Robert Lambert

Robert Lambert    (policeman, spook, academic, “terror expert”)
Born	1952
Nationality	UK
Founder of	Muslim Contact Unit
Subpage	•Robert Lambert/Gallery •Robert Lambert/Police career
Undercover policeman turned "terror expert"

Dr Robert Lambert MBE, commonly known as Bob Lambert, who used the pseudonym 'Bob Robinson', (born February or March 1952) , is a former Metropolitan Police officer turned academic.

A long-serving officer with the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, Lambert was a key member of its secretive Special Demonstration Squad. He served both as an undercover officer - using the false identity 'Bob Robinson' to infiltrate the environmental and animal rights protest movement in the 1980s - and then later as an influential manager of the unit in the 1990s.

He subsequently set up the Muslim Contact Unit within Special Branch, which worked with British Islamists purportedly to temper radicalisation, before retiring from the police in 2007. He then began a successful second career as an academic, building on his work at MCU.

In October 2011 he was publicly exposed as having been a police spy by some of the London Greenpeace activists upon whom he had spied.

Background

Bob Lambert was born in early 1952; documents lodged at Companies House indicate that he was born in March, whilst a New Yorker article claims that his birthday is 12 February.

Lambert's grandfather Ernest served in the Metropolitan Police for a quarter-century from 1899 until his retirement as an Inspector in 1924. Ernest Lambert died in 1963. Little is currently known about his parents or other antecedents, except that his father was “a London printer and a British soldier” who “entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to help rescue Jewish survivors at the end of the Second World War,” and was subsequently “a staunch supporter of a post war reforming Labour government that set great store by social justice and support for the underprivileged.”

During the 1980s, at the same time as pretending to be animal rights activist ‘Bob Robinson’, Lambert maintained a home in suburban Hertfordshire with his then-wife and their two children. Their daughter died suddenly aged seventeen in 1992, their son Adam in February 2011. Both are believed to have suffered from the same congenital heart disorder.

After divorcing his first wife, Lambert was later remarried to Julia (referred to in the New Yorker as ‘Katharine’).

As well as the aforementioned Lambert family home in Hertfordshire in the 1980s, by the late 1990s Lambert is described as living in a house in north London. It is not yet clear whether the ‘North London personal address’ is distinct from the ‘Hertfordshire family home’.

Further to his October 2011 exposure as a police infiltrator, in January 2012 he was publicly identified as having fathered a child by Jacqui (previously pseudonymised as ‘Charlotte’), an animal rights activist on whom he had spied. Jacqui only discovered that the man she had known as ‘Bob Robinson’, who got her pregnant in 1984 but disappeared in 1988, had in fact been an undercover policeman when she saw a newspaper story with his photograph in it in June 2012.

Legal action begun by Jacqui led to the Metropolitan Police to formally acknowledge Lambert as a police infiltrator under the ‘Bob Robinson’ identity, and to it making a significant out-of-court settlement in relation to the behaviour of the service and its officer.

He is a supporter of Chelsea Football Club, regularly attending matches with other police officers including his former SDS and MCU colleague Jim Boyling. Lambert also shares with Boyling a passion for running, and both attend running club events on the outskirts of London.

Police career

Full article: Robert Lambert/Police career

Lambert joined the Metropolitan Police in 1977, aged 25, had a 31 year long career before retiring in 2007 He went undercover as 'Bob Robinson' in the animal rights and environmental milieu in north London in late 1983 or early 1984, until late 1988. After being pulled out of his SDS undercover tour, Lambert was redeployed elsewhere in MPSB, first finding a new home in E Squad, which dealt with worldwide "terrorist" threats In January 2002 he set up the Muslim Contact Unit, which he termed "a graveyard in career terms".

Academic career

Full article: Robert Lambert/Academic career

According to Lambert his involvement in academic issues began in 1995, when he received a first class degree from the Open University for an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree on European cultural history. In 2003 - whilst running MCU - he received a masters from Birkbeck College at the University of London.

Following his retirement from the Met, in 2008 he took up a place as a PhD student at the University of Exeter, an institution with which he maintained links until at least 2011 (in October of which he was exposed as a spook). From 2008 he also began teaching on a course managed by St. Andrews University. In 2012 he took up a senior lecturing position at London Metropolitan University.

In 2010 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Exeter. His dissertation was entitled The London Partnerships: an Insider’s Analysis of Legitimacy and Effectiveness. This dissertation (and the research underpinning it) later became the basis of his book, Countering Al-Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership, as well as numerous other pieces of work.

