Cock-up vs conspiracy – and law and policy commentary

1st June 2021

Swapping human beings for gods, some people like to see an intelligent design behind anything extraordinary in human affairs.

A thing happens – out of the ordinary course of events – and that thing requires (even demands) a special explanation of how certain people intended it to happen and made it happen.

And sometimes – conspiracies actually do happen.

To always dismiss conspiracies is as misconceived as always seeing them in existence.

But conspiracies are (in my view and experience) rare, as they often require a group of people to act effectively but silently in concert in an emerging and often novel situation.

And so I am not a conspiracy theorist by inclination.

Conspiracies do happen – but often because there has been a cock-up, as it is usually only with a cock-up that a group of people are sufficiently focused and motivated to act silently in concert. 

(By ‘silently’ I mean, with no visible traces outside of that concert, as that would undermine the purpose of the conspiracy.) 

Yes, of course, everyone knows (who should know) Hanlon’s Razor – that a thing should not be attributed to malice that can be attributed to stupidity.

But that is not quite the same – not all conspiracies are malicious (often they are defensive), and not all cock-up result from stupidity but because, to invoke another law, when things can go wrong they will go wrong.

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The particular reason I mention this is, of course, the upcoming Daniel Morgan report.

Others following the independent panel inquiry have put forward possible explanations for why each investigation and prosecution collapsed in respect of the 1987 murder of Morgan.

I do not have any plausible theories – still less any knowledge – as to who was involved when and how.

This is not just safe libel-speak – I have no idea.

It may well be, for example, that there is a plausible and mundane explanation for why each successive investigation and prosecution collapsed.

But such a pattern of failed investigations does require its own investigation – and one of the purposes of the upcoming report is to provide a document-based understanding of what happened and who was involved.

There may be an elaborate conspiracy or sequence of conspiracies – or there may be a sequence of mistakes and improvisations – or there may be a mixture of both.

The best thing to do is to see what evidence is put together by the independent panel, and to see where there that evidence takes us.

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