Deceived Into a Relationship by an Undercover Officer: Britain's 'Spy Cop' Row Puts Coles and Jessica Face to Face Again
A former Metropolitan Police undercover officer, Andrew Coles, is once again at the centre of Britain's long-running inquiry into undercover policing. The allegation against him is that, while working under a false identity inside a protest movement, he deceived a young woman activist into a relationship. Coles strongly denies every allegation and says he himself has been the victim of a deception.
Coles's present life could hardly be more different from his secret past. The 66-year-old now lives with his wife and their greyhound in a thatched cottage in rural Cambridgeshire. He sings in a church choir and is active in local Conservative politics. Yet between 1990 and 1995 he served in the Metropolitan Police Service's undercover Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a unit that infiltrated political and protest groups.
That unit's activities have been under examination for a decade by the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI). Established in 2015 by then home secretary Theresa May, the inquiry is investigating whether officers deceived women into sexual relationships, spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, adopted the names of dead children and infiltrated groups without justification.
The complainant, known as Jessica — not her real name — is an animal rights activist. She alleges the officer deceived her into a sexual relationship. The Metropolitan Police itself has admitted that Coles had a sexual relationship with Jessica. The force's commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, has written that the MPS admitted the relationship and was disappointed that Coles had not told the truth to the inquiry. Coles also faces an allegation that he advised colleagues on having similar relationships.
The story began in 1991. Taking the name "Andy Davey" from a dead child's identity, Coles made contact with the Animal Liberation Front, an extremist direct-action group. In Jessica's recollection, she was a naive 19-year-old living in a shared terraced flat in east London and looking for adventure. Davey was an older, scruffy man who drove a van — and that, she says, made him popular in the close circle of like-minded activists around her.
Jessica says he would come to the house late at night and they would struggle to get rid of him. Then one night, without warning, he moved to kiss her. She did not have the confidence to get out of the situation, and he became her first real boyfriend. But the reality was very different: Jessica believed Davey was 24; in fact he was 32, married and had a child. Nor was he a fellow hunt saboteur. After several ALF members were convicted of arson and bomb attacks, he was secretly gathering intelligence as part of a criminal investigation into the organisation.
In Jessica's words: "He had groomed me. He slept in my single bed several times a week, and I didn't know who he was. It's hard to call it rape, but he knew that having sex with me would have been against my consent." Coles has admitted sleeping in Jessica's bed once but says there was no sexual contact. "Her story is not true, not true at all," he insists. Pressed on the weight of the evidence, however, he concedes: "It's very hard to refute."
Among the evidence are two handwritten letters Jessica wrote in 1993 to her closest friend while she was in France. In the first she wrote: "It's really weird, but I'm still in love with Andy." The second referred to a startling proposal involving other partners. Coles has a theory about the letters: he suggests the second was written much later and added to the evidence bundle, because its elegant cursive handwriting is nothing like the near-childish scrawl of the original, while the second is in a neat, elaborate hand. Jessica replies that when she writes slowly she can make her writing neat, but hurried or angry writing looks completely different. Forensic graphologist Kate Barr told the BBC that Jessica's handwriting showed variation and that it was possible she wrote both letters at around the same time.
In an exclusive interview, Coles said the qualities a good undercover officer needs are resilience, courage and ruthlessness. "I think so too," he said, "although I didn't act very differently from my own personality." He also admitted that to win trust and protect his cover he sometimes had to break the law. "I took drugs — cannabis. It was necessary — someone had to vouch for your credibility," he said. He described spraying liquid from a lemon-squeezer bottle said to contain acid at a butcher's shop window, and taking part in a raid on a chicken farm in which some chickens were stolen and property damaged. Even so, he maintains: "The work wasn't to everyone's taste, but I protected a section of society from some extremely dangerous people, and I think I did a good job."
Giving evidence to the inquiry in 2024, Coles was questioned about references in his intelligence reports to women activists' "good looks." Asked whether the sexual attractiveness of the women he mixed with was in his mind, he replied: "No, not for me, but it was certainly... notable." He was then confronted with accounts from witnesses, many of whom did not know Jessica, who described him as a "sexual predator," a "weirdo" and a "lecher." Some alleged he stalked women and tried to initiate unwanted sexual contact. Three people said they had seen him in a van in an intimate situation with Jessica, or leaving her bedroom wearing only boxer shorts. Coles dismissed their stories as "complete fabrications."
Coles's identity was exposed unexpectedly through his famous brother, who wrote in his 2014 autobiography that his elder brother Andy had brought his own drama, having joined Special Branch, lived a double life undercover and infiltrated some sinister organisation, while his wife and baby daughter survived on irregular visits. In 2018 the UCPI confirmed Coles's identity as "Andy Davey," operative HN2. Asked whether his brother regrets writing those words, Coles said: "It might have been easier if he hadn't, but I bear no ill will; he is my brother and I love him deeply, so it's not a problem for me."
For Jessica, the realisation was far harder. She was then building a business and an art studio. In her words: "They created this man and put him into my life, into my bed. It was an extreme violation. It was like being raped by the state. He was surveilling my parents, my friends. And why? I was a hunt saboteur. I have no criminal record... and all these officers were just watching people who came to rescue chickens."
After leaving the Metropolitan Police in 2012, Coles worked at Peterborough City Council and served as deputy police and crime commissioner for Cambridgeshire. But after his unmasking there was a fierce backlash. Jessica and her supporters branded him a misogynist, protested at council meetings and campaigned against him. Coles says: "They met the council leader; they wrote to charities I'm involved with saying, don't trust this man; they produced leaflets." A former chairman of the Peterborough Conservative Association, Coles lost his council seat in 2024 and has twice stood unsuccessfully for re-election.
The inquiry also heard of a 2019 encounter in a residential area of Peterborough. Jessica said: "I turned around and he was standing about 10 feet from me and my colleague, holding a camera in my face, filming us and saying, you should be in jail. It was the closest he had been to me in 30 years, and I just wanted to get away." Coles admitted snatching leaflets from one person's hand.
Jessica's position is clear: "He should not hold a position of power. When he was in a relationship with me, he held a powerful position and abused that power in the most appalling way." She says people need to know, and she does not want him to do the same to anyone else. Coles, for his part, remains adamant about his innocence. The final report of this decade-long inquiry will ultimately decide where responsibility lies for what was done in the name of covert state operations.
