Peter Jukes, co-author with Alastair Morgan of Who Killed Daniel Morgan and the Untold Murder podcast, gives his personal take on the unprecedented intervention of the Home Secretary in the publishing of a report into the unsolved 1987 crime
The principle of independent panels, ever since the landmark Hillsborough Independent Panel is that – as it says on the tin – they are independent of interference from government or its branches which, more often than not, are the targets of these investigations.
So the last-minute intervention by the Home Secretary into the publication of a report by the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel strikes at the heart of the whole exercise – especially since the report could well contain damning evidence into her own department.
Private detective Daniel Morgan was found murdered in a pub car park in Sydenham, south-east London, in 1987. Although numerous charges were brought against suspects, no one has ever been convicted of his death. His killing is understood to have been motivated by his knowledge of high-level corruption within the Metropolitan Police – part of what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown described in 2011 as “a criminal media nexus”, with corrupt police officers and Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World.
The Panel, first initiated by then Home Secretary Theresa May in 2013 after an emotional meeting with the Morgan family, had a specific remit to steer it clear of political interference. The only role for the Home Office was “make arrangements for the final report’s publication to Parliament”.
After eight years of painstaking research, the Panel duly delivered the report to Priti Patel last Friday, on the expectation that it would be released within one working day.
Initially, the Home Office said that it wanted to move the publication date from Monday 17 May to Monday 24 May because of procedural problems around the parliamentary timetable and the funeral of Prince Philip. Then yesterday, the Panel dropped a bombshell: Patel wanted to override the Panel and hold back publication until her staff have had a chance to “review” and possibly redact the long-awaited contents.
Once again, the norms of British governance are being bent, putting the rule of law under renewed pressure. But what exactly happened between the delivery of the report and the last-minute delay? Who could have leant on the Home Secretary to break the stern remit of independence characterising independent panel inquiries?
Well, there are two obvious choices.
The Metropolitan Police Service and Institutional Corruption
Unlike a full public inquiry, which has powers of subpoena of documents and to compel witnesses to give testimony under oath, the independent panel model effectively has the power to shame public bodies into disclosure.
The public body at the centre of the Daniel Morgan murder case – the most investigated murder in British history – is clearly Britain’s largest police force: the Metropolitan Police Service, which has since admitted that the first investigation into the murder in 1987 was mired in corruption, when one of the senior investigating officers in the squad was arrested on suspicion of involvement, only to be freed and then to replace Daniel Morgan as a co-director of the soon-to-be notorious detective agency, Southern Investigations.
Scotland Yard has every reason to be wary of the Panel’s report.
The Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report opens up a potential finding of ‘institutional corruption’ – something which could almost be a death knell for any policing organisation.
Though I have no idea what is in it (nor have the Morgan family) it is clear that the Panel will have much more material on the original corruption in the first murder inquiry, and be able to shed light on what on earth happened during the second investigation by the Police Complaints Authority in 1988, which found no evidence of corruption.
It will also examine the secret anti-corruption investigation in the 1990s, Operation Two Bridges/Nigeria, and the two final investigations, Operations Abelard I and II, in 2002 and 2006. At trial, all of these cases came crashing down because of the weight of previous corruption, millions of items of evidence, missing documents, unreliable witnesses and the legally effective plea from all of the accused: the police were corrupt then? How do you know the police aren’t corrupt now?
In the three decades since, the Daniel Morgan murder and its aftermath has become a major reputational disaster for Scotland Yard, worse in some ways than the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence six years later and a few miles away, with the same network of police officers involved in undermining the investigation.
The Macpherson Report into the handling of the Lawrence case concluded that “institutional racism” had played a major part in the failure to bring his killers to justice. The Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report opens up a potential finding of “institutional corruption” – something which could almost be a death knell for any policing organisation.
However, whatever the existential threat to the Met, they have been working with the Panel for six years now. A team of 10 officers worked for 10 days inspecting the report for any operational threats to national security and any senior officers criticised received letters from the Panel months ago allowing them a full right of reply.
For the Met to lean on Priti Patel to halt publication of the Panel’s report in its tracks seems unlikely, as they had ample chance to do so many times before. So who else would take a last-minute interest and have any kind of leverage over the Home Secretary?
Murdoch, News of the World and Southern Investigations
The remit of the Panel was to explore the allegations of police corruption in the original murder, and the involvement of Dani