A public inquiry is laying bare decades' worth of dubious tactics by undercover police officers

What are the police accused of?
Of conducting intrusive surveillance operations targeting political activists over a period of at least 40 years, using highly questionable tactics. Some 139 officers from at least two units – the National Public Order Intelligence Unit and the Metropolitan Police's Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) – were given fake identities to help them monitor the inner workings of more than 1,000 predominantly left-wing political groups, from 1968 on. Some lived with, and even had sexual relationships with, members of the groups they had infiltrated. Four undercover officers are known (or alleged) to have fathered children while living under aliases. These abuses are now the subject of a public inquiry, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI).

Why was the SDS formed?
To gather intelligence about anti-Vietnam War protests. In the late 1960s there were violent clashes between police and protesters; on one occasion, in 1968, protesters had almost gained entry to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. Plans for further campaigns by hard-left activists had sparked concern at the highest levels of government. The only way to gather intelligence on these demonstrations, the police concluded, was to attend preparatory meetings undercover, posing as supporters of the protests. In the event, subsequent protests passed relatively peacefully. But in the following decades, undercover officers infiltrated political groups ranging from the Socialist Workers Party to hunt saboteurs and animal rights groups, to anti-racist activists. Few were planning to commit serious crimes.

How did they infiltrate these groups?
Officers adopted fake identities – including those of about 80 dead children – and were issued with fake passports. They fabricated cover stories and immersed themselves in the groups, claiming to be sympathetic to their causes. Some moved into shared houses, living side-by-side with their targets. Tactics varied according to the group they were targeting, but some of the methods used can be found in a 1995 "Tradecraft Manual", which was written by former undercover officer Andy Coles (brother of the broadcaster and priest Richard Coles). It suggests techniques for blending in with activists, whom it refers to disdainfully as "wearies": that officers should grow their hair long and wear "big sloppy jumpers", for instance. "Being a little untidy, smelly and rumpled is a natural state for many of [them]", it states, adding that "the smell of fresh clothing from the suburban washing line" could arouse suspicion. The manual suggests that officers should "try to avoid" sexual relationships, and gives detailed instructions about how to go about adopting a dead child's identity.

How was all this exposed?
Initially, through a chance discovery during a holiday in Italy. Lisa Jones (a pseudonym) found a passport belonging to her boyfriend of six years, who went by the name Mark Stone. Inside it, she saw her boyfriend's photo beside a stranger's name: Mark Kennedy. She discovered that Mark wasn’t the environmental activist he had been posing as for seven years, but an undercover police officer with two children. The discovery set in motion a chain of events that led to the collapse of a major trial of environmental activists accused of conspiring to break into a power station; and to further revelations about such relationships. In 2015, the then home secretary, Theresa May, ordered a public inquiry, following revelations that Scotland Yard had infiltrated the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

What has the inquiry revealed?
The UCPI is one of the most complicated, often-delayed and expensive public inquiries in British legal history. Chaired by Sir John Mitting, it finally got under way in 2020. Three years later, it published an interim report, covering the period from 1968 to 1982, that was highly critical of the police. Mitting said that undercover operations to infiltrate left-wing groups, though carried out with government approval, were unjustified, and should have been rapidly shut down. The report found that police infiltration was legally justified on grounds of public safety in the case of only three groups – (Provisional) Sinn Féin and two unidentified organisations – out of hundreds targeted. It also revealed the human costs of the undercover operations.

What sort of human costs?
Officers collected a "striking" and "extensive" amount of information about the personal lives of political activists, ranging from their body size and holiday plans to their bank details. Police targeted trade unionists, some of whom suffered years of unemployment as a result. And at least six undercover officers had sexual relationships with women while on deployment between 1968 and 1982. Since then, the inquiry has heard evidence covering the 1980s and 1990s, including testimony from multiple further women who said they had been deceived into relationships with officers. It has also heard claims that crimes were committed or incited by serving undercover officers.

Is this still going on?
The police have sought to paint the scandal as largely historical: barristers acting for the Met Police apologised for the "indefensible" use of undercover officers to infiltrate political groups in the past. Police guidelines have been rewritten to ensure that undercover officers stay within the law: intrusion must be proportionate to the perceived crime or harm; it is "never acceptable" to have sexual relationships while undercover. Since 2016 there has been an oversight body. But when Mitting asked, in 2020, whether police are still infiltrating political groups, he received no answer. He made clear that he expects the questions to be answered before the inquiry ends; it is expected to report by late 2026.