Despite his retirement from the police in 2007, Lambert continued to engage with the Muslim Contact Unit through his academic work.

Just before Christmas 2015, Lambert quit his jobs at both his academic posts, after campaigners had written to St Andrews' principal Louise Richardson.

University of Exeter & EMRC

After retiring from the Met in late 2007, he became a Research Fellow at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies in the University of Exeter's politics department, a post he held from 2008 until 2011.

Whilst at Exeter he became closely associated with Professor Jonathan Githens-Mazer, and in September 2009 the two together set up the European Muslim Research Centre (EMRC), which was officially launched the following January.

Following the exposure of Lambert as a former undercover police officer in October 2011, Exeter's university management has remained tight-lipped, making no statement about its errant academic, despite having previously heralded much of his work - right up to September, when the press office plugged the launch of Lambert's book at the Houses of Parliament.

Since then, though, the EMRC appears to have been quietly dismantled, with Lambert and Githens-Mazer going their separate ways, and Labert's name as co-director of the Centre being removed from their website sometime in the Summer of 2012.

St. Andrews University & CSTPV

In parallel to his post at Exeter, in September 2008 Lambert began teaching, lecturing and supervising dissertations on the e-learning MLitt terrorism studies course provided by St Andrews University's Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), which has a lot of "terror experts". That Lambert began work at St. Andrews University in September 2008 is obliquely corroborated by the reference in his book to “commenc[ing] regular train journeys from...Kings Cross [in central London] to Leuchars” - the nearest rail station to St. Andrews - in that month. See Robert Lambert, Countering Al-Qaeda in London: Police and Muslims in Partnership, Hurst & Company, 2011, p.xvi.</ref>

Since at least 2006 former senior Metropolitan Police officer David Veness - who as Assistant Commissioner (Specialist Operations) had direct oversight of SDS between 1994 and 2005, as well as a personal working relationship with Lambert through the offices of the Muslim Safety Forum, which Veness chaired - has held the position of Honorary Professor of Terrorism Studies at CSTPV.

London Metropolitan University & John Grieve Centre

In September 2012 - that is, nearly one year after his exposure - Lambert was hired by the John Grieve Centre for Policing and Community Safety (also known as JGC), a criminology unit based at the London Metropolitan University.

Lambert's role at London Met was not merely as a teacher, but as a course leader on the undergraduate Criminology and Law course, and as part of the team running the university's Professional Doctorate in Policing and Security (“the only doctorate course specifically in policing in the country”). For his work on the latter Lambert was fulsomely praised by vice-chancellor Malcolm Gillies in July 2013 “for giving excellent supervision while ensuring the course goes from strength to strength.” It is not known whether Lambert has continued his involvement on the undergraduate course.

The John Grieve Centre was originally established and led by former MPS senior officer (and recurring figure in the story of undercover policing) John Grieve at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College in 2003, before it was transferred to London Metropolitan in April 2006.

Of the seven ‘John Grieve Centre Team’ members noted by London Met's website other than Lambert himself, three have Metropolitan Police backgrounds, two worked for either MPS Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO12) or Special Branch (SO13) (now combined together as Counter Terrorism Command or SO15), two are alumni of St. Andrews University's Terrorism Studies course, and one has close connections to the University of Exeter's EMRC.

Resignation

In December 2015, after a long-running picketing campaign in London and a series of articles about undercover officers operating in Scotland, Bob Lambert announced his resignation from both his academic posts. According to a University of St. Andrews spokesman, Lambert tendered his resignation with effect from the end of the current term.

The announcement came a week after a letter to university principal Louise Richardson at St. Andrews, signed by spied-on activists Helen Steel, Lois Austen and Dave Smith, as well George Monbiot (who holds an honorary doctorate from St. Andrews):

We believe that his [Lambert] past conduct as a central figure in the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad means that he is supremely unsuitable for teaching and shaping the thoughts of others in his current position.

The SDS’ abuse of citizens and undermining of legitimate campaigns are one of the darkest corners of Metropolitan Police history. Lambert is no role model and should not be trading on his abuses.

The letter gave a detailed account of Lambert’s history as an SDS officer and further noted:

One has to wonder, if all this is not enough to make him unfit to teach others, what does it take? With fresh revelations coming to light almost weekly and the public inquiry about to begin, we can be confident there will be more.

