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An undercover police officer who deceived at least four women into sexual relationships and fathered a child with one of them is a “cruel and manipulative” liar, a public inquiry has been told.
Belinda Harvey, one of the women who had an 18-month relationship with Bob Lambert without knowing his real identity, said it was “beyond comprehension” how the undercover officer had used her.
On Tuesday she told the undercover policing inquiry that she had been “completely deceived and betrayed” by Lambert after falling “head over heels” in love with him.
Harvey said Lambert had acted in a “callous” way as he prepared his exit from his undercover mission for a year beforehand. During that year, he had continued their relationship and to tell her that he loved her, even though he knew that he was going to leave her. “It was incredibly upsetting to find that out,” she said.
Lambert’s five-year deployment as an undercover officer in the 1980s was seen as a major success by police chiefs. He was given a Metropolitan police commissioner’s commendation for helping to secure the arrests of animal rights campaigners.
He went on to become a senior manager in the 1990s running covert operations to spy on campaigners including those supporting the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.
The public inquiry, headed by the retired judge Sir John Mitting, is scrutinising the activities of about 139 undercover officers who infiltrated predominantly leftwing groups between 1968 and 2010.
Currently the inquiry is examining Lambert’s conduct, including his deception of women. It is also looking at allegations that Lambert set fire to a branch of the Debenhams chain in a protest against the fur trade, while he was masquerading as an activist.
Lambert was married with two children when he infiltrated animal rights and anarchist campaigners between 1984 and 1989. During his relationship with Harvey, Lambert concealed from her his marriage and his job as a police officer.
Harvey, who was not politically active, said she fell “madly in love” with Lambert when she met him in 1987 as he “appeared genuine, romantic, and attentive at all times”.
She believed that they were soulmates in an “idyllic” partnership, describing him as the “perfect partner”.
But in 1988, Lambert told her he had to end the relationship as he had to go on the run to Spain. He claimed he was worried that police were about to arrest him for crimes he had committed while promoting the cause of animal rights.
In fact, he had crafted an illusion to leave his undercover mission without arousing the suspicions of the activists he was spying on – he returned to work at Scotland Yard.
Harvey said she was “devastated and destroyed” when she received a letter in 1989 that Lambert had apparently sent to her from Valencia, telling her he was not coming back.
She said it was “just unfathomable” that the police had spent taxpayers’ money on “somebody to be in my life … he was at work when he was seeing me”.
Lambert is due to give evidence next week. He will be questioned about how he had fathered a son with an animal rights campaigner, known as Jacqui, without telling her that he was an undercover officer. He disappeared from their lives at the end of his covert mission – Jacqui discovered his true identity by accident more than two decades later.
