’t want to work with them anyway!
Coles reported that a group of people who were planning an attack on a meat facility asked if they’d have ALFSG support if they were imprisoned for it. Callum says that too was ridiculous on several levels. Firstly, they’d already know that prisoners were supported.
But more to the point, for security reasons, activists did not tell people in advance about actions. The ALFSG could only find out who did an action after it happened, if the people were arrested and imprisoned. Again, there was a very strict security culture for everybody’s sake. They didn’t want to know who did what!
Coles claims he was given an ALF spycatcher role, and talked of a prospective trip to Belfast to investigate a suspected mole. Police records show that management declined permission, saying it was too risky for him to go.
Callum says there was no ‘spycatcher’ involved in the case, let alone any chance of Coles going. In reality, eight people had been arrested for ALF action. They’d been badly abused in the cells with beatings and being burned with cigarettes. One of them had given full statement incriminating others in order to protect themselves and get a lesser sentence.
Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group newsletter, autumn 1993
The ALFSG did not support ‘grasses’. Callum went to find out what happened and agreed the ALFSG would not support that prisoner. This person was not an ‘informer’, just someone who grassed very readily in order to protect themselves and get a lesser sentence.
Once again, a spycop exaggerates what’s going on and takes credit for someone else’s deeds in order to seem important.
Callum was frequently stopped by the police at the time, presumably because the police thought he was still an ALF activist. Coles was ideally placed to tell the police that he wasn’t, but doing so would have undermined the stories he was telling his bosses.
COLES’S RELATIONSHIPS
Callum was asked about Coles claiming at the time that he’d had a one night stand with a known animal rights activist. Callum hadn’t previously noticed Coles having any romantic or sexual interest in anyone, and he’d thought Coles might be gay. This was the only time he heard anything sexual from Coles.
Callum says Coles never told him about being any kind of ongoing relationship. He’d said he was a delivery driver, who moved around a lot, and being single fitted with his lifestyle. He didn’t seem interested in a relationship.
Here’s an officer spying for years who didn’t appear to Callum to ever have a relationship, and Callum thought that was fine. So much for other officers saying having relationships was vital to establish credibility and acceptance.
FAMILY INTRUSION
Coles visited Callum at his home and at his parents’ home. He says it was totally unnecessary for Coles to name and report on his young son, who was under six when Coles left. His excuse was that it was to identify Callum’s partner.
We were shown a long, hand written letter, supposedly sent from Budapest on 1 January 1996, from Andy to Callum, his partner and child.
It says he was glad to hear Callum was well, as he said he was going to leave the country with little detail.
He says he didn’t believe it when, years later, he was told Andy Coles was a spycop. Even when he was shown photos he couldn’t quite accept that this man who came over their house, walked their dog, and played with their son had been doing it all as a paid police role.
Callum highlighted the fact that Andy Coles doesn’t really report anything much about him or his partner. What was he doing in spending so much time with them? How can he justify befriending a young family for three years?
‘it’s a betrayal of a friendship… this is somebody we considered a friend, he came to our house, we walked our dogs together, he played with our son and we had no ill feelings about him whatsoever, there was nothing we can say “oh yeah Andy, he was a bit of a twat” or something, you know, it was a case of he’s a nice guy, helped us out and then went abroad…
Now it’s all tainted… it changes the view of your life.’
He is giving evidence every day this week. We’ll publish detailed reports later, but in the meantime we’re doing quick overviews of the key points every day. (Here are our reports for Monday 2 December and Tuesday 3 December).
Wednesday’s hearing was not livestreamed (or broadcast on iPlayer, for that matter) and it is still unclear if any more of Lambert’s evidence will be or not – there are rumours that some of it will be.
The Inquiry has now uploaded the (edited) transcript of Wednesday’s hearing. There’s plenty more evidence that’s just been published, so is available on the Undercover Policing Inquiry website: over 700 pieces relating to ‘HN10’ (the code for Bob Lambert).
