On Friday 19th June 2026, at the end of an emotional day for Helen Steel who was giving evidence to the Public Inquiry into Undercover Policing about being deceived into intimate sexual relationship with Special Branch officer John Dines, Inquiry Chair Sir John Mitting asked her to reflect upon whether Dines might have had any genuine feelings for her.
I can’t believe that we still have to speak to this after all this time. We’ve been making these same points for 15 years now, but still it keeps coming up. At best, it felt insensitive given the 30 or so years that Helen has been grappling with all the complex emotions of such questions. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) used the phrase ‘genuine feelings’ as a reason not to prosecute Jim Boyling back in 2018, and Mitting’s phrasing reflected exactly those words.
In some ways though, I’m glad Mitting has expressed that this is what’s on his mind, as it means we can counter it, as Helen very robustly did at the time. It needs nipping in the bud again and again whenever it’s raised. The phrase “genuine feelings” needs interrogating. What does it mean? And why does it matter?
I imagine the undercover officers who deceived women into relationships will have felt many different ‘genuine’ feelings including the guilty pleasure of sleeping with their targets; narcissistic gratification of illiciting strong love from someone else; the warm glow of having your ego boosted; appreciation for being with someone who shows you emotional support, given the lack of care you get from your colleagues and managers; the adrenaline rush of power, control and entitlement; simple lust; and maybe – although unlikely – the occasional trickle of remorse.
Humans are complex beings, and I’m sure there are many layers of feelings involved with living a double life with a split personality in this way. Psychologists would no doubt have a lot to say about it. But how about love? Is that what is meant by ‘genuine’ here? I’m not sure that anything about this one-sided abusive, deceitful powerplay can be called love. And is it within the scope of this Inquiry to define love? Absolutely not, but we can surely say that manipulation isn’t love. Narcissism isn’t love. The relationships and tactics deployed by these undercover operatives (or spycops as we call them) bear many of the hallmarks of coercive control, and even in courts of law we know that isn’t love.
The most important question, however, is why are we focusing on his feelings? Does it matter what the spycops in deceitful relationships may have felt? Is there anything they could possibly have felt that could change the profound impact of their behaviour? Is it supposed to somehow mitigate it? How many violent partners have claimed to have loved the person they battered? Paedophiles have even claimed to love the child they’ve raped? These assertions are rightly taken as no excuse. It feels just like being back in the playground, when we were told to accept that affection can be shown by name calling or hitting. It was bullshit then and is bullshit now. Is grooming ok if the perpetrator claims to feellove? Of course, it isn’t. Abuse is abuse regardless of how the abuser feels, and these relationships were inherently abusive.
How many sleepless nights, for how many years did I waste on trying to fathom what might or might not have been genuine during all of those years Mark Kennedy and I were together? The answer I finally came to was that it doesn’t matter. Whatever he thought he did or didn’t feel doesn’t change what he and his managers put me through.
However, having said all of that, let’s entertain for a moment he may have felt some kind of love or other more noble ‘genuine feeling’. How can that make it any better? For me, it only makes it worse. A deceit is far more convincing when there is a grain of truth at its heart. These undercover officers drew on all kinds of resources to make their legends more credible, including family members and past events. So why not utilise some emotion too? The more convincing it was, the deeper the relationships became, the more entangled in our lives they were and the more damage was caused each time.
The manipulation of our emotions and our lives was for operational gain, regardless of what was felt by them.
It’s no excuse; it only makes it worse.
