UK: Undercover policing: Met police pay compensation to man fathered by undercover officer

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The Metropolitan Police have paid a "substantial sum" in compensation to a man who found out when he was 26 that his father was Bob Lambert, a notorious undercover police officer. He had grown up believing that his father was a left-wing activist who had fled abroad. His mother became aware of Lambert's real identity at the same time as her son, after reading about Lambert in the papers. The Met previously paid her £425,000 in compensation due to the trauma she suffered.

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Met police pay compensation to man fathered by undercover officer (The Guardian, link):

"Scotland Yard has apologised and paid substantial compensation to a man who was fathered by an undercover police officer who formed a long-term relationship with his mother in the 1980s in order to spy on political campaigners.

The Metropolitan police has been compelled to pay the confidential sum after the man said in a lawsuit that he suffered psychiatric damage after discovering, at the age of 26, that his father was not the committed leftwing protester he had been led to believe.

He discovered his father, who abandoned him as a two-year-old child, was in fact Bob Lambert, a police spy who had deceived his mother into an intimate relationship as part of an operation to infiltrate animal rights and environmental groups.

Lambert’s alter ego was that of a long-haired anarchist by the name of Bob Robinson. When his undercover stint drew to a close, he disappeared completely from the lives of his long-term girlfriend and child."

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