I thought I understood the UK’s spy cops scandal, as it became known in the media, yet reading ‘Small Town Girl’ made me realise how wrong I was. For starters, Donna McLean’s relationship with Carlo only began in 2002. They got engaged shortly after. While their relationship ended in 2004, McLean did not discover the truth about Carlo until 2015. Carlo was an undercover police officer, and their entire relationship had been built on a lie.

‘Small Town Girl’ is a compelling insight into what it means to realise you have not only been deceived by a former partner but also by the Met police and, ultimately, the State. In telling her story, Donna McLean reclaims her voice and reminds the reader of the women at the centre of the spy cops scandal.

You ever read certain books and once you finish it, feel angry more attention wasn’t paid to it on its release? Like it deserves attention as much as the latest celebrity biography, no matter who the focus is. Small Town Girl should have had a wider impact than it did, and reignited the public’s consciousness about the spy cops scandal, reminding them of the very real people at the heart of the story, people who had their lives destroyed by undercover police.

McLean doesn’t just talk about the women duped into relationships here; she also highlights other victims, other activists who found themselves blacklisted, jailed and more. But at the centre of this book is her story, not just her relationship with Carlo, but her passion being reignited, the work she does to try and keep the story afloat, the bonds forged between activists who dared point out the truth at the heart of the state.

This is a story of corruption, but through it we also see the very real people impacted. It feels like you could be sitting in a cosy room with Donna herself, sharing a bottle of wine by a fireplace as she tells you about her life from the moment she was told her ex was a police officer.

There is a warmth to the voice in this book, and it feels like an understanding that too much too fast might be more than most people can take. We’re taken through the events slowly, snapshots of memories filtering through as we move back and forth with Donna, tales of her relationship woven in with what’s happening to her in the present day, as she becomes more deeply involved with the activism surrounding police corruption.

It would be easy to say Donna and the other women involved are strong, and there’s certainly a strength they all carry, but at the heart, they’re women who felt like they had no other choice, who were dealt a shitty hand, who must have been experiencing tremendous hurt, on top of the abrupt breakups they went through, when they found out the truth. Donna’s relationship reads like any other, and like any abusive relationship, the red flags don’t become clear until after the end.

It’s a book that will – and should – make you feel angry, and frustrated, but able to appreciate how many people are fighting, and how many people are there to help them along. Again, it deserves to be read, and deserves to have an impact.

Thank you to Hodder Studio for providing a copy of this ebook via NetGalley. Views remain my own.

I've always been interested in the spycops scandal but this is the most compelling, enraging account I've ever read. It reads like a thriller - you feel you are there in real time as the scandal unfolds. The author writes viscerally about her betrayal but never descends into self-pity. Highly recommended.

This isn't one of the early, main works on the scandal. In fact, McLean didn't realise that her ex, Carlo, was a SpyCop until old activist friends got in touch and told her - the fact that they, all men, had suspected for three years but not advise her is pulled out and examined when she forms a tight support group with other women who were abused in this way. We then follow her path through putting all her memories and evidence together, joining in one of the big court cases and fighting for an apology and compensation, her lawyer the excellent Harriet Wistrich. Sometimes it's a bit disjointed as she follows various memories or talks to friends and family but it's well-written and easy to follow.

As well as a narrative of the events in her and Carlo's life and the subsequent investigation, McLean brings various skills to the table which add to the book and give it depth. She's a therapist who works with trauma and addiction and she's very good at demonstrating the physical reactions she has to aspects of the process, and also at explaining how it affects her own work as a group therapy leader and her relationships with her mother, sister and daughters. She is also good at pen portraits, bringing the other characters alive, and she really gets across the support and care of the group of affected women that forms, sharing their joy as well as their pain as they go on writing retreats. In addition, she's able to bring in the wider context very effectively: the blacklisting of unionised and activist construction workers and the shocking infiltration of the Stephen Lawrence campaign for justice, which I hadn't known about.

