Judy Murray: Amazing resilience of Kate Wilson, who was duped by police spy

The story of Kate Wilson, the environmental activist duped into a two-year intimate relationship with an undercover police officer, shocked me to the core.

Last week The Investigatory Powers Tribunal did the right thing and in a rare move, ordered the Metropolitan police and the National Police Chiefs’ Council to pay her £229,471 “by way of just satisfaction for the breaches of her human rights”.

They’d already found that the officer in question, Mark Kennedy, had “grossly debased, degraded and humiliated her” and that his bosses either knew about the relationship, ignored it, or were negligent in their failure to follow up on it.

Wilson – who only discovered Kennedy’s true identity in 2010, five years after the affair ended – quite rightly pointed out the award amounted to a long overdue recognition that spying on protest movements is political policing and has no place in democratic society.

She went up against the might of the police and continued to fight long and hard. And while she will have some gratification with the pay out, of far greater importance to her I am sure, is the validation that came with it; that three judges found that she was right and the police were wrong to do what they did. That’s more valuable than any money.

I couldn’t get over that someone – especially a police officer – could do what Kennedy did, start a relationship for the sole purpose of infiltration and gaining information. It certainly opened my eyes to the lengths to which some people will go to get what they want.

How must she have felt when she finally discovered that he wasn’t who he said he was? Deceived, devastated, humiliated, and completely violated. The effect of this cannot be underestimated. It would have impacted, not only her self-esteem, but also her confidence and would cause her to question her judgment of character and her ability to trust people. Like most of us, she would probably have asked herself how she could have been so stupid to have fallen for it. And who can blame her?

It reminds me of James Bond movies and The Spy Who Loved Me; that attitude of “let’s seduce the woman and hope that it leads us to information and people that we want.” But the movies are there for entertainment. You take them with a pinch of salt, and this guy is no Roger Moore. The real life devastation behind something like this is horrible.

Wilson showed incredible courage and resilience after such a massive blow to take this to tribunal. The case has taken up so much of her life and would have taken its toll on her mental health. That she did it alone because she couldn’t afford lawyers is all the more remarkable. What a woman!

She followed it through simply because what the police did was wrong and she wanted to call it out. Hopefully her actions will lead to changes not only in procedure, but in law if necessary to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Reading Wilson’s story will make women from across the social spectrum begin to wonder if their lovers have ulterior motives. Take note girls, and even boys. We should always find out as much as possible about the people who enter our lives before we give them our trust.