In the 1980s, Bob Lambert was an undercover policeman working for the maverick Special Demonstration Squad. In 1983 he adopted the name of a dead child - Mark Robert Robinson - to create a false identity as Bob Robinson, a political activist in order to infiltrate organisations the SDS unit deemed a political threat. These included Greenpeace and the Molesworth Peace Camp. In June 2012, MP Caroline Lucas accused Lambert of acting as an agent provocateur, even claiming that Lambert himself planted an incendiary device in a London department store.

To bolster his false identity, Bob Lambert developed intimate relationships with two women. For one of the two women, twelve years his junior, Bob Lambert was her first serious relationship. Despite being married with two children of his own, Bob Lambert, fathered her child. Two years later, when he no longer needed the cover, he abandoned his partner and their child, claiming he needed to escape to Spain. He never contacted either of them again. The woman only discovered his deception in 2012.

Bob Lambert went on to become head of operations at the SDS and coached other undercover officers, such as the notorious Mark Kennedy, in similar deceptions, adopting the identities of dead children and setting up false intimate relationships in order to provide cover for their operations.

And how has Bob Lambert been punished for his cold and deliberate deceit perpetrated upon women at the very fringes - if that - of the activities he was investigating? What sanction has been imposed upon him for fathering a child under a false identity then abandoning mother and child when their usefulness to his purposes was over? In 2008 he was awarded an MBE for 'services to police work'.

Bob Lambert is now an academic lecturing in Terrorism Studies at the University of St. Andrews.

If the Honours system is to mean anything in the 21st century, then surely its first principle must be that honours should only be awarded to honourable people. Is Bob Lambert an honourable man? I don't think so. Do you?