My full review on my blog https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2022/02/23/book-review-donna-mclean-small-town-girl/

Donna McLean is a warrior among women. "Small Town Girl" is a brave, unflinching account of her unwitting, non-consensual, involvement with a spy cop. She relays her experience with honesty and integrity, illustrating the incredible toll the process of seeking justice has taken on her, and the other women in similar situations.

I'm so angry! My eyes were popping out of my head as I read. How can this behaviour be sanctioned? It really does beggar belief and I'm extremely grateful to Donna McLean for claiming her space and sharing her pain, in order that we can learn lessons. I fervently hope that we do.

McLean's account is heartbreaking. It's painfully shocking to realise that the very people tasked with keeping all of us safe can be so cruel and self-serving. I can only imagine how it must feel to live through such an experience. "Small Town Girl" is an engaging, eye-opening read and I highly recommend it. I hope this is the beginning of a long, and successful, writing career for Donna McLean.

Donna McClean was a woman in love, and Carlo Neri, her partner, was the perfect boyfriend. Caring, considerate, loving, he quickly found the keys to her heart. They met in September 2002 at an antiwar demonstration, at which he was stewarding. Mutual friends, who were trade unionists, introduced them. They were quickly inseparable and within six weeks, he’d moved in with her. Just three months after meeting he proposed. They talked about having children; they went on holiday together; he met her family. But their relationship lasted just two years, before he first appeared to have a nervous breakdown, and then disappeared.

It wasn’t until 2015, thirteen years later, that Donna learnt the truth. Carlo Neri hadn’t suffered a breakdown. In fact, Neri wasn’t even his surname. It was Soracchi. Carlo was an undercover police officer, and their entire relationship had been a cynical ploy.

Rule breaking, deception, and lies are in the news at the moment. At the time of writing, Prime Minister Boris Johnson desperately tries to cling on at N010, and his excuses for attending COVID rule-breaking parties ring increasingly hollow. The Metropolitan Police, too, have been in the public eye of late, and not for anything good. First, there was the horrific murder of Sarah Everard by a serving cop, and since then, a string of officers have been convicted for crimes linked to misogyny, such as the two who shared images of the bodies of murdered sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, over WhatsApp. The force’s refusal to investigate the Downing Street lockdown parties only risks tarnishing its reputation further.

With such a string of wrongdoing, it’s easy to conclude that a rot has set into the fabric of our institutions. And perhaps that’s the case. But within the Met Police there’s powerful evidence that in one division at least, the rot has festered for a long time. Special Branch was a secretive unit tasked with investigating issues surrounding national security and intelligence. In 2006, it merged with the Anti-Terrorism Branch to become the Counter Terrorism Command, though some other regional forces retain a separate Special Branch to this day.

Within the Met’s special branch was a sub-unit known only to a few. The Special Demonstration Squad was founded in 1968 in response to anti-Vietnam War demonstrations outside the American Embassy. Its original purpose was to infiltrate left-wing direct-action groups, and while this broadened out over the years, mostly it continued to focus on the left, environmental and social justice groups (a tiny number targeted the far right, and only for very short periods of time). A feature of the unit, and the latter units to replace it after its disbandment in 2008, was long-term undercover deployments. Unlike undercover operations against organised crime run by SO11, the Met’s intelligence branch, SDS operations lasted months, even years.

The SDS was first mentioned in a BBC television series in 2002 called True Spies, presented by Pater Taylor. But it wasn’t until the exposure of Mark Kennedy as a police spy by journalists and activists in 2010, and publication of the book Undercover, by Guardian journalists Paul Lewis and Robert Evans, that the true extent of what they had been doing came to light. Indeed, it was this which first alerted Donna to the possibility her boyfriend Carlo might have been a police spy.

Other activists who had suspicions about Carlo contacted Donna. They had guessed Kennedy was not alone, but one of many. They looked for patterns and soon found them: men (and a few women) who had more money than the average activist; drove a car or a van and ferried people to protests; made themselves useful and took on key roles; were relatively apolitical compared to others; and who suddenly disappeared, often having suffered some kind of crisis.

