The woman, a former animal rights protestor codenamed Jessica, claimed former spy cop Andrew Coles lied about his age and had a “creepy” relationship with her when she was only 19.
But in his witness statement to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, Coles denied her claims, insisting Jessica had pursued him and he had spurned her advances.
He went on to become a Conservative councillor in Peterborough and the Deputy Police and Crime Commissioner for Cambridgeshire – in charge of scrutinising the county’s police force.
He resigned as deputy commissioner in 2017 when Jessica’s allegations became public and lost his council seat this year.
But he remains president of the Peterborough Conservatives and recently tweeted a photograph of himself with new national party leader Kemi Badenoch.
An internal police investigation upheld a complaint by Jessica about the alleged relationship in 2020, despite Coles’s denials.
And now to work… pic.twitter.com/XjR6DJ0O5N
— Andy Coles (@AndyColesFLW) November 2, 2024
“He’s a liar,” Jessica testified at the inquiry on Thursday (December 12). “An absolute liar.”
Her evidence was livestreamed online by the government inquiry.
Through tears, she said: “The worst part was my age. To know that at that age, someone so much older and not who he said he was… It just made me feel disgusting…
“Just the exploitation. It’s something I haven’t – it’s something I can’t get over. I can’t come to terms with it properly.”
Asked how it felt to know he had denied it, she wept: “It just exacerbates everything because at the same time I feel like I’m trying to prove I’m not lying. I’m telling the truth… I’ve had to sit here and completely humiliate myself to try and prove I’m not lying about it. Why would I?”
She said Coles – then calling himself Andy Davey – had “lunged at” her one night after showing up at her home.
She claimed they ended up in an “emotionless, passionless” relationship because she was too young and awkward to tell him she didn’t find him attractive.
Shown reports Coles had written about her, she said he had falsely claimed she was linked to the militant Animal Liberation Front and was part of a network of like-minded protesters.
She accused him of “tarting up” her lawful campaigning to make it “look more interesting”, adding that he had actively incited her to become involved in more risky, criminal forms of protest.
She said he had “created a cell” in 1992 and driven them to Great Hookley Farm in Surrey, to “liberate” around 80 battery chickens – the only direct action she had ever engaged in.
“That was purely because of him,” she testified. “I had to be persuaded to do that.”
Jessica said she now knew Coles was one of three undercover officers who spied on her friendship circle. Another – a female spy cop – had a relationship with one of her male friends, she alleged.
Jessica couldn’t remember how she first met Coles, who infiltrated north and east London animal rights campaigns for the Met’s Special Demonstration Squad from 1991 to 1995, basing himself in Peckham and then Streatham.
She said her first forays into campaigning had been with Hackney and Islington Animal Rights and London Greenpeace.
She also recalled Coles joining fox-hunting sabotage missions, where activists would spray strong-smelling liquids to stop hounds from being able to follow foxes’ scents, or use hunting horns or recordings of hounds howling to misdirect the hunters.
In 1992, she said she moved into a shared house in London with some other animal rights enthusiasts.
The precise location is the subject of a reporting restriction to preserve Jessica’s anonymity.
She said Coles began showing up unannounced at the address, late at night, and staying for hours.
The housemates would tell each other, “I didn’t invite him, I thought you had,” she claimed.
“Then we realised that nobody had,” she testified. “He just sort of invited himself. He would just show up.”
Whenever he arrived, she said, they’d all collectively say, “Here we go again!”
It was during one such visit, she said, that Coles kissed her “completely out of the blue”.
“He just, like, lunged straight at me and kissed me,” said Jessica. “It was the last thing I was expecting. I didn’t know how to react… It sounds stupid but I didn’t, and nothing like this had happened to me before.”
“I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” she added. “I kind of just froze… I just let him kiss me.”
She said she didn’t recall much about what happened next.
“From then on we just seemed to be in a relationship,” she said.
“It sounds so pathetic to say, but it was less awkward to go along with it than it would have been to do anything else… He wasn’t nasty. He wasn’t horrible. It just seemed the easiest thing to do.”
Jessica said she and Coles began regularly having sex, always in her single bed at her shared east London house.
“I was a pretty awful girlfriend,” she said. “I don’t ever remember being particularly inquisitive about him. It was not love’s young dream, that’s for sure.”
She described their relationship as being like an old couple who’d been “married for 40 years”.
She was “embarrassed” of the relationship, she said, because Coles was “fairly unpopular and kind of awkward and a bit odd”.
She told the inquiry she had been 19 and Coles had claimed to be 24. She later found out he had been in his early 30s.
“I was very naïve, I think, and quite stupid, to be perfectly honest,” said Jessica. “Now, I kind of cringe to think of myself back then.
“I wasn’t very worldly wise and certainly not when it came to boyfriends or anything like that.”
Catch up on our past Spy Cops Inquiry coverage:
“Had you known he was really 31 or 32, do you think you would have reacted to him differently?” Jessica was asked.
“Yes, because it’s – it’s not right,” she replied. “There’s no reason for someone that age to be trying to go out with someone that’s that much younger. It’s creepy. It’s inappropriate. It’s really inappropriate…
“It’s not a comfortable thing – someone of that age being interested in someone that’s 19. There’s something wrong about it. It’s bordering on a schoolteacher-student kind of thing.”
After a few months, Jessica told the inquiry, she accepted a job in France but remained in a “long-distance relationship” with Coles.
They eventually broke up and she later found out from another woman that he had tried to kiss her during his relationship with Jessica, she said.
“She was more mortified about it than I was,” Jessica said. “I didn’t care.”
She called Coles a “creepy letch” who had been “quite sexually pushy” with the other woman, although she said she had heard this third-hand.
The other woman has since died but spoke to a journalist before she did, the inquiry heard.
When she found out Coles was not only a spy cop, but one who had gone on to become a Conservative politician, Jessica told the inquiry she had felt a duty to warn people about his character.
“You know – another position of power. That’s the thing,” she said. “When I was a teenager he had the power that I didn’t and he completely abused it.”
She said she had travelled repeatedly to Peterborough to hand out leaflets, “just to tell people what he did when he was undercover and just warn people, because I don’t want anyone else to feel the weight that I have felt since I found out”.
But, she said, she was met with “friends of his telling me I’m a liar and he’s done nothing wrong… It’s made it a lot harder”.
Coles is due to appear at the inquiry to answer the allegations next week.
