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Senior leaders overseeing a secret police unit allowed undercover officers to engage in sexual relationships with women under false identities, according to testimony heard at the spycops public inquiry.
Peter Francis, a former undercover operative turned whistleblower, said such sexual encounters had long been normalized within the unit. He stated that they were treated as “a standard part of undercover duties … accepted by both officers and their superiors.”
He also recalled that two of his managers advised him to use condoms while sleeping with activists during his covert assignment.
His testimony contradicts previous statements by senior police officials who denied—or avoided acknowledging—that undercover officers had intimate relationships with women without revealing their true identities.
Francis is the only officer who infiltrated political organisations and later publicly exposed the unit’s misconduct. Over many years, he has released information to the Guardian revealing systemic abuses.
It was his disclosure that the unit monitored the family of Stephen Lawrence—who was murdered in 1993—and their justice campaign that triggered the launch of the spycops inquiry.
Francis is testifying this week as the inquiry investigates the behaviour of over 139 undercover officers who surveilled tens of thousands of activists between 1968 and 2010.
He joined the Met’s covert Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) in 1993, spending four years embedded among anti-racist and left-wing campaigners. By then, the SDS had already been operating for a quarter of a century.
Francis testified: “By the time I joined, it was widely understood among my colleagues that sex as part of undercover work had been practised since the early years of the SDS.”
He added that the managers in charge of the unit did not discourage or prohibit officers from forming intimate relationships with targets.
According to Francis, “most” undercover operatives in the unit had sexual encounters with activists while concealing their true identities.
He admitted to having two one-night sexual encounters with activists while posing as a fellow campaigner. He chose not to name them, saying they are aware of his identity and wish to maintain their privacy.
He also acknowledged having several one-night stands with women not connected to his political targets, describing them as “people I met socially”. During this period, he was married.
Records show that at least 25 undercover officers infiltrating political groups pursued intimate relationships under their fabricated personas between the mid-1970s and 2010. Some of these relationships continued for as long as six years.
At least four officers fathered—or are suspected of having fathered—children with women they encountered during their covert missions. To date, more than 50 women have been identified as victims of such deception.
One of the managers during Francis’s tenure was Bob Lambert, a highly controversial figure in the secretive operations.
Lambert spent four years in the 1980s spying on environmental and animal-rights activists. During that period, he secretly fathered a child with one activist while posing as someone else, later abandoning both mother and infant. The woman—known only as Jacqui—did not discover his real identity until more than 20 years later, leaving her traumatised by the revelation.
Francis said: “Lambert … explicitly told me to always use my own condom.” He also mentioned a rumour in the SDS that a previous operative had fathered a child with an activist who had sabotaged a condom by perforating it. Lambert never told Francis at the time that he himself had secretly fathered a child with an activist.
