24 March (Part 1) - Incompetence or corruption?
Yesterday
I watched the Home Office Minister Kit Malthouse address an almost empty House of Commons following Tuesday’s report on
corruption in the Metropolitan Police
by the HMIC. He began by saying it was not all bad - whilst accepting that most of it was very bad.
Malthouse’s very brief defence of the Met included the words “[the report] found no
evidence that the force deliberately sought to frustrate the work of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel”.
This is in itself evidence of corruption.
In 2013/14, soon after the DMIP began its investigation, Daniel’s brother Alastair
told me that things were not going well. The retired judge who had been
appointed by Home Secretary Theresa May to chair the panel had been colluding with the
Metropolitan Police to ‘lose’ evidence on the grounds that putting it into the
public domain would seriously undermine confidence in the police.
He was found out and left the Panel.
Obviously not something I could reveal here and except for a short reference in
an obscure Welsh newspaper (extract below) there was no publicity at all.
Click image for source web page.
However the DMIP report did refer to the 2013 incident and the involvement of the Metropolitan Police and Cressida Dick.
Dick went on to work elsewhere until Theresa May, who must have known about the
earlier corruption, allowed her to be appointed Commissioner.
The DMIP report went further and made it very clear that following her return to
the Met, Dick was again responsible for frustrating the work of the DMIP by refusing access to police files. Hence the
verdict of Institutional Corruption.
However Kit Malthouse has been suckered into believing that the HMIC
could not find the evidence that the Home Office sponsored DMIP report had, with
difficulty, extracted from the Met.
Corruption runs deep.
Note: Alastair Morgan was not informed of Kit Malthouse's
statement, he found out about it only because of a tip off by former Erith &
Thamesmead MP Teresa Pearce.