Lambert's own writings, speaking engagements and media appearances

See forthcoming page Bob Lambert Writing and Speaking for the fullest compendium yet of such material

From his retirement at the end of 2007 until his exposure in late 2011, Lambert built up a reputation as an expert on islamophobia and police-Muslim community engagement. This enabled him to speak at many academic and political events, to have articles accepted by peer-reviewed journals, to be interviewed by both specialist and mainstream media, and even gave him regular opinion pieces in the ‘Comment is Free’ section of The Guardian website.

After being exposed as a spy, Lambert's appearances on conference platforms, in journals and as an invited author in the pages of liberal newspapers have been noticeably reduced.

Post-Met consultancy and other business interests

See also the forthcoming in-depth page Bob Lambert consultancy

Following his retirement from the police, Lambert became a director of a number of companies, each of which was directly connected to his academic work and contacts, but which were also linked to his past work in Special Branch.

STREET

Full article: STREET

In the words of founder Dr Abdul Haqq Baker, the Lambeth-based islamic youth outreach project ‘Strategy To Reach Empower and Educate Teenagers’ (also known as ‘STREET UK’) was set up “to provide alternative and safe environments for young Muslims to interact and comfortably express themselves among peers sharing ideas, aspirations and concerns.” It should be noted that STREET, whilst not officially incorporated until 2008, had been mooted as a project at least as early as 2006, and by Baker's account was active from March 2007 (though some other sources put STREET's foundation as taking place in 2006).

STREET was set up as a company by two Hertfordshire-based business registration services, Qa Nominees Ltd and Qa Registrars Ltd.. Its business address - both in terms of a registered and a trading address - was given as 54 Anson Road in Cricklewood, north-west London.

Bob Lambert was appointed director with Dr Abdul Haqq Baker, the initiator of STREET.

Lambert started this company after his retirement from the Met, but before he took up his posts at either St. Andrews University or the University of Exeter.) A salafi convert from Brixton, Baker worked with Lambert at least as far back as 2002, when MCU made contact with leading members of Brixton Mosque in the wake of the arrest of attempted ‘shoe-bomber’ Richard Reid, and they subsequently became academic colleagues. This academic partnership began at St. Andrews University, where - like Lambert - Baker lectured on the CSTPV Terrorism Studies course; and continued at the University of Exeter, where Baker was a research fellow in the EMRC run by Lambert.

Lambert's own son by his first wife, Adam, was seemingly also involved in STREET. According to Lambert he “played a pivotal role in establishing [STREET] as an effective and legitimate youth outreach project in Brixton”, working as its operations manager from July 2008 until his death in February 2011.

Lambert Consultancy and Training Ltd

In August 2008 Lambert set up a company called ‘Lambert Consultancy and Training Limited’, with his second wife Julia as its secretary, and - as with STREET - its registered address was given as 54 Anson Road in Cricklewood, north-west London. In March 2009 Lambert brought in his academic collaborator from the University of Exeter, Dr Jonathan Githens-Mazer, and Githens-Mazer's wife Gayle, as directors of the company. The company was dissolved one year later on 30 March 2010, having filed no accounts.

Siraat Ltd

Full article: Siraat Ltd

In January 2009 Lambert, along with Raymond Boakye and Carey Anderson, set up Siraat Ltd, a “prison-based mentoring project across southern England” with an address at a business centre on Coldharbour Lane in south London's Brixton.

Siraat filed its last accounts in January 2010, its last tax return in January 2011, and was officially dissolved in July 2014. Neither Lambert - who as designated company secretary had legal responsibilities for ensuring timely business filings to Companies House - nor the others formally resigned as directors before Siraat's dissolution.

In addition to his directorship of Siraat Ltd, Carey Anderson - under the name Abdur Rahman Anderson - was also a director of Street Consultancy Ltd, which he set up with Abdul Haqq Baker (who used the name Anthony Baker) in March 2007, with a third director and trustee, Sameer Koomson, joining in June 2007. Like STREET and Lambert's own consultancy, this too was registered to the 54 Anson Road address in Cricklewood.

West London IMPACT

Whilst Lambert was never directly involved as a company director, he was tangentially connected to the Initiative for Muslim Progression And Community Tolerance (West London IMPACT) project. IMPACT was set up in December 2009 by Abdul Haqq Baker, Valerie Chung and Najeeb Ahmed, using company formation agent Graham Cowan and with a trading address in the West London neighbourhood of Southall. Baker and Chung both resigned as directors in March 2012, leaving Ahmed in charge. The organisation remained extant and up to date with its business filings as up until its dissolution in February 2013.

Withdrawal of government funding

STREET, Siraat and IMPACT initially all received significant income (estimated by the Daily Telegraph to be nearly £1.3 million) through the "counter-terrorism" funding stream administered by the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT).

