AN UNDERCOVER copper is still in a romantic relationship with an activist she was sent to monitor more than 15 years after her deployment ended.

The officer, who used the “cover name” Christine Green, has lived in remote parts of Cornwall and Scotland with anti-fox hunting campaigner Tom Frampton, the Guardian reported today. She became friends with Mr Frampton during her deployment.

Ms Green is the first female officer known to have had a long-term relationship with a campaigner. It is not known at what stage she revealed to her boyfriend that she was a police spy.

Like other officers from the Metropolitan Police’s elite undercover squads, she said she was going abroad when her deployment ended in 2000.

Animal rights campaigner Paul Gravett, who was also key to the unmasking of spycop turned Tory councillor and former deputy police commissioner Andy Coles, said he had known Ms Green during her deployment.

“She had quite a serious and aloof personality although she could be friendly to people she wanted to know,” he told the Guardian.

Activists said Ms Green helped manage the finances of the campaign group London Animal Action and was also involved in deployments of hunt saboteurs across south-east England.

She was reportedly a member of the Special Demonstration Squad, which infiltrated numerous left-wing campaigns, trade unions and environmental groups.

The activities of the SDS and other undercover units are the subject of a public inquiry that has still to start hearing evidence after the government set it up in 2015.

Police files on covert operations have been destroyed since the probe was established, and victims of police spying have accused the Met of trying to wreck the inquiry’s progress.

The inquiry is expected to release several more cover names used by infiltrators tomorrow. Police officers regularly adopted the names of dead children with the same given names as their own.

Ms Green lived in Cornwall with Mr Frampton after her deployment finished and stayed in touch with some animal rights activists. They later moved to Scotland, where a Guardian journalist visited them last year. Mr Frampton declined to comment at the time.

They are thought to have moved again since then, but their current whereabouts are unknown.