These include transcripts of the interviews carried out with him in 2013-15 as part of ‘Operation Herne’ (an internal police investigation into the spycops’ misconduct), some of which make very interesting reading.
BIZARRE BEHAVIOUR
At the very start of Wednesday’s hearing, David Barr KC, who is questioning Lambert on behalf of the Inquiry, made some comments which helped us understand Lambert’s bizarre behaviour of the day before a little better.
When we heard him say ‘I’ve never been asked that before’, it was in the middle of a conversation about the way that Jacqui (an activist Lambert had deceived into a relationship and had a child with) and ‘TBS’ (their son) had first found out that ‘Bob Robinson wasn’t a real person but was in fact undercover police officer Bob Lambert.
Bob Lambert (far left) with baby son TBS at Hopefield animal sanctuary
Like everyone else, we thought ‘I’ve never been asked that before’ meant that this was the first time anyone had asked him about the events of that era since they occurred.
What we now think he meant is that the Inquiry hadn’t officially asked him about this subject. They had sent him a ‘Rule 9’ request (this is Rule 9 of the Inquiry Rules 2006 – which allows a public inquiry to send a written request asking for a witness statement or other evidence to be supplied). However, this wasn’t one of the questions asked of him at that time.
It appears that his memory, bad enough at the best of times, couldn’t function without this kind of advance warning. Barr took pity on him, and said on Wednesday morning that he will be sent another such request, and given time to produce a second, ‘supplementary’, witness statement.
The livestream was only suspended once on Wednesday, with even the Inquiry’s Chair, Sir John Mitting, looking confused as to why it happened. After about 15 minutes and an emergency Restriction Order covering a full nine minutes of evidence, everyone returned to their seats, and was told whatever had been said was not a problem after all.
At the time, Lambert was talking about how his ‘predecessor’ in the Special Demonstration Squad had been spying on people involved in organising the big ‘Stop the City’ protests of 1983. This is no huge surprise; at the time everyone knew how keen the police were to find out what was planned.
LYING ABOUT POLICE & MCDONALD’S
Lambert also said that there were ‘no links’ between Special Branch and the McDonald’s corporation, despite these being extensively documented.
Sid Nicholson, police officer in apartheid South Africa and Brixton before becoming McDonald’s head of security
McDonald’s Vice President Sid Nicholson was their Head of Security, and as a former Metropolitan Police officer himself, tended to recruit from within the Metropolitan Police ‘family’. Nicholson spent 31 years in the police and rose to the rank of Chief Superintendent. Both he and his side-kick, Terry Carroll, were based at Brixton nick.
It is believed Lambert worked closely with Brixton police during his time in Special Branch’s C Squad, before going undercover to infiltrate London Greenpeace. His denial of any knowledge of contact between the police and the fast food corporation therefore stretches credibility.
There were many points during the day when we marvelled at David Barr KC’s skill – especially when he face to yet another long, rambling collection of words that issued from Lambert’s mouth (calling them ‘sentences’ would be inaccurate, and an insult to grammar) and just reposnded ‘understood’.
Lambert consistently failed to answer even simple questions. And occasionally made unsolicited offers which he obviously had no intention of carrying out. One memorable example was when he told us ‘I won’t launch into anecdotes’, and promptly commenced to share a number of very long and boring anecdotes.
Supposedly somebody once called him ‘the boring man in green’ at an anarchist bookfair. Watchers have realised that he’s taken his method acting so far that he’s really nailed the character of ‘annoying old man’. One person remarked that he ‘is like that bloke you avoid in the pub’.
He is very unwilling to admit that he might have been inspirational in any way, and says something like ‘I can’t really imagine anyone finding me charismatic’. He thinks ‘Bob Robinson’ was regarded as ‘trustworthy’, and ‘reliable in all respects’, someone with a van who was always ‘available’ to help people and animals who needed it’.
