My ex was a 'spycop' who monitored me for a year

Kate Wilson has written a book about her experience of discovering her boyfriend was an undercover police officer

- ATHENA STAVROU

It had been a 12-month-long whirlwind romance that ended amicably, but little did Kate Wilson know a phone call six years on would change her life forever.

Ms Wilson was in her mid-twenties when she met a man she believed was Mark Stone at an activist meeting in Nottingham in 2003.

The pair hit it off and began a romance which lasted over a year but it was all a lie.

Mark Stone's real name was actually Mark Kennedy. He was an undercover police officer sent by the now-disbanded National Public Order Intelligence Unit to spy on an activist group Ms Wilson was associated with in the early 2000s.

Speaking at Wales' Hay Festival, with which The Independent has partnered again, Ms Wilson described the impact of the immense invasion of privacy and her fight for justice.

"I met Mark at the end of 2003, after he had shown up in the summer and befriended some of my friends who were living in Nottingham," she said.

"We had an awful lot in common. He even liked country music, which was pretty much unheard of in the circles I was in. He said he was from Battersea and from a broken home.

"He used to get emotional, saying how his mother had brought up two sons on her own. But none of it was true." After the relationship ended, the pair kept in touch, with Kennedy visiting Ms Wilson abroad in Barcelona and Berlin.