Bob Lambert

Detective Inspector Robert Lambert is the former head of the Muslim Contact Unit in the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command (SO15).

In January 2002, Bob and a Special Branch colleague, set up the Muslim Contact Unit (MCU), with the purpose of establishing partnerships with Muslim community leaders to help tackle the spread of al-Qa'ida influence in London. Previously, Bob worked continuously as a Special Branch specialist counter-terrorist / counter-extremist intelligence officer from 1980, which involved dealing with all forms of violent political threats to the UK, from Irish republican to the many strands of International terrorism.

Bob Lambert is at the liberal end of the Special Branch, in its eight person Muslim Contact Unit. He promotes the idea of partnership working with muslim community organisations. He explicitly counterposes this to repressive policing and attacking the muslim commumity in politics, the press such as the assault unleashed by Jack Straw’s remarks about the veil or the ‘terror experts’ who suggest that universities are a hotbed of muslim ‘radicalisation’.

This means he is seen by some in government and the press – including some ‘left’ journalists such as those supporting the Euston Manifesto – as an appeaser of radical Islam. Lambert noted that he wasn’t bothered by the Chatham House rule since he had previously been the victim such rules when the existence of his unit was disclosed – he said – by a leak from the Foreign Office to the press.

On the Irish Troubles

Lambert has cited experience from the Northern Ireland conflict in support of his approach to the war on terror.

The MCU has taken a leaf from the book of former head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, George Churchill-Coleman in challenging conventional counter terrorism thinking by highlighting the danger of unintentionally increasing support for terrorism by recourse to extra-judicial powers in tackling it. Internment in Northern Ireland, he recalls, was immediately followed by a substantial increase in violence, just as the government's unbending approach to Bobby Sands and fellow hunger strikers gave the IRA its biggest ever recruitment boost.