Met Police Spent £2.5m Relocating Undercover Officer to Hide From Former Partner

Helen Steel landed at Auckland airport on a December afternoon in 2002, her parents beside her, ready for a family holiday. They were delayed leaving the terminal for an hour—an irritation at the time, nothing more. What Steel would not learn until decades later was that her arrival had triggered a silent alarm. Three weeks before she boarded the plane, the Metropolitan Police had flagged her name. Customs officers, acting on that flag, quietly searched her luggage.

Over the next weeks, as Steel and her family moved through New Zealand, surveillance officers employed by the local police followed them. They photographed the family leaving her sister's house. They logged her shopping trips, her phone calls, her movements. They reported back to Scotland Yard with the precision of a hunting operation. None of this was visible to Steel. She was simply trying to understand what had happened to the man she had loved.

That man was John Dines, an undercover police officer. In 1990, when their relationship began, Steel believed she had found someone extraordinary—a man who spoke of wanting six children, of building a life together, of an idyllic future. For two years, he was present in her life. Then, in 1992, he vanished. He claimed a mental breakdown had made the relationship impossible. It was a lie designed to end his deployment. What followed was what Steel would later describe as sadistic psychological torture: six months of contradictory signals, disappearances, declarations of love, and then nothing. He was gone.

Steel spent nearly two decades trying to piece together who he really was. She visited archives, followed fragments of information, spoke to people who might have known him. It took her that long to establish the truth: Dines had been a spy, assigned to infiltrate political groups, and his relationship with her had been part of his cover. While she searched, Scotland Yard was searching too—but not for Dines. They were tracking Steel. Police documents logged her phone calls, her visits to people who turned out to be Dines's relatives, even her contact with Keir Starmer, then a barrister, who was advising her on the McLibel case, the longest trial in English history, in which she and another campaigner were sued by McDonald's.

By December 2002, when Steel flew to New Zealand with her parents, Dines was already there. He had moved to the country in 1995 after leaving the Met and was working as a barrister in Auckland. Steel, unaware of his proximity, contacted people she believed might be his relatives, hoping they would tell her where he was. The senior officers at Scotland Yard learned of her movements through the New Zealand police, whom they had enlisted to monitor her. Fearing exposure, they made a decision: they would move Dines again, this time to Australia, and they would spend public money to do it. The bill came to £2.5 million. It included subsidizing the purchase of a house in Sydney—four times more expensive than his New Zealand home—and compensating him for the income he would lose as a barrister.

When Steel gave evidence to the spycops inquiry in 2026, she described the operation as an abuse of state power. The surveillance of her and her family, the expenditure of millions to hide a man who had deceived and sexually exploited her, the protection of what she called an illegitimate and undemocratic operation—all of it was designed to prevent her from discovering the truth. The police justified the relocation by claiming Steel posed a threat to Dines. Steel rejected this as malicious lies. The real reason, she said, was to protect him from bad publicity. Paul Condon, the former Met commissioner, admitted to the inquiry that Scotland Yard had failed to control its undercover officers and their managers, who had committed what he called horrendous abuses: monitoring grieving families, stealing the identities of dead children, lying in court. The spycops inquiry, now examining four decades of undercover operations that infiltrated more than a thousand political groups, continues to expose the machinery by which the state had hidden its own wrongdoing.