Why the Spycops scandal deserves more of our attention

You’d think the very opposite should be true. Public inquiries are almost always born out of social pressure, driven by human stories, journalistic curiosity, and perceived institutional failures.

Secure one, and everyone lawyers up. Senior judges are summoned to chair. ­Millions of pounds worth of public money are spent. In theory, this should give the press reams of material to work with as inquiry teams diligently unearth the facts, accumulate witness statements, and key actors find themselves taking the oath, ­exposed to examination and cross-examination by experienced advocates.

READ MORE: If right-wing Tories make their mark Labour will surely follow …

These days, evidence can be live-tweeted by journalists and broadcast live across the internet to the interested public. In the era of on-demand streaming, high-profile evidence sessions feel like a throwback to event television.

But for all this accessibility, all the ­potential drama, all the human and ­official interest entangled in these processes, ­British public life is planted thick with judge-led inquiries which attract a fraction of the media attention they merit.

Why? Legalism has something to do with it, I suspect.

Given our modern society’s tendency ­towards short attention spans, forensic analysis easily becomes a euphemism for long, boring, and in the details largely unread, leaving the essence of a powerful story buried under the dead weight of the assembled facts.

Implicated in this is the issue of time. Public inquiries progress glacially slowly. Grenfell is one case in point. The inquiry published its final findings, a little more than seven years after the North Kensington tower block burned. Public life is flighty. ­Memories fade. Interest wanes. The news caravan rolls ever onwards.

Unless you can mobilise some other ­dimension of human interest in what’s ­being said – whether that’s the spectacle of Paula Vennells suffering under the cross of her failures at the Post Office, or it’s familiar faces from politics ­finding themselves confined in the ­witness box being grilled at the Covid ­inquiries – without the hook of celebrity or notoriety, the material public inquiries turn up can be all too easy to ignore.

Take another recent experience. The Post Office scandal is now one of the break-out stories of 2024. ­Everyone’s heard of it. Alan Bates is almost a ­household name. So is Vennells. Grasp of the technical details may still be sketchy, but the essence of the tale is well understood, as is the human impact of what was done.

None of this – at least directly – is an achievement of the inquiry. Sir Wyn ­Williams kicked off its public hearings in October 2022. Fourteen long months of human stories from subpostmasters were read into the record before the ITV drama propelled the story fully into the public imagination, dominating the news ­agenda, and creating widespread understanding of the miscarriage of justice.

You can see the pattern elsewhere. The ongoing independent inquiry on ­Afghanistan has unearthed credible ­evidence ­British special forces engaged and ­covered up their involvement in ­extrajudicial killings of detained Afghans. I reckon most folk haven’t heard of it.

Lady Smith’s Scottish Child Abuse ­Inquiry has detailed the disturbingly consistent story about a string of educational and religious institutions, public and ­private, theoretically concerned with the care of children – but which in reality, filled many of their lives with ghosts.

Although her findings reliably ­attract some publicity, there’s a palpable sense of ­politely turning away from the troubling stories of these institutions and the lie they give to consoling fictions about the golden days of Scottish ­education.

Lord Bracadale’s inquiry into the ­circumstances of Sheku ­Bayoh’s death in police custody can probably make a similar claim to flying under the news radar. It’s significant that you won’t find the most comprehensive ­coverage of these inquiries on the BBC or in ­corporate ­media but in podcasts and blogs ­curated by diligent citizen-journalists.

Given all this, maybe it shouldn’t ­surprise us that the Spycops Inquiry has met a similar fate.

Established by Theresa May back in 2015, the Undercover Policing Inquiry started a new phase of its public work last week. Its mission is to unearth the activities of the organisation euphemistically entitled the “Special Demonstration Squad” of the Metropolitan Police.

One overarching concern of Sir John Pickford’s inquiry is whether the astonishingly widespread infiltration of left-wing, environmental and animal rights groups by the police between 1968 and 2010 could be justified. In an interim report last year, the retired judge concluded that “only three” of the groups infiltrated by undercover officers from the Met – which numbered more than 1000 – “posed any credible threat” to the public.

The undercover officers, by contrast, posed a significant threat to the ­activists they cultivated, befriended, seduced and betrayed. The emotional core of this ­inquiry is how these agents of the state used and abused the women they met in these campaign groups.

But there are also questions about the extent to which these officers actually ­orchestrated the kinds of criminality they were deployed to detect and prevent, from penning defamatory pamphlets, ­passing on privileged information to ­private corporations, and even being directly ­involved in planting incendiary devices.

READ MORE: One-of-a-kind Alex Salmond leaves gaping hole in Scottish politics

There is also the issue of the ­identities they chose. Seemingly with the Home ­Office’s blessing, it was standard ­practice for officers on infiltration missions to identify a suitable dead child whose name and birth date they could ­appropriate.

One officer at the centre of last week’s revelations appropriated the identity of an eight-year-old who died of leukaemia years earlier. Shockingly, there are still some “restricted families” – as the inquiry describes them – who are banned from talking publicly about the identity of their deceased child, in case that exposes the undercover cop who stole their identity on behalf of the British state.

The modus operandi of these ­shadowy operators seemed pretty consistent. ­Present yourself at the community ­centre or at activist meetings as an interested fellow traveller excited to become more involved. Talking the talk and ­looking the part, these undercover cops ­inveigled their way into these networks – all the while aiming to maintain their cover, ­cultivate relationships giving them ­access to ­intelligence about what these groups were planning, gaining influence, and in some cases, apparently making ­suggestions for the kind of direct action these protesters might consider pursuing.

Their position in these intimate and trusting social groups was contingent on social ties formed, and several of these ­undercover officers seem to have recognised the value of establishing intimate relationships with the female activists. Many of these infiltrations spanned years.

READ MORE: Return of Chagos Islands brings an end to shameful colonial episode

Astonishingly, four undercover officers are known or alleged to have fathered children with women they met during their covert operations.

At the conclusion of their infiltration missions, some of these men simply disappeared from the lives of these guileless partners, who sometimes only discovered years later that they’d been living a lie.

Activist Helen Steel – famous for her role in the landmark McLibel case of the 1990s – was cultivated by undercover ­officer John Dines. Steel has eloquently described the impact of discovering she’d been recruited into this false reality.

“I’d been living with someone for two years and I now didn’t even know what his name was. I was deeply in love with this person and I knew nothing about him. It really throws all your other relationships into doubt. If you can live with someone for that length of time and think you know them so well and then you find out they don’t exist, what does it say for everybody else that you are talking to, that you are meeting with, how can you be sure that anything going on around you is real?”

This is state-sponsored gaslighting. Some former spycops have presented the emotional entanglements they fell into with these activists in self-serving ways, painting pictures of a stressful job, real friendships being struck up, and intimacy and attraction overcoming their better judgement and professional boundaries.

The evidence uncovered by the inquiry so far is far darker. The relationships weren’t lapses but reflected the cynical role sex played as a weapon.

The inquiry has now acquired ­written evidence from Dines who admits he ­cultivated the relationship with Steel “to maintain his cover and obtain ­intelligence” from her. He also suggests his superiors knew what he was doing.

As counsel to the inquiry put it last week, this wasn’t a misjudgement by a soft-hearted cop sentimentally ­living out his undercover identity, but “cold, ­calculating emotional and sexual ­exploitation” of an ordinary citizen ­exercising their ­democratic rights by an agent of the state.

If that isn’t ­newsworthy, I don’t know what is.