UNDERESTIMATING HIMSELF
He also made a point of telling us (again) what a ‘junior’ officer he was during his time in Special Branch’s C Squad. He went on to boast of being described as ‘intelligent’ by Martyn Lowe (who was part of London Greenpeace when first spied on by ‘Bob’) and made sure we knew that he’d failed his 11-plus and not gone on to further education after school. Oh, and he was told he was good on a megaphone. He seemed very proud of this and implied that it gave him a purpose in life.
Inquiry Chair, Sir John Mitting
Mitting interrupted proceedings at one point to let Lambert know that his admitted involvement in various actions constituted active ‘assistance’ in the committing of criminal offences (‘aiding and abetting’ would be the technical term).
We heard a few examples of this, including his role as a ‘getaway driver’. For a man who claims not to have used any of the corrosive etching fluid he asked activists to obtain for him so he could damage windows, he seems to have got through a lot of it.
Things like getting authorisation, or worrying about concepts like legal professional privilege, or doing anything about miscarriages of justice once he’d learned of them, were not a priority.
We note that he has come up with a few new ways to resist Barr’s questions, for example
‘I can’t offer anything that I can remember’, ‘I can’t answer that competently today’, and ‘I cannot really offer anything today’.
There were lots of the usual lies and exaggerations, many of which were skilfully highlighted by Barr. Lambert was forced to admit that:
he had only met Ronnie Lee once before Lee went to prison (instead of ‘regularly’)
arson attacks did not in fact enjoy the ‘full support of London Greenpeace’
for all of Geoff Sheppard’s verbal expressions of a ‘visceral hatred’ of vivisection, he never intended or carried out any actual violence against vivisectors
He fell back to claiming that he made his reports ‘as accurately as I can’. He never admitted to stealing Chris Baillee’s diary, just made up a convoluted and incredible story about how its contents landed in an SDS report, having been somehow passed to Special Branch by ‘local police’.
He spent a long time insisting that activists talked about their criminal activity, and the idea of only speaking about such things on a ‘need to know’ basis was just an ‘aspiration’ that nobody stuck to. Yet if groups of people did talk about actions they’d done at any ‘private gathering’ attended by Lambert, he conspicuously failed to mention this in any of his reports.
It was clear that his role, like that of the other spycops officers, was ‘hoovering up’ any information he could get his hands on. He just added extra dirt to his, to make his work seem more impressive.
HUNT SABOTEURS
Another group he seemed very keen to cast shade on was the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA). He continually spoke of ‘violence on both sides’ and was noticeably unwilling to criticise the violence carried out by hunt supporters.
Jacqui has already told us about her experiences as a young female hunt sab, many of which ‘Bob’ witnessed at the time, but he pretends to have conveniently forgotten all this, leaving many of us wondering if he perhaps has friends in the hunting fraternity, or even takes part himself these days.
Tom Worby, murdered aged 15 near Gravesley in Cambridgeshire when a hunters’ van drove at him and dragged him along the road.
He admitted that the HSA’s rules precluded hunt sabs from ever using or provoking violence, but claimed that many people broke these rules, and that others within the HSA welcomed the police’s involvement in dealing with such ‘hot heads’. He also talked about the alleged existence of a notorious ‘Hunt Retribution Squad’ and kept using the phrase ‘visceral hatred’.
He doesn’t recall ever witnessing a police officer make an unlawful arrest of a hunt saboteur. He is unwilling to criticise any of the policing he saw – he thinks they did ‘a difficult job the best they could’.
It’s hard to listen to him and not recall the huge levels of violence meted out to hunt sabs in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of them were seriously injured and even killed while trying to protect the lives of animals. RIP Mike Hill (killed 9 February 1991) & Tom Worby (killed 3 April 1993 at the age of 15).
Some of this violence was detailed in the ‘Public Order, Private Armies: the use of hunt security in the UK and Ireland’ report delivered to the Home Affairs Select Committee at the time. Lambert’s deliberate failure to talk honestly about this era makes all the evidence he gives even less credible.
Tom Fowler broadcast a reaction video at the end of the day’s hearing, as well as a ‘Twitter space’ in the evening.
