A FORMER police chief made a passionate defence of the secretive “spy cops” unit he commanded and blasted the long-running inquiry investigating decades of malpractice, before revealing how secret services and government were also complicit in the wrongdoing.

Ben Gunn, a former commander of operations of the Special Demonstration Squad, SDS, accused the current Metropolitan Police Service commissioner Sir Mark Rowley of “throwing us all under the bus”.

The Extra has published several reports on the inquiry, launched a decade ago, that have revealed details of how officers had sexual relationships with targets, fabricated evidence, used aliases from dead children, and – at times – themselves broke the law. Officers went undercover to infiltrate left wing and justice campaign groups that organised peaceful protests over four decades. It was set up as a covert response to the demonstrations in Grosvenor Square against the Vietnam War.

Mr Gunn, who stated “the home office and security services were complicit in most of what they did”, also faced a string of questions about the unit’s response to the poll tax riots.

He told the inquiry: “For the commissioner to say that the SDS was a dysfun­ctional unit, carte blanche for 40 years – when we know the home office funded it for 25, we know the security services and the home office were complicit in most of what they did – I think is an appalling stretch of the truth. And I fear that that damning statement that it was a dysfunctional unit was grossly unfair and there are a lot of people that have contacted me, from the undercover officers, who feel grievously hurt that their reputation has been traduced and besmirched by a commissioner giving half a story.

“I know Mark Rowley, he’s a very fair and reasonable man. But he threw us all under the bus for the sake of eight or nine miscreants,” he said.

Metropolitan Police Service commissioner Sir Mark Rowley

The Extra has reported over several years on the – at times bizarre – practices of the SDS, that filed thousands of in-depth reports on targets in Westminster. Examples include the Soho cartoonist Phil Evans who was monitored due to filing illustrations for left wing publications, who was spied on for years, the Pimlico Women’s Liber­ation and St Marylebone Liberation groups were infiltrated by a female officer for years using the codename “Sandra”.

The inquiry has repeatedly heard how groups that posed no threat to society and were merely campaigning for prog­ressive change were tar­geted as the operation spun “utterly out of control”.

One of the spy cops, John Dines, was himself arrested by police at the poll tax demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 1990, after being involved in assaulting a uniformed officer. He was allowed to skip bail due his use of a dead child’s identity, Wayne Cadogan.

Speaking about Mr Dines, Mr Gunn told the inquiry this week this was the “lesser of two evils” as him attending court under a fake name would have meant “a whole trial with duff details”, and added: “I keep mentioning a rock and a hard place, sometimes you have to make decisions which in the cold light of today may not appear justified. I have to say also when judging those matters… we didn’t get it all right.

“But we neither got it all wrong.”

The Undercover Policing Inquiry, launched in 2015, is due to end next year.