16th June 2021
I have done a podcast on the Daniel Morgan report – click here for links to the podcast on various platforms.
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I also have done this piece over at the Financial Times.
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If you have any (non-irksome) questions on either the podcast or the FT piece – or on the Daniel Morgan report generally – ask below as a comment and I will answer if I can.
15th June 2021
The report of the independent panel into the death of Daniel Morgan – and how every investigation and prosecution collapsed – was published today.
And if you are to substantiate the serious allegation of ‘institutional corruption’ against the metropolitan police both historically and in the present tense then this is how to do it.
The report is solid, detailed, thorough, methodical, sourced, and it cannot be dismissed.
(Even if the report is ignored.)
It makes out a compelling case of corruption throughout the metropolitan police – and not just some dodgy officers at one police station.
But corruption needs a motive – and this is where the report is at its most compelling – it shows how the police were primarily motivated by reputational imperatives at each stage.
And the report demonstrates that this corruption continued with obstructing the work of the panel itself.
Given the weaknesses of a non-statutory inquiry, this is a far better report than one could have reasonably hoped for – and let us hope it brings at last some sense of justice for the Morgan family.
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14th June 2021
Tomorrow the publication is expected of the report of the independent panel on Daniel Morgan.
We do not know at the moment whether the report will be momentous – or an anti-climax.
Many waited anxiously for, say, the Chilcot report or the Meuller report – only for the news to move on to other things within days, if not hours.
But regardless of the response of news organisations to the report, the report will be significant in its nature – even if it is not momentous in its effects.
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The report is about three things.
The first is the 1987 death of a private detective in circumstances so brutal that the passage of thirty-four years cannot diminish the horror.
I do not know whether Daniel Morgan was about to uncover and expose police corruption or not when he was murdered – but the motivation for any murder does not really matter.
Even without what followed in the aftermath of his death, it was a singular murder that has never been properly investigated or explained.
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The second is the messy and corrupt relationships between the private detective industry, the Metropolitan police and the media from the 1980s onwards – as they merrily sold and bought personal information.
Even if Daniel Morgan’s death was not about the potential exposure of corruption, the circumstances of his death was – for those connected with him – something which hanged over everyone involved for over thirty years.
And for some of those connected with him, the murder and its fallout – all those investigations and prosecutions – was no doubt an inconvenience and a perceived ‘problem’ that had to be somehow ‘managed’ while they were all otherwise engaged in the lucrative trade in the supply and purchase of private information.
This is regardless of whether anyone suspected for the murder was actually involved – the investigations and prosecutions never seemed to go away and were, no doubt, a nuisance.
Insofar as this report covers this messy and corrupt set of relationships, it will be the nearest we will probably get to the now abandoned ‘Leveson 2’.
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Third, there is something rather extraordinary that requires an explanation.
Following Daniel Morgan’s murder there were no less than five investigations and prosecutions – all of which collapsed.
Like those castles built by the king in Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, each successive investigation and prosecution seemingly fell into a swamp – but here a swamp of compromised processes and irregularities and acts of self-protection.
It may well be that there were mundane reasons why each of these five investigations and prosecutions failed – and, of course, investigations and prosecutions fail all the time for all sorts of unexceptional reasons.
But how all these five investigations and prosecutions each toppled over is extraordinary – and extraordinary things require explanations, even if those explanations are themselves not extraordinary.
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I have followed the Daniel Morgan story since 2012 – and I would have blogged more about the case and it possible implications had it not been for the launch of the independent panel inquiry.
The case is potentially a way into understanding what happened at the time between the police and the media and the private detective industry – and how all of this in turn affected public policy and the conduct of the media.
But the human side of this is also crucial.
Alastair Morgan – one of the most decent and determined people you will ever meet – has spent thirty-four years campaigning for justice and to uncover what happened with the death of his brother Daniel and its aftermath.
We should hope the report brings some sense of justice to Alastair Morgan and the rest of the Morgan family.
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28th May 2021
Today came the news that the publication of the report on the Daniel Morgan independent panel should be on 15 June 2021.
This is the report into the 1987 death of Daniel Morgan, the collapse of the many subsequent investigations and prosecutions, and the existence of (and the relevance of) any corrupt relationships between the police, the private investigation industry and the press.
The statement of the panel is here and should be read in full.
This is, of course, welcome news.
It ends the stand-off between the panel and the home office – and, on balance, the home office has given way more than the panel.
The late intervention of the home office – to demand a last-minute ‘review’ of the report – is now unlikely to frustrate the publication of the report.
Delay and blocking
This statement means that, unless something happens to prevent it, there is now a fixed, imminent date for publication.
This should prevent the report being delayed indefinitely by the home office sitting on it during this (supposed) review.
If the objective of the home office was to provide room for delay (or even prevent) the publication of the report, then that objective looks like it has been defeated.
There is a little wriggle-room for potential further delay – but not as much as if there was no date set at all.
Redactions
The statement also deals with the issue of any home office redactions.
Any redactions that the home office insist upon will be identifiable – and so, it would seem, contestable in court.
Each redaction would be an action by the home secretary that could – at law – be looked at by the high court for its reasonableness and relevance.
Any redaction would thereby not necessarily be the end of the matter – but just the prelude for litigation.
The redactions cannot just be silently made, with no one to know.
Again this is a set-back if the objective of the home office was to have room to make such silent redactions.