Bob Lambert, undercover father
Bob Lambert was a member of the SDS who posed as Bob Robinson, a radical left-winger, as part of a five-year mission to infiltrate environmental groups in the 1980s. In 1984, he met a woman known only as Jacqui. She was 22, and fell in love with him; she'd found him to be "very charming and charismatic". Their son was born in 1985; Lambert was at first a devoted, hands-on father, but he vanished two years later, claiming he had to flee abroad to escape prosecution for his animal rights activism. In fact, he had been married all along, with two children. Jacqui only discovered the deception in 2012, when she saw his photo in the press because of the police spying scandal.

It has since transpired that Lambert deceived four women into sexual relationships during his time undercover. Even so, afterwards he was given a commendation and enjoyed a distinguished career. Jacqui has said that she feels as if she was "raped by the state". In 2014, she received £425,000 from the Met in an out-of-court settlement. At the UCPI, Lambert said he was "deeply sorry" to all four women, but said his superiors never told him to avoid such relationships. He was also accused of masterminding an animal rights plot to bomb Debenhams for stocking fur; he has denied this.

There were no survivors of the mid-air collision between a Black Hawk army helicopter and a passenger jet heading into Washington DC's Reagan National airport, said Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker. In total, 67 people, including several young figure skaters, died when the two aircraft plunged into the Potomac River. The next day, President Trump called a press conference. Reading from a prepared script, he referred gravely to "a tragedy of terrible proportions", and a nation "overcome with grief". Then his tone changed as he started to ad-lib his own thoughts: that the crash was likely the fault of his predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and their efforts to boost diversity in the Federal Aviation Administration. This, he said, had led to "lower" standards and meant people with "psychiatric disabilities" may have been hired as air traffic controllers (ATCs).

His claim was baseless, said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. Yes, federal agencies have sought to recruit more employees from minority groups, but ATCs must still go through rigorous testing and training, and the cohort is similar to when Trump left office in 2019: 84% are men; 75% are white. The truth, however, doesn't matter to Trump: for him, this tragedy was just another opportunity to blast his enemies and air a grievance that plays well with his base – that diversity policies have harmed the US by denying jobs to white men.

This tragedy should not be politicised, said Elizabeth McCormick, a former military pilot, in The Times. Instead, we need an impartial inquiry focused on three questions. First, why did the helicopter have only three crew? Training for a crisis in which officials have to be evacuated from DC, the crew were relying on visual cues to navigate. It's safer in such situations to have four crew. Second, were they too high? It seems that the helicopter had left its "corridor", and entered one used by commercial jets. Third, was the ATC precise enough? The crew had been asked to confirm visual contact with the plane, but there was another nearby taking off, which could mean that they may have been looking at the wrong one. The airspace above DC is challenging for pilots, said ABC News. They must navigate around scores of commercial and military aircraft and various restricted flight zones. But the once-small Reagan National, which is 10 minutes from the Capitol, is now very busy: it serves destinations all over the US, thanks in part to lobbying by Congress members who prefer it to Dulles International, which is 25 miles away. Arguably, "this was a disaster waiting to happen".

Having been acting for most of her adult life, Harriet Walter has, in her 70s, become something of a household name, owing to her roles in hit TV series including Succession and Killing Eve. She tends to be cast as elegant women who are tough, chilly, abrasive. But in person, says Janice Turner in The Times, she's warm, frank and disarmingly self-critical. "I know that my face can come over as quite hard and tough, snooty, bad-tempered," she says, "but inside I'm absolutely not feeling that."

As a child, she was a tomboy who loved racing around outside, playing vividly imagined games in which she was fighting Nazis in Occupied France. She never felt as if she were a "real girl", and was horrified when she reached adolescence and realised that she was now expected to behave like an adult woman. She remembers her best friend telling her to cross her legs daintily, rather than sit with them apart. "At the same time, she stopped wanting to play our imaginative games. I was still pretending we were in the French Resistance, climbing trees and shooting at passing trains. I think part of growing up and being an actual woman in the world took me a very long time." It was at boarding school that she found that she could channel her talent for make-believe into acting. It was her salvation. "I call it 'the nameless aspiration', this desire to express myself. I still have it."