10 March - 30 years of police corruption
30 years ago today the younger brother of my daughter’s long term partner
Alastair was murdered in the car park of the Golden Lion public house in Sydenham.
Daniel Morgan was a private detective who had uncovered serious corruption among
south London’s police. Organising robberies, running drugs, protecting known
criminals; all the sort of things you might think happen only in TV fiction.
He took his evidence to the News of the World and that was his undoing. Unknown
to him the Murdoch press was employing criminals and bent coppers as a matter of
routine. As we know now they went on to tap telephones.
The paper’s editor Andy Coulson’s influence with the establishment was so
great he even managed to secure a job with David Cameron at No. 10.
The News of the World likely tipped off their police contacts and
Daniel Morgan’s reward for his attempt to uphold the law was an axe through his
skull. The establishment went into overdrive to protect its reputation.
The murderers have been named in court but are safe from prosecution because
almost every Metropolitan Police Commissioner has, what shall we say, neglected
his or her primary duties. The new Commissioner Cressida Dick in a former role
did her utmost to ensure that the truth remained hidden. I wish I could reveal more
but it is shocking.
In recent years the police have admitted that the unsolved murder
is the biggest corruption scandal ever to have hit the Metropolitan Police.
The Met’s report on an ‘independent’ review by the Hampshire Police was pretty much
a lie from beginning to end.
Every single Labour Home Secretary was party to the cover up. Jack Straw and
David Blunkett perhaps the worst of them and only when Theresa May took charge
of the Home Office was any serious attempt made to get to the root of the cover-up. She ordered a
Hillsborough style inquiry panel. Not a true Public Inquiry but better than nothing.
It hasn’t been plain sailing. The police fought a rear guard action and the
first panel chairman was not all he should have been, he retired for personal reasons.
The inquiry is still
on-going and won’t report until the end of this year.
There was a series of
ten award winning podcasts to tell the story last year, I sponsored one of
them, and another book on the subject will be published in May.
When I sometimes say on Bonkers that the Metropolitan Police is corrupt I do so
with a clear conscience, I absolutely know they are and they have recently
admitted it in writing. They may excuse themselves that their corruption is all
in the past, but that is a lie too. They still don’t want the truth to come out,
neither do the newspapers. Most of them have been working hand in glove with corrupt police officers.
Alastair Morgan has pursued police corruption for 30 years and I shall try to
steer him on to his beloved game of rugby when I meet him for lunch tomorrow as
a result if which I suspect there will be no blog.
If I have to chase Bexley police for as long as Alastair I will have to live to be 100.