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10 hours ago
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What function does a television series have when the disgrace it covers is already in the public domain? The “spy cops” scandal has been the subject of extensive reporting, spearheaded by the Guardian. There is no need to demand a public inquiry, either: one is under way.
Yet ITV’s three-part The Undercover Police Scandal: Love and Lies Exposed – produced with the Guardian and featuring its journalists Rob Evans and Paul Lewis – more than earns its place. Aside from television simply hitting a wider audience, the way it unfolds narratives using personal testimony has a power a written summary may not achieve. And, as the series uses the tricks, and some of the cliches, of the true-crime documentary to keep viewers happily engrossed for three hours, it gives us the time we need to sit with the story and absorb its importance. Because this injustice asks huge questions about Britain.
Over several decades, peaking in the 1990s and 2000s, undercover police officers infiltrated local campaign groups using false identities. You might argue this is an outrage in itself, but the scheme went much further. More than 60 women are now known to have had sexual liaisons, often developing into long-term relationships, with men they thought were political allies. Some even had children with the impostors.
Women who fell victim to these conmen – virtually all the undercover officers were male, targeting female activists – appear on camera to tell their stories, although most are disguised with wigs and makeup or their names are changed. Lisa spent five happy years with her boyfriend before a glimpse of his passport suggested he was not who he said he was. When the partner of “Alison” suddenly left her, she remembered finding a debit card with an unfamiliar surname. Helen – which is her real name, because she is the activist Helen Steel, of McLibel fame – was similarly abandoned by the love of her life and wondered if the gaps in his family history might offer an explanation.
It is a tale with all the twists, coincidences and courage that the intrigue-hungry viewer would want, told using tested true-crime tradecraft. Genre thrills kick in as the women remember apparently idyllic courtships, followed by creeping doubts, then their transformations into dogged amateur detectives. By the time one of them involves the Guardian and a snowball starts rolling, they have each independently busted the cover of a different professional spy. Then the scandal goes national.
The real value of this series, though, is in seeing the faces of the victims and hearing their anguish, which brings new clarity to the depth of the harm done. In photographs and home movies, and in memories of the times their partners accompanied them to siblings’ weddings and parents’ death beds, we are privy to those moments, all irreplaceable, all now tainted.
It’s not just the cruelty and professional misogyny that linger. That the women’s experiences were eerily alike underlines that this was an elaborate and expensive state-sanctioned operation. That raises the question of what would drive our government to such extremes. We learn part of the answer when we are told that “Alison” was in a community group that supported the families of Black people killed in contact with the police – and that, as the home secretary, Theresa May was forced to commission an inquiry in 2014 when it emerged that the Stephen Lawrence justice campaign had been infiltrated and undermined.
Many of the women were engaged in nothing more subversive than small-scale anti-fascist or environmental campaigns, yet were seen as nuts to be cracked with a sledgehammer. One valid response to this level of official chicanery is hopeless, reclusive terror; another is to be encouraged by how paranoid the spy cops scandal shows those in power to have been. In her interview, Steel reminds us that every significant right and privilege citizens enjoy today was won through protests that began at grassroots level.
“Alison”, recalling the day she deduced that her boyfriend was a cop, says: “I felt like I had uncovered something you weren’t supposed to uncover.” Shocking and disgusting as the facts of the case are, this documentary is part of a preciously rare moment when we can lift that lid a little higher.