Lambert speaks so slowly, and there’s so much to ask him, that the Inquiry team have decided that they’ll need to schedule *another* day in order for him to deliver all his evidence. As well as Friday 6 December, he is due to return on Tuesday 10th to complete his evidence for this ‘Tranche’ of hearings.
He is bound to be asked back again for the next ‘Tranche’ (covering 1994 onwards, hearings expected to be in May 2025) as this will cover his time as a Special Demonstration Squad manager and spycops’ handler.
In other news, yesterday the Inquiry published another ruling from Mitting, making clear what we had already suspected about the anonymity applications of 15 other spycops officers, all of whom were part of the SDS’s successor unit, the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. The real names of 14 of these officers will be kept secret and just one name, that of EN107, will become public knowledge.
We’ll publish detailed reports later, but in the meantime we’re doing quick overviews of the key points every day. Here’s the one for Monday 2 December.
On Tuesday 3 December, Bob Lambert returned to the Inquiry to give more evidence.
The morning’s hearing was streamed on YouTube (and the BBC’s iPlayer). There was a section immediately after lunch which wasn’t, but the remainder of the afternoon is also available on YouTube.
Lambert faced some tough questions from David Barr KC, and we have some observations about how he responded.
Lambert seems to be a man who is used to being in control of a situation, and has developed a range of techniques over the years to help him ‘manage’ and manipulate people.
In Barr he may have met his match: someone who is not into being ‘managed’ and has come up with some tactics of his own. Those targeted by the spycops reported being happy to see Barr go after Lambert ‘like a terrier’. He was noticeably terse with this witness and his pathetic attempts to evade questions.
Some of Lambert’s favoured tactics include:
• speaking extremely slowly, in what may well be an attempt to bore listeners into losing the will to live
• simply repeating the words of the question, going round in a circle, and not actually providing any answers
• using phrases like ‘I don’t recall’, ‘I have no recollection’ and ‘I can’t assist’
• responding positively about the question and telling Barr that ‘Yes, I can answer that…’ but then actually not doing so
• deflecting the question by saying something completely unrelated to it
• choosing what he is prepared to say – usually prefacing this with ‘What I can say is…’
• saying something like ‘I can tell you more about that, if you want me to’ – in the style of someone who’s really hoping the answer won’t be ‘yes please’
• saying he doesn’t want to name anyone because ‘it’s so important to be certain’
• pretending to be a bit deaf and asking Barr to repeat the question, to give him more time to work out how to reply to it
There are probably plenty more; that’s just a few examples.
One highly effective method of evading any question in the Undercover Policing Inquiry is of course to make what’s called a ‘blurt’. This is the legal term for a witness inadvertently saying something that is meant to be kept private – in this case because the Inquiry has put Restriction Orders in place, that are supposed to protect ‘national security’ the ‘public interest’, or in rarer cases, the anonymity, privacy, safety and/or human rights of those involved.
David Barr KC at the Undercover Policing Inquiry
Lambert made his first such ‘blurt’ early on in his evidence on Monday afternoon, in a move that many said smacked of intention – there was nothing inadvertent about it.
Whenever this happens, it completely derails the Inquiry for a while. The live-stream is switched off, usually for far longer than necessary (leaving everyone who’s not in the room in the dark as all they see is a message on screen telling them the hearing is ‘suspended’) and the Chair usually ‘rises’ (another legal term meaning he gets up and leaves the room for a 5-10 minute break).
He did the same thing even more blatantly on Tuesday, when to universal disgust, he chose to weaponise his own son’s anonymity. The activist Lambert had a son with, and the son himself, have both been granted anonymity at the Inquiry. They are known as ‘Jacqui’ and ‘TBS’.
There was no question in any of the witnesses’ minds about his intention here. Lambert was being asked a series of questions about whether the police discussed informing ‘TBS’ about his true parentage. He was asked if he thought TBS was entitled to know the truth about his parentage, and said he had ‘never been asked this before’. It was clear he did not have his answer prepared.
Witnesses say his speech became more erratic than usual, and he made ‘funny noises and no sense’, immediately before turning with a big smile and after a pause, very clearly saying ‘we did discuss…’ and announcing TBS’s real name out loud to the entire room.