By February 2011 all three had their government grants cut by OSCT as part of a shake-up of the government's PREVENT strategy.

Exposure and post-exposure issues

Full article: Bob Lambert/Exposure

Having worked undercover as ‘Bob Robinson’ from early 1984 until late 1988 without being exposed, Lambert came out of the shadows somewhat in the mid-2000s in his new role as head of the Muslim Contact Unit. Whilst as a Special Branch officer he was not a wholly public figure, his community engagement work did see him make some public statements at least as far back as 2006. At the same time as his police career was winding down, his academic work began to take off. By November 2007, he had been publicly lauded in person by both the Muslim Council of Britain and the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

Having retired from the Met, he seemed to fully embrace the public acknowledgement of his work (both positive and negative), and accepted invitations to speak at academic and political events as an expert on subjects such as community engagement policing or islamophobia. Whilst Lambert's past as an officer with the MPSB, was to some degree known as he built up his academic reputation, he did not publicise his own close involvement in its undercover operations. Indeed, in his book, discussing the work of fellow Special Branch officer-turned-academic and private sector consultant Lindsay Clutterbuck in analysing MPSB files from the 1880s, he noted disapprovingly that from its inception the Branch had favoured covert spying tactics over transparent interaction with particular communities: “Infiltration rather than community partnerships were the popular hallmarks of an elite police department first established in 1883 to combat the threat to the capital posed by Irish republican bombers.”

It was after seeing videos of Dr Robert Lambert speak at anti-racism events that several former London Greenpeace campaigners determined that the ex-Special Branch officer-turned-academic was the same person as the animal rights activist they had known as ‘Bob Robinson’ in the 1980s. A group of them then decided to attend a Unite Against Fascism/One Society Many Cultures anti-racism conference at Congress House in Central London where Lambert was scheduled to speak on 15 October 2011, and publicly exposed him as a police spy.

‘Apologies’ by Bob Lambert

Since his exposure in October 2011 as a former undercover police spy, Bob Lambert has made only a handful of public statements in relation to his time in SDS. Each of these can be seen to include only the barest admissions necessary at that time, with his words chosen extremely carefully.

We list and summarise each of them below:

• Lambert's reply to Spinwatch open letter (23 October 2011)

Following his public exposure, Spinwatch - which noted that it had “shared platforms with Bob Lambert...at public meetings and at academic conferences” - published an open letter to Lambert calling on him to confirm or deny “the specific allegations so far made public...give an account of what you now think of your previous activities...disavow any previous activities [and] publically apologise to the activists who you allegedly betrayed.

Lambert's response was to “apologise unreservedly for the deception I therefore practiced on law abiding members of London Greenpeace [and] for forming false friendships with law abiding citizens and in particular forming a long term relationship with [Name of person removed] who had every reason to think I was a committed animal rights activist and a genuine London Greenpeace campaigner.” However, he justified his actions by saying that he had been “deployed as an undercover Met special branch officer to identify and prosecute members of Animal Liberation Front who were then engaged in incendiary device and explosive device campaigns against targets in the vivisection, meat and fur trades,” and needed “the necessary credibility to become involved in serious crime”. He makes no specific mention of the Debenhams case, nor of the extended infiltration targeting London Greenpeace members by subsequent SDS officers such as John Dines or Jim Boyling, which he was at least in part responsible for supervising.

• Response to The Guardian (23 October 2011)

The same day as Lambert's reply to Spinwatch was published, The Guardian also published a story based on “a statement” from Lambert “after the Guardian contacted him”. All direct quotations attributed to Lambert appear to be identical to sections of the Spinwatch reply, which is also referenced, which may imply that Lambert did not respond separately or differently to The Guardian.

• ‘Rebuilding Trust and Credibility’ (1 February 2012)

Styled by Lambert as his own “preliminary commentary” on his role as a full-time police mole within London Greenpeace and other groups, ‘Rebuilding Trust and Credibility’ was a brief text which he placed on his profile page on the St. Andrews University website. In it he again plugged his book, points to his earlier public apology, and adds that he hopes to continue in his work with Muslim communities. He makes reference to “The recent trial of two members of a gang that murdered Stephen Lawrence in 1993” which “serves to remind us of the self inflicted damage the Metropolitan Police has had to overcome when seeking to rebuild trust with minority ethnic Londoners” - but of course says nothing about his own key role in facilitating the flow of secret intelligence from spies in the Lawrence family camp to the team leading the Met's whitewashed response to the Macpherson Report. He alludes to his relationship with Belinda Harvey, but due to the civil litigation by then begun, he rows back to “alleged”.

