UK Women Suing Undercover Cops Who Dated Them

Police chiefs have been forced to drop an attempt to block legal action by a group of five women who say they were duped into having long-term relationships with undercover police officers.

The Metropolitan police abandoned its attempt to strike out the women’s lawsuit after conceding that the move was neither “appropriate or proportionate”.

The Met cited last week’s decision by the home secretary, Theresa May, to order a public inquiry into the undercover infiltration of political groups and the huge public interest in the issue.

The women launched the legal action in 2011 saying they had suffered intense emotional trauma after discovering that men they had had long-term relationships with were undercover police officers.

The officers worked for the Special Demonstration Squad, the covert unit that infiltrated and disrupted political campaigners for four decades.

Lawyers for the Met were due to go to the high court next week to argue that the police would have been unable to defend themselves against the women’s legal action.

They were planning to claim the police had a strict policy of “neither confirming nor denying” the identity of undercover police officers and that they were therefore unable to get a fair hearing as they could not offer any evidence in court.

The Met refused to say whether it would now settle the cases.

The women welcomed the Met’s “long overdue” move and called on Scotland Yard to “stop prevaricating and acknowledge the harm done by the officers”.

One officer, Mark Jenner, lived for four years with a woman, while another, John Dines, had a two-year relationship with Helen Steel, the environmental campaigner who was famously sued by burger giant McDonalds in the McLibel case.

The other officers were Bob Lambert and Jim Boyling, both of whom have admitted they were undercover officers.

The women had criticised the Met’s “neither confirm nor deny” policy as a “shield to prevent any illegal and immoral activities by the police from ever coming to light” and “to avoid any genuine scrutiny of their actions”.

However the Met is still insisting its principle of neither confirming nor denying the identity of undercover officers is valid – a position that threatens to undermine the public inquiry set up by May to bring the “greatest possible scrutiny” to the spying controversy.

Referring to last week’s report into the infiltration of the Stephen Lawrence campaign, the Met said: “We still maintain the principle of neither confirm nor deny, as we have a duty, as recognised by Mark Ellison QC in his report, to do all we can to protect those officers who served or currently work undercover.”

On Thursday Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Met’s commissioner, met and apologised to Doreen Lawrence after Ellison’s report revealed how undercover officers had spied on her grieving family as they pressed the police to investigate the racist murder of her son, Stephen, in 1993.

Although the remit of the inquiry has yet to be set, Hogan-Howe told Lawrence and her lawyer, Imran Khan, during the meeting that he accepted that the inquiry would be a wide-ranging examination of the conduct of undercover officers deployed in political groups since 1968.

After the Met’s climbdown, the women said the attempted strike-out was the latest in a series of attempts to avoid answering their legal action for more than two years and to “hide behind a veil of secrecy”.

They added that the Met had been inconsistent in applying its neither confirm nor deny policy, rendering its attempted strike-out “farcical”.

The Met said: “The legal arguments involved in this case are novel, complicated and important and the ramifications of departing from [the neither confirm nor deny] policy, during litigation, was likely to have far reaching implications.”