Robert Lambert

THE “spy cops” inquiry has been going on for so long now that its longevity is almost more incredible than the evidence it has heard and the judgment it will, one day, come to make.

The Undercover Policing Inquiry was launched in 2015 but continually throws up little nuggets of information and evidence that still deserve our attention.

This week it heard allegations about the spy cop Robert Lambert planting a bomb in Debenhams store in Harrow while working undercover, and that this was covered up by the Special Demonstrations Squad he had been assigned to from the Metropolitan police.

A joint witness statement to the inquiry from a group of 12 activists said Mr Lambert was “intimately involved in the planning and carrying out this action, including planting the IID in the Harrow store”.

Two activists were convicted at the time but, the statement said information about Mr Lambert’s alleged role was concealed from the original criminal court case and CCTV evidence mysteriously disappeared, the witness statement said.

The group is calling on the inquiry to “fully investigate the role Bob Lambert played in these offences and refer any related convictions to the miscarriage of justice panel”.

The SDS was an undercover branch of the Met initially set up to stop disorder and violent protests.

Mr Lambert operated under the code name Mark Robinson and has been criticised for fathering a child with one of the campaigners he was spying on.

The allegations come from a group of “core participants”, which include Dave Morris, one of the founders of the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign that was targeted by SDS officers in the 1990s.

The TSDC was set up in 1990 to represent 491 people who were arrested following the massive anti-poll tax demonstrations in 1990.

Mr Morris is no stranger to lengthy legal proceedings, as he was one of two defendants in the infamous “McLibel” trial, a defamation suit brought by the McDonald’s Corporation over a leaflet he had helped to make, in a court case that became the longest trial in English legal history.

Mr Lambert was later accused of being one of the authors of the leaflet.

In a previous statement to the Guardian newspaper, Mr Lambert said: “It was necessary to create the false impression that I was a committed animal rights extremist to gain intelligence so as to disrupt serious criminal conspiracies.

“However, I did not commit a serious crime such as ‘planting an incendiary device at the [Debenhams] Harrow store’.”