Spy cops scandal: ‘creepy’ officer formed sexual relationship with teen in 1990s
Activist tells public inquiry Andy Coles lied about his age and manipulated her into relationship when she was 19
A “creepy” undercover police officer in his 30s formed a sexual relationship with a teenage activist without disclosing his true identity to her, a public inquiry has been told.
The activist, known as Jessica, said the deception by Andy Coles, the undercover officer, was “disgusting and gross”.
She said she was a “quite young and naive 19” when she started a relationship with Coles, who was 31 at the time. It was her first relationship.
She told the undercover policing inquiry that he was a “creepy lech”. She discovered that he was an undercover officer only when he was exposed in 2017 after a throwaway remark by his brother, the broadcaster and former pop star Richard Coles.
Richard Coles had made a brief reference in his autobiography to his brother’s past work as an undercover police officer. This enabled activists to piece together Andy Coles’s deployment infiltrating animal rights groups in the 1990s. He went on to become a Conservative councillor after he left the police.
His conduct is being scrutinised by an undercover policing inquiry which is looking at how about 139 police officers adopted fake identities and were sent on deployments – usually lasting four years – to spy on more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and 2010.
Andy Coles, who is due to be questioned by the inquiry this week, denies that he had a relationship with Jessica. However, the Metropolitan police, his former employer, has told the inquiry that Coles had an intimate relationship with her in 1992 and 1993 and does not accept his denial. The Met has previously said Coles would have faced a disciplinary hearing on a charge of gross misconduct if he had not already retired from the police in 2013.
Giving evidence last Thursday, Jessica said the deception affected her to this day, and she broke down when asked how she felt about his denials. She said: “I feel like I’m fighting all the time to try to prove that I’m not lying. It’s made it a lot harder.” He was an “absolute liar”, she said.
Two of her contemporaneous letters to friends referred to her relationship with Coles.
She described how the relationship started one night when they were sitting together watching television. Out of the blue, Coles “just lunged straight at me and kissed me”.
Asked how she felt, she replied: “Shock. It was the last thing I was expecting … I didn’t really know how to react. Nothing like this had happened to me before so I didn’t really know what to do. I think my overriding feeling was that … I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings.”
She said Coles had told her that he was 24 at the time, when he was actually about 31. She called their relationship “fairly emotionless, passionless and not love’s young dream”.
She said she was manipulated into a relationship that she did not really want, adding that the worst part was “my age … someone so much older and not who he said he was … it’s disgusting”.
In 2014, Richard Coles wrote in his autobiography that his older brother had infiltrated “some sinister organisation”, writing: “He looked like he had just walked out of the woods, his hair long and shaggy, with a straggly beard, his ears rattling with piercings.”
That provided a clue, which led to activists exposing Andy Coles’s covert past and deception of Jessica in 2017. The revelation compelled him to resign as the deputy police and crime commissioner for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
He is the president of the Peterborough Conservative Association and was a councillor in the city between 2015 and May this year.
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