Indeed, the official inquiry released an SDS training manual into the public domain. While heavily redacted, it’s clear that all this was a carefully constructed template, right down to the extraction procedures which involved faking personal crises and then disappearing. Another equally appalling aspect was the “Jackal Run”. The name is taken from the Frederick Forsyth novel The Day of the Jackal and involves SDS officers trawling the registry of births and deaths for children who were born near to their birthdate, but who died in childhood, and who had the same first name (so the undercover officer would react naturally when their first name was spoken). They would then adopt this dead child’s persona as their own.

As Donna recognised, Carlo ticked all these boxes. He had money; he had a car unlike many of his fellow activists living in London; he rarely talked politics but focused more on the practical aspects of protesting; he worked as a locksmith and offered to help improve the home security of friends and associates. This last point took on a sinister dimension in the activists’ minds once they realised he was a spy, because it meant he had the keys to their homes, which would have been very useful to his masters.

Small Time Girl is not the first book to be written about the SDS and its successor units, and it won’t be the last. But it’s a powerful account not least because it humanises the story. It draws out just how callous the police spies’ behaviour was. These men not only insinuated themselves into these women’s lives, but they did so with a cruelty and relish which is difficult to reconcile. Carlo not only met Donna’s family but courted them too, becoming part of their family to the extent they embraced him as a future son-in-law. His proposal, which he obviously had no intention of going through with, is the manifestation of his calculated attempt to make her fall in love with him, all just to burnish his cover story. Then there’s his disappearance, leaving her to wonder and worry about what had happened to the man she loved. It’s small comfort no doubt that she could have fared worse: some of his colleagues fathered children with the women they courted, only to abandon them afterwards. And all the while, he led a double life. Like other SDS officers, he had a real wife, and children at home. This is a story about (primarily) men, who caused immeasurable harm to scores of women and children in their wake.

A deeply moving story and one which demands accountability from the Metropolitan Police, Small Time Girl is a vital read for our times.

I have been earnestly awaiting this book after listening to the podcast ‘Bed of Lies’’ and being stunned by the Spycops story. I am left even more stunned after reading this book. I’d always wondered about the long term impact on the women, and how it must feel to discover that everything about your partner was/is a lie and Donna’s story answers that question in a searingly honest way, but what I had failed to appreciate was how tortuous the route to justice was, a story which again, Donna unflinchingly tells. This is a must read I think, particularly in this time as we are quite rightly questioning the integrity of our institutions (like the Met).

Every infamous incident has a stream of people associated with it who have 'their side' of the story to tell. This book is one of a number relating to an undercover policing scandal and sadly it feels, perhaps in an attempt to avoid duplicating others in the same vein or maybe there are prohibitive rules in place as to what can actually be written, it skims over the surface of the 'happenings' and fails to give a really deep and emotive pathway into understanding the experience.
This lady has clearly lived through something unbelievable, hurtful, painful and I just would have liked more personal insight from her about what happened and how it felt - instead she tells us endlessly about meeting other activists in pubs and cafes and theatres and conferences and how they constantly 'tell their stories' - SO TELL US!
I'm far less interested in the preparation you needed to go through to do an interview with a newspaper journalist or even for the TV than the day to day life you lived with an undercover cop who proposed to you despite being married and having a child.
There are some tantalizing glimpses of really exciting/shocking/surprising stories - someone pretending to work as a locksmith and getting access to hundreds of activists houses as a result, undercover police allegedly inciting firebombing - but you never get any detail, to find out more or understand what impact this had on the author and those around her, how they felt when they found out etc.
It's a reasonable read and does bring some interesting questions to the fore but it misses more opportunities than it delivers on sadly.

Intriguing blurb and cover but this book doesn't really focus on the false relationship between McLean and the undercover policeman who lived with her for two years. Instead, it has quite a belated feel as McLean reads an exposé of the scandal at the start ('Undercover') and recognises her own boyfriend/relationship in the pattern. The rest of the book deals with the aftermath of talking to journalists, other activists, telling her family and so on. It felt to me like a gaping hole at the centre of the book.

An important and timely story, for sure, and one which the Met has already been indicted and apologised for. Just that the book isn't what I expected. If you haven't read 'Undercover', then start there.