Double lives and bent heads in Britain’s Metropolitan Police

The former senior British police officer, Robert Lambert, has reportedly told friends that he is meditating conversion to Islam. It would be a remarkable development in a career many are bound to feel has been sufficiently remarkable already.
A policeman who became an academic specialist in Islamic extremism, Lambert contended that Britain’s security services could best tackle Islamic terrorism by forging ties with Muslims who were known radicals but exemplary in their rejection of violence. His book Countering al Qaeda in London was, it seemed, the work of an ex-policeman of unusually progressive views who deplored British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s bellicose foreign policy and was anxious to promote better understanding between Muslims and mainstream British society.
Yet shortly after the book’s publication in 2011, it transpired that during the 1980s Lambert had been a leading figure in the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad, operating as both a spy and spymaster. Moreover, his covert exploits had been such as to compromise his standing not just as a public servant but as a human being of basic moral decency. In their incendiary new book Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police, the Guardian journalists Rob Evans and Paul Lewis draw on the testimony of Lambert’s whistleblowing undercover colleague, “Pete Black,” to reveal how Lambert and others infiltrated environmental and animal rights protest groups, even forming sexual relationships with women connected with these groups.
Their book includes a chilling photograph of Lambert in his guise as a hirsute activist fondling the baby boy who has just been born to him by a woman who had no suspicion that he was a married policeman with a family of his own. Not long afterward, Lambert vanished from her life without trace, as he was later to disappear from the lives of other woman to whom as an undercover officer he faked long-term commitment.
Lambert is now one of several former undercover officers who faces being sued by women who regard themselves as victims of gross violations. On top of this, he is being investigated by police from outside London over allegations that he firebombed a department store, co-wrote a leaflet besmirching McDonald’s hamburger chain and committed perjury by going into court and testifying under his activist alias. At issue also is the appropriation by him and others of the names of deceased children, a practice Lambert claims was condoned by the UK Home Office.
The other day, in an interview for Britain’s Channel 4 News, Lambert expressed regret for ‘serious mistakes’ he has made. Evans and Lewis report that the penitent ex-policeman has made contact with the woman who bore his child. Traumatized by a relationship she believes constituted ‘rape by the state’, she has been less than appreciative of his approaches, though he has got to know the son he abandoned. What beggars all belief is that Lambert has mooted the idea of selling the story of their life together to Hollywood.
Yet the exposure of Lambert’s unconscionable conduct has been all but eclipsed by the allegation of “Pete Black” that the Special Demonstration Squad organized the surveillance of the best friend and parents of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence, who was knifed to death by racist white thugs in south London in 1993, in the hope of smearing them as extremists. Many long believed that this most controversial of British crimes was never properly investigated, with the result that for years the young men suspected of committing it evaded justice; only in 2012 were two of them finally jailed for the teenager’s murder. Now there is an inescapable impression that the Metropolitan Police were more concerned to discredit Stephen Lawrence’s bereaved friend and family than to apprehend his killers.
The UK used to congratulate itself on possessing a police service that was an example to the rest of the world. As evidence of police malpractice piles up, it increasingly seems that there was scant basis for such self-preening. It is not just that the police have been guilty of egregious infractions. It is also that, in the case of the infiltration of environmental activists, they seem to have got their priorities idiotically askew and to have flagrantly betrayed their role as public servants. Staggering sums of public money were expended on elaborate undercover operations which may have led to the imprisonment of the odd violent animal rights activist but which almost certainly did more harm than good.
Some feel that the story set out in Undercover has echoes of the Stasi, the notorious repressive secret police of former communist East Germany. Certainly, it can no longer be doubted that Britain was nurturing its own sinister surveillance culture even as it boasted of epitomizing qualities of openness and accountability denied to those living under Communism. What is also plain is that exponents of this culture developed a disastrously tenuous relationship with reality. “Pete Black” confesses that as an undercover policeman masquerading as an activist he became consumed with loathing of the police. His double life was, he says, a “total head-bender.”
One may wonder just how bent must be the head of Robert Lambert that he could even think of propositioning Hollywood with the story of his relationship with a woman he cynically deceived. This possible convert to Islam hopes that his work with Muslims will not be discredited along with the rest of his career. But he and his fellow undercover policemen have much to answer for, as indeed do the Metropolitan Police Service and British political establishment that ultimately bore responsibility for their escapades. What Rob Evans and Paul Lewis have laid bare amounts to state-sponsored delinquency.