A former police spy, Special Branch manipulator, abuser of women, and agent provocateur, Robert Lambert is not in any way a fit person to be trusted teaching students policing and criminology.

He spent the 1980s and 1990s in Special Branch’s now discredited Special Demonstrations Squad, spying on community and activist groups campaigning against violence and oppression.

While pretending to be an activist involved in peace and animal rights campaigns, he acted as an agent provocateur, encouraging people to carry out illegal actions which would lead to their arrest.

He also had sexual relationships with several women campaigners, lying to them about his identity and then disappearing from their lives – in the most abusive breach of trust imaginable. One woman even had a child fathered by Lambert. Only decades later did any of them discover he was a police spy.

Lambert went on to run the Special Demonstrations Squad, supervising spies in many other political campaigns. Following his own example, almost all of the thirteen other undercover police so far unmasked have also used their position to sexually exploit women who were unaware of their real role.

He is also directly implicated in police attempts to spy on, smear and discredit Stephen Lawrence’s family campaign against the police failures to investigate Stephen’s racist murder in 1993.

As a group of academics recently asked: "is there anyone less well-qualified to teach the next generation of senior police officers and management staff?"