• Interview with Channel 4 News (2-5 July 2013)

By the time of his first onscreen television interview since his exposure, the mother of the child whom Lambert fathered whilst undercover - Jacqui - had come forward, so now he admitted to having had four relationships with women whilst deployed in the field. Besides Jacqui and Belinda Harvey, nothing is publicly known about the other two. Lambert apologises to Jacqui and Belinda, but insists that he fell in love with them both. He refuses to say whether senior officers knew that he had fathered a child whilst undercover, but indicates that he will offer a full account to “the investigation team”, by which he presumably means Operation Herne. He denies that he was involved “in the planting or the ignition” of the Debenhams incendiary device. He admits that “on occasions” he was arrested as ‘Bob Robinson’ and implies that he used that identity more than once in court. He admits to co-authoring the McLibel leaflet, but denies knowing if McDonald's were aware of police involvement in the document. He again claims that his behaviour should not reflect negatively on his SDS colleagues, “the overwhelming majority” of whom “behaved impeccably at all times”.

• Article in Critical Studies on Terrorism (7 April 2014)

Whilst rather illuminating in the way that he discusses - if somewhat opaquely - his work in SDS, early on in the article Lambert explains that he “will not write my own full account in response to [the Evans/Lewis book] Undercover and [Paul Lewis' television documentary] Dispatches until I have first discharged my legal obligations to the investigations and court proceedings”. Accordingly, there are no further specific apologies to allegations, only that he “accept[s] blame for mistakes I made as an undercover police officer in the 1980s” and that he has “made public apologies for them”. He states that he does “not accept the pejorative account of my role in undercover policing” by Evans and Lewis.

Supporters and critics of Lambert

Since his exit from the Metropolitan Police, Lambert has received both positive and negative acknowledgement of his work. Around the time of his retirement, he was presented with first a ‘Friends of Islam’ award by the Muslim Council of Britain, and then a trophy from the Islamic Human Rights Commission “In appreciation for his integrity and commitment to promoting a fair, just and secure society for all, which, is a rarity and will be greatly missed”. He was also inducted as a Member of the Order of the British Empire “for Services to the Police” in June 2008, enabling him to style himself ‘Dr. Robert Lambert MBE’. A ‘Dialogue and Building Bridges’ award followed the next month courtesy of the Cordoba Foundation, at that year's Islam Expo.

However, following his exposure by London Greenpeace activists in October 2011, Lambert has been targeted by a number of protests. On 9 February 2012 animal rights activists disrupted a public seminar at St. Andrews University which Lambert was scheduled to speak at, reportedly leaving him “startled” as he was heckled over his activities as an undercover police spy. Leaflets detailing his infiltration were also distributed.

Then in February 2013 two online petitions were started, one calling for Lambert to apologise and face disciplinary action from his then-employer St. Andrews University, the other demanding that he be stripped of his MBE. To date, neither has drawn significant support.

Next, in October 2013 a preview of a documentary film on the subject of police infiltration of political activist groups was shown at St. Andrews University, and students leafleted to inform them of Lambert's past. This followed a number of articles published in student magazine The Saint which outlined Lambert's role as a police spy.

By March 2014 the London Metropolitan University branch of Unison had voted to support Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance, which works to publicise and resist police infiltration of political movements. This was then followed by a “packed public meeting” on the subject hosted by Unison at London Met in November. Later that year saw the creation of a group called [Islington Against Police Spies]. Comprising residents from the area around the university as well as those who studying or working in it, IAPS called for a series of pickets at London Met, describing Lambert as “a known liar, spy and exploiter of women - not in any way a fit person to be trusted teaching students at this University”, and with the aim of keeping up “pressure on London Met until they fire him”. This then led to wider coverage of the issue in the national media. London Met's management was then forced to defend Lambert publicly, whilst a handful of individuals - notably the aforementioned fellow John Grieve Centre senior lecturer Tim Parsons, academic colleague Stefano Bonino and Finsbury Park Mosque's Mohammed Kosbar - have offered Lambert their public support.

Court cases

In December 2011 Lambert was named in legal proceedings brought by eight women, including Belinda Harvey, who had had long-term relationships with undercover officers. The Metropolitan Police faced separate litigation from Jacqui, the unwitting mother of Lambert's ‘undercover son’. The Met settled this second suit out-of-court in October 2014 for £425,000.

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References

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