A FEW years ago I interviewed Donna McLean, one of the women lied to and seduced by undercover police officers from a special unit set up to infiltrate mostly left-wing protest groups.

It was August 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, so we met in a dark, dank pub, one of the few that were open, and sat far apart.

There, Donna told me about the man she knew as Carlo Neri and how he used her to gain access to the activists she hung around with. Neri, whose real name was Carlo Sorrachi, affected to like the things she liked, told her he loved her, and asked her to marry him. Then, when she had served her purpose, he disappeared.

Donna has since written her own book about her experience: Small Town Girl. The public inquiry which, back then, had not yet taken evidence, has heard similar stories from other women, whose lives were co-opted by a state intent on stamping out dissent.

Some of the undercover officers fathered babies with their duped partners: tiny bundles of collateral damage, their lives forever tarnished by the deceit that led to their conception.

Beyond the emotional fallout, two aspects of the scandal stand out for me. The first is the way the groups chosen for infiltration were cherry-picked. The Special Demonstration Squad (then called the Special Operations Squad) was set up in 1968 to target Vietnam War protesters. In the following 50 years, it sent officers into, amongst others, the anti-apartheid movement, Camps for Climate Action, and the campaign to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to court. Right-wing groups were largely left alone.

Read more Dani Garavelli

Most of those left-wing groups are now regarded as having occupied the moral high ground. Anti-apartheid activists were standing up against the iniquity of the South African regime while Margaret Thatcher was still refusing to introduce economic sanctions. The climate action groups were ahead of the curve on the crisis facing the planet. The Stephen Lawrence campaign exposed the institutional........

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