The sorry episode has left her wondering if he loved her at all. I feel violated," she said.Īs she was trying to persuade him to set up home and have a family together, he was resisting, claiming he had to flee abroad as he was being pursued by special branch because he was a dangerous radical activist. "I was cruelly tricked and it has made me very angry. She is very hurt that he duped her about who he was. The discovery has left Jenny feeling that he deceived her about the bedrock of any relationship – his identity. Jenny and others only discovered his true identity more than 20 years after they first met him.
The special branch officer was one of a group of police spies in a covert unit who have been infiltrating and disrupting the activities of political campaign groups across Britain for decades. Bob Lambert today admits he was an undercover police officer who had created the fictional persona of Bob Robinson to spy on political activists. It turns out that there was a lot more to Bob Robinson than his impassioned campaigning and shoulder-length hair, which gave every impression of a rebel with many causes. They had an 18-month relationship and one of his characteristics struck her in particular: "I thought he had a high moral code."īut now she feels very different about him. He was very charming and I thought I could take him to meet my parents," she says. He was, she says, "polite, considerate, very romantic, attentive, charismatic".
The love she felt for him rolls easily off her tongue. They fell easily into conversation and before long, Jenny was smitten. Jenny (not her real name), a 24-year-old who had come to the capital to find work, was intrigued by the slim man with the endearing smile, who was slightly older than her. The man she would come to know as Bob Robinson was standing on his own. They met by chance one night at a party in Tottenham, north London.