The leftwing journalist and intellectual Tariq Ali was spied on by at least 14 undercover police officers who went to extraordinary lengths to keep tabs on his political activities, a public inquiry has heard. Previously secret reports disclosed how police spied on Ali as he helped promote political campaigns against the Vietnam war, violent racist assaults, fascism and other progressive causes. The surveillance occurred over several decades, and was taking place as recently as 2003, when Ali was campaigning against the Iraq war. At one point, police reported to MI5 that Ali had collaborated on a book about the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky with a cartoonist. The confidential report noted the name of the cartoonist’s girlfriend, along with her occupation, her address and friends. Ali criticised the extent of the surveillance, adding that he was “shocked” to hear that MI5 was alleged to have gone so far as to have burgled the offices of the campaign against the Vietnam war. The 76-year-old was the first witness to give live evidence at the judge-led inquiry, which is examining how undercover police officers monitored more than 1,000 political groups since 1968. The inquiry, which is headed by the retired judge Sir John Mitting, heard that police had started recording Ali’s political activities in 1965 when he became president of the Oxford Union, Oxford University’s debating society. In the late 1960s, Ali came to prominence as a leading member of the campaign against the Vietnam war, often speaking at rallies. At the same time, Scotland Yard set up the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a secret squad of undercover officers, to infiltrate leftwing groups. Ali, who became a journalist after he left university, joined a small leftwing organisation, the International Marxist Group (IMG), in 1968. Details of his political activities were logged in 80 secret police reports between March 1968 and November 2003, with most of the information being collected by undercover officers working for the SDS. He listed 14 members of the SDS who spied on him between 1968 and 1976, as identified in the reports that had been disclosed to him by the inquiry. The police, with the approval of the Home Office and MI5, set up the SDS following disorder at demonstration against the Vietnam war in March 1968. They argued that they needed to infiltrate protesters to prevent further disturbances at political events. Ali said the police had exaggerated the possibility of disorder, adding it would be “entirely wrong” to conclude that the “deployment of SDS officers into people’s private lives was justified based on occasionally lurid and inaccurate reports of threats of serious violence that never transpired”. Ali said that Conrad Dixon, the first head of the SDS, “had everything to gain by playing up the threat of violence; it gave him a new unit under his personal command, and a budget of £500,000”. He accused Dixon of writing “dodgy dossiers” and using his “febrile imagination” to overestimate “the threat of violence to give credence to the idea that his secret unit was valuable to the British state”. He asked the inquiry to examine the allegation that an undercover officer had taken a copy of the keys to the premises of the Vietnam war campaign and the IMG to enable MI5 to later break in and steal information. “That depth of intrusive state surveillance was something I had not expected,” he said. He identified one “grotesque” report that showed “how utterly out of control the British spying network was”. In 1980, the report detailed his collaboration with the cartoonist Phil Evans on their book Trotsky for Beginners. He said: “Why should Phil’s girlfriend be mentioned, not just her job as a teacher, but her address and friends, and why should his housemates be mentioned? What use is made of this prurient intelligence?” Ali said it was “bizarre” that in 1968, police had checked whether he had had “intimate contact” with a student and had made inquiries to establish his identity. Ali, who was editor of a Channel 4 current affairs programme for four years in the 1980s and has often appeared on television, told the inquiry that the book was one of a dozen he had written on world history and politics. In 1984, police sent a report to MI5 about a public meeting organised by anti-racist campaigners to prevent racist attacks in London, he said. Ali had been invited to attend. He told the inquiry: “What were Special Branch doing at the time to help put a stop to the racist murders? Spying on those of us trying to stop it.” Another report from the police to MI5 recorded a meeting in 1982 of 70 people in Hounslow, west London, which had been organised by the Anti-Nazi League, he said. Ali said the police noted that he was the main speaker and “gave an eloquent speech” linking racism to unemployment. The most recent police report dated from 2003, when he was elected to the national committee of the Stop the War Coalition seeking to prevent the invasion of Iraq. He said SDS undercover officers were deployed to infiltrate this coalition, just as they had done for the campaign against the Vietnam war. “It is incredible to think that after 35 years, in 2003, under the Tony Blair Labour government, that Special Branch were still engaging in the same anti-democratic activity as they had been at the outset,” he said.