A cabinet minister has accepted a donation from a corporate investigator with a history of spying on political campaigners.



The education secretary, Nicky Morgan, who received £3,220 from Paul Mercer, is fighting to be re-elected in her marginal seat of Loughborough in Leicestershire. Mercer, who has lived in the area for many years, is taking an active part in promoting her campaign.

His covert work monitoring campaigners was exposed in 2007 when legal papers revealed that he was paid £2,500 a month by the security department of the arms manufacturer BAE.

Mercer was entangled in the controversy after it emerged he had passed to BAE a CD containing confidential legal advice drawn up by lawyers working for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. The advice had been circulated to a limited number of the group’s campaigners when they were planning a legal challenge against an official decision to drop a police investigation into alleged bribery by BAE.

Evidence of Mercer’s work for a second clandestine operation has been revealed in a set of confidential documents seen by the Guardian. According to the documents, he worked in 2003 for a secretive corporate security firm, The Inkerman Group, which monitored campaign groups, and was on one occasion part of an eight-person covert unit that infiltrated an anti-capitalist protest.

An environmental campaigner told the Guardian Mercer, now 54, regularly attended demonstrations in the 1990s and 2000s when he said he supported their cause. He often took photographs of the demonstrations, another said.

One of his associates, the Tory MP Julian Lewis, has previously said he regarded Mercer as a friend who “did a lot of good work exposing the far left”.

Recently Mercer, who made his donation in 2013, has been campaigning for the Conservatives in Loughborough, canvassing and running a website with a Tory councillor that promotes the party.

The Guardian asked the Conservatives if Mercer wished to comment, and attempted on several occasions to contact him directly, and no response was received.

Morgan declined to comment. Voted in at the last general election, she is defending a majority of 3,744.

In 2007, court action by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade revealed the payments Mercer had been receiving from BAE for the previous two years.

The campaign forced BAE to admit it had received the campaigners’ confidential legal advice from Mercer, who said himself that the document had been sent to him anonymously and he did not know whom it was from.

The campaigners’ lawyers had given them advice on tactics they could use to take legal action after Tony Blair’s government shut down a major investigation into allegations that BAE had paid huge bribes to members of the Saudi royal family.

At the time, Mercer said he had started work for BAE after he was contacted by a corporate security firm, Global Open, because BAE needed someone to search the media and internet “to examine potential threats to it”. He had a “very good reputation for my ability to rigorously search the internet”.

Global Open, run by the former Special Branch officer Rod Leeming, has been paid by firms to keep a “discreet watch” on protest groups that could cause them trouble.

The Kent-based Inkerman Group, which has also employed Mercer, has had former Met commissioner Lord Imbert on its books as a strategic adviser.

A confidential document produced by Inkerman warned of the danger posed by protest groups who used direct action to disrupt the “economic welfare” of companies.

Another document describes how Inkerman intended to deploy a covert team at the 2003 May Day anti-capitalist protest in London to warn firms along the route “of approaching trouble”. It noted that “Mercer will be on the ground as well”, but that the other infiltrators should “if possible avoid him”. Inkerman declined to comment.

During the 1980s, Mercer worked for the rightwing thinktank, the Adam Smith Institute, and wrote an unsympathetic book on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that he said was partly based on confidential internal CND documents.

He was a Conservative councillor in Loughborough between 1987 and 1991, and is seeking to be elected again to the local council on 7 May.

In 2011, Mercer, who says he is a long-standing journalist, told a meeting organised by a thinktank that he advised companies on public order issues, adding that he had spent 29 years trying to “combine an academic study of extra-parliamentary groups with actually going and seeing what happens on protests”.

He told the audience that he had been on “pretty well every major public order disturbance in London over that period”, such as the demonstration against the poll tax.





