Metropolitan police lose legal fight over keeping secret the names of officers who fathered children with their 'targets'

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Police chiefs have been forced to confirm for the first time the identities of two undercover police officers who fathered children with campaigners from groups they had been sent to infiltrate.

A high court judge had ordered the Metropolitan police to make the disclosures after the force lost a legal battle. The Met had fought to keep secret the identities of the two undercover officers, Bob Lambert and Jim Boyling, since a group of women launched a lawsuit three years ago.

The women are suing the Met saying they have suffered intense emotional trauma and pain after learning they had been deceived into forming long-term relationships with undercover police officers.

Harriet Wistrich, a lawyer representing the women, said the disclosures were a "partial victory" for the women: "The police have been pulled, kicking and screaming, to this first extremely significant development in the litigation brought by the women in their long battle for justice and accountability."

Lambert had sexual relationships with four women while he infiltrated animal rights and environmental groups between 1984 and 1988. He fathered a son with one campaigner but abandoned both of them when the child was an infant.

He had a 18-month relationship with another woman, Belinda Harvey, while pretending to be a left-wing campaigner called Bob Robinson.

Boyling had sexual relationships with at least three women while posing as an environmental activist, under the false name of Jim Sutton, between 1995 and 2000. He later married one of them and had two children with her before they divorced in 2008.

Both were members of Scotland Yard's controversial undercover unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, that infiltrated hundreds of political groups between 1968 and 2008. Last month, the Met was criticised after it was revealed that the unit had collected information on 18 grieving families who were campaigning against police.

The women's lawsuit continues as the Met is rejecting their claims that the force was legally responsible for the trauma experienced by them.

In a legal filing at the high court, the Met denied that Lambert and Boyling were authorised by their supervisors to form the relationships with the women or that "intimate and sexual relationships were started as a deliberate tactic" to gather intelligence about campaigners.

The Met said that the pair "violated explicit guidance" from their managers that undercover officers should not have long-term, or "emotionally committed" relationships during their deployments.

The Met said that the two men started the relationships "because of mutual attraction and genuine personal feelings".

Harvey said she was "very upset" by the Met's stance, adding that her relationship with Lambert was "a total violation of me and my life".

She said: "How can a relationship be genuine when it is based on a massive web of lies? He pretended to be a man with noble ideals and political commitments, when in reality he was a police officer spying on our friendship network.

"He pretended he was committed to the future when he always knew he would go back to his real job and wife and kids. That doesn't show genuine feelings; it is abuse and I would never have consented to such a relationship had I known."

Wistrich said that the confirmation of the pair's identities did not "go far enough. It is mealy mouthed, offensive and lacking in any acknowledgment of the huge abuse of power and harm caused to my clients".

The Met had argued in court that they have a strict, unbreakable policy of neither confirming nor denying whether a particular individual was an undercover officer, in order to protect them and their operations.

The Met had claimed that this policy prevented the force from contesting the women's legal action.

However, Mr Justice Bean ruled last month that it was "simply unsustainable" for the Met to conceal the identities of Lambert and Boyling.

Lambert had admitted publicly he was an undercover officer, while Bernard Hogan-Hogan, the Met's Commissioner, had referred to Sutton, Boyling's fake name, in a public meeting.

More than 10 women are taking legal action against the police over relationships they formed with men who they later found out were undercover officers, including Mark Kennedy, who infiltrated environmental groups for seven years.