‘TBS’ and his mother ‘Jacqui’, did not find out Lambert’s true identity from him, or the Metropolitan Police, but from the media and from other victims of the spycops’ operations.
There is very little sign of the articulate, charismatic, persuasive Bob that so many previous witnesses have described. However we saw flashes of this more animated version of himself just once: he came across as very keen to talk about the conduct of one former colleague, and blame him for all sorts of things (sexist reporting, bad tradecraft and other mistakes).
Spycop HN11 Mike Chitty ‘Mike Blake’ at a camp in Devon protesting against government plans to kill badgers in 1986.
This was Mike Chitty, a man who we know Lambert came to blows with on at least one occasion. Chitty sued the police for the post traumatic stress he suffered as a result of his deployment. By this time Lambert was an SDS manager, extremely loyal to the unit and tasked with dealing with this disgruntled ‘dissident’ former spy.
As detailed in the book ‘Undercover’, Lambert spent 18 months pretending to befriend Chitty while at the same time writing a confidential report about him. It is clear that there is absolutely no love lost between these two men, and it’s a pity that Chitty is not planning to engage with this Inquiry.
At the age of 73, Lambert seems keen to play the part of a doddery, frail, aged man, whose faculties are lacking. As the Undercover Research Group have helpfully pointed out, he is still fit and very active, regularly taking part in his local park run and achieving good timings. in the 30-odd 5k runs he’s done this year.
We note that Mitting is much older, but does not appear to be impressed with the man’s character. He intervened at one point, wanting to pin down exactly who in the Met was involved in dealing with Jacqui’s discovery. We can only hope that he won’t be taken for a fool.
On his part, David Barr has been increasingly efficient at dealing with Lambert’s feigns, and snappily suggesting that he write names down whenever he acts unwilling to say them out loud. He’s used Lambert’s own words against him many times, and seems to relish reading them out loud from reports and from old interviews conducted with Lambert for Operaton Herne, the Met’s internal spycops investigatoin in 2013.
He asked some incisive questions, for example, about the source of TBS’s child maintenance payments. Lambert was obviously unwilling to admit that he used police ‘expenses’ to make relatively small payments to the mother of his son.
Barr was not pulling any punches with his most direct questions, such as: Why didn’t you just stop having sex with members of the public? Couldn’t you control yourself? Did you ever question, seven months into your deployment with two sexual relationships and one pregnancy, whether you should continue to be an undercover police officer?
It was noted that despite saying this was his ‘first opportunity to apologise’ to both ‘CTS’ and his first wife, Lambert has failed to actually do so. It’s disingenuous to pretend that he couldn’t possibly have reached out and apologised to them at any point before this, in the thirteen years since his identity was uncovered by activists.
He’s admitted to having had unprotected sex with an overlapping series of much younger women (whilst cheating on his wife), all of whom he accepts would not have consented had they known he was a police officer.
He smirked as he spoke about the way he was able to influence ‘Jacqui’ and her activism. It’s clear that he considered her ‘valuable’ to his mission, but despite claiming to care about her well-being, has consistently disregarded or ‘’forgotten’ many important details about her life and experiences.
At the same time he likes to claim that he was never ‘sexist’ or ‘misogynist’ during his stint in the SDS. His disdain and disrespect for women shines brightly throughout almost everything he says. It’s clear that he comes from a police culture of deeply ingrained institutional sexism, and will never shake off his loyalty to it.
That loyalty was most evident when he was asked to specify which managers were part to which conversations, and who knew about his transgressions, his sexual relationships, ‘Jacqui’s’ pregnancy and ‘TBS’s’ birth.
Almost every single word he has said was carefully considered and calculated, and no-one, not even Barr, believed that it was a coincidence when he finally consented to name those managers, and all the names he dropped were of officers who are deceased. He insisted no living manager had any idea what was going on.
We wait with interest to see what he will say next, on Wednesday 4 December.
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