AVT026 - VID134 Matt Prodger on acknowledgement by Met Police that Lambert & Boyling were undercover officers, BBC News At One, BBC1, 15 August 2014. ▪ Programme page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04d4dv3/bbc-news-atone-15082014 ▪ Video source: http://youtu.be/QC83HKQ5O2M Speakers: JH = Jane Hills MP = Matt Prodger HW = Harriet Wistrich HS = Helen Steel === JH: BBC News has learnt that for the first time the Metropolitan Police has confirmed the identity of two undercover officers. Both men are accused of deceiving women by having relationships with them without disclosing their true identity. The Met, which is being sued by the women, denies authorising the relationships. It says they were based on “genuine feelings”. Our Home Affairs Correspondent Matt Prodger reports. MP: They were members of a police unit so secret they’re accused of deceiving activists into sexual relationships and even fathered children with them. Jim Boyling later married and had two children with one of three women he was involved with. Bob Lambert had sexual relationships with three women from environmental and animal rights groups, and a child with a fourth. Years later he was exposed and challenged by the activists he’d infiltrated while he was a member of the undercover Special Demonstration Squad. A court order’s forced the Met to confirm the two men’s identities. The Force has also offered a defence: “The relationships occurred because of mutual attraction and genuine personal feelings,” it said, and “it is denied that intimate and sexual relationships were started as a deliberate tactic.” HS: There was nothing genuine about it. You know, the entire relationship was based on a massive web of lies. They had all the power, and that’s not love, that’s abuse. MP: Helen Steel is an environmentalist, who says she was psychologically scarred after she was fooled into a two year relationship with another undercover officer.
HS: Eventually I found out that he had been using the identity of a child who had died when they were eight years old, and at that point my world really kind of fell apart. MP : She’s one of more than ten women suing the police over the activities of six police spies. Although the Met’s now been forced to confirm the identities of two of them, it’s refusing to be drawn on the other four. It says it needs to protect its undercover officers. Campaigners say that’s an excuse to hide wrongdoing. Matt Prodger, BBC News. JH: And Matt is with me now. So why, after all this time, has the Met done this? MP: Well, they had to - a court told them to, and there were a couple of reasons for that. For example, in relation to Bob Lambert, one of those officers, he has already publicly admitted his role. Now, with the other one, Jim Boyling, well, the Commissioner himself, of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, three years ago in 2011, admitted that he too was an undercover officer. So this argument that the Met had, that it couldn’t confirm or deny the identity of officers was effectively thrown out by the judge, at least in relation to these two cases. And that is a step forward for these women, for this group of women who are trying to sue the Metropolitan Police over undercover police officers. Now this has wider background as well of course. Not just about the tactics undercover police officers employ, but their targets as well. So for example last month it was revealed that Scotland Yard had for example gathered information secretly on eighteen people involved in justice campaigns over things like police custody, deaths in police custody, and holding the police to account. There’s also of course the ongoing judge-led inquiry which was sparked by claims that police had spied on the family of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. So this isn’t something that’s going to go away very quickly. JH: Matt Prodger, thanks very much. === Transcript by BristleKRS from scratch, 2014