Forewarnings and leaks
If, however, the home office had as its objective that it would be forewarned of the content of the report, this objective has been achieved.
This means that if – and it is only an ‘if’ – there is anything politically significant in the report then the home office will not have a shock and so will not be bounced.
It also means there is the possibility of leaks from the home office – perhaps to the media – in the days before 15 June 2021.
This is notwithstanding the controlled conditions for the review of the report – which will remind those with longer memories of Robin Cook and the Scott report.
Making sense of the Home Office intervention
As this blog has already averred, there appears to be no good reason for the late home office intervention.
The purported reasons do not add up – and they appear to be improvised and cynical.
As I set out in detail here, the choice of ‘national security’ and ‘the human rights act’ as grounds appear to have been for providing the maximum litigation cover for any home office delay, and not because of any genuine concerns.
I am not a conspiracy theorist by inclination – conspiracies do, of course exist, but usually to hide cock-ups, as only then will a number of people have the motivation and focus to act in concert.
As such I do not think there is any conspiracy between the home secretary and others to try and block or delay or gut the report.
The home secretary may well be (as a lawyer would say) on a frolic of her own in all this, without contact with anyone else with an interest.
It may well be that the home secretary simply did not like the idea of something being published by an independent panel beyond her control or involvement.
But whatever the true motive for the home office’s late bullying intervention, the statement today means that it is more likely than not that we will see the report published in two weeks, and possibly with few if any redactions.
The panel and its lawyers should be commended for facing off this illiberal and misconceived intervention.
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23rd May 2021
We have a lopsided view of the bad things that were happening in respect of the media around the turn of this century.
The focus has been on the press – journalistic ethics, newsroom culture and the breaches of the civil and criminal law.
But those did not happen in a vacuum.
What elements of the press did was part of a wider problem, which involved the metropolitan police and the private investigation industry.
Of course, the press took advantage of these relations and was the source of a lot of the money involved.
But there were wrongs being committed on the supply-side of the trade in personal information.
Had the Leveson inquiry continued with its phase two – that was to look at the dealings of the press with the police and so on – then we would now have a more rounded picture of what went on.
But the Leveson inquiry will now never continue to phase two.
And so the nearest we will get to a documented understanding of this supply-side will be the independent panel report on the Daniel Morgan case – a case which goes to the heart of the problematic relationship between the press, the police and the private investigation industry.
It may well turn out to be the best record we will ever get of what then happened – and how so many got away with so many things which they should not have done so.
22nd May 2021
If anyone doubted the often indirect power of the crown in the public affairs of the United Kingdom then this week’s media news about the Dyson report is a useful reminder.
A reporter fabricated documents so as to engineer an introduction to a member of the royal family and then lied about it.
This sort of ‘blagging’ – as some of those in the media would call it – was one of what was once euphemistically described as the ‘dark arts’.
And as a result of the exposure of this dishonesty, the future of the BBC (itself founded by royal charter) is now uncertain.
To throw the future of the United Kingdom’s state broadcaster into doubt requires a significant intervention.
It is an example of how the presence of a royal element to a story can electrify things.
And it is not the first time.
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The phone hacking scandal – which affected the press in a way that the Dyson report may affect the BBC – also came about because it had a significant royal element.
In short: the telephones of the royal household were hacked – just as the telephones of celebrities and newsworthy non-celebrities were hacked.
(Hacking was another of those ‘dark arts’.)
But because the target was the royal household, a different part of the metropolitan police became involved instead of those parts of the metropolitan police that the press then had a close (and mutually advantageous) relationship.
This in turn led to a police raid of a private investigator’s office, and the documents then seized in turn were a media-legal time-bomb which exploded when disclosed about the time of the Millie Dowler murder trial.
The story is set out in this thread by James Doleman, who reported on the trials (and with whom, I must add, I disagree on other issues):
The News of the World published a story about Harry being injured on a skiing trip. As he was only accompanied by two diplomatic protection officers the spotlight fell on them so there was an internal investigation.
— James Doleman (@jamesdoleman) May 22, 2021
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They raided his house, and found thousands of pages of evidence of thousands of hacks, however somewhere the decision was made only to prosecute him, and one reporter, Clive Goodman, over that one hack. They both stayed silent and pled guilty and the matter was dropped.
— James Doleman (@jamesdoleman) May 22, 2021
When Andy Coulson joined Downing Street though, the press, especially the Guardian, got interested enough to investigate the hacking story, and their revelations led to the case being re-opened.
— James Doleman (@jamesdoleman) May 22, 2021
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Had the mobile telephones of the royal household not been hacked then it is plausible that – even now – we would not know anything about the real extent of telephone hacking.
Such is the indirect power of the crown in our public affairs.
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21st May 2021
Under section 1 of the Public Order Act 1936 it is an offence to wear political uniforms.
And section 90 of the Police Act 1990 provides that it is an offence to impersonate a police officer.
But politicians do like dressing up.
Here is a Labour politician – an elected police and crime commissioner in 2017.
His Conservative political opponents were scathing:
But partisanship is the foe of consistency, and so we now have a Conservative politician dressed in quasi-police kit:
The remarkable thing is that the Conservative politician in question is the actual Home Secretary.
We have the Home Secretary dressing up in a quasi-police uniform and going on operations where coercive force is used.
When I re-tweeted a gloss on this significant picture yesterday, I was told-off because the original tweet had got the nature of the police operation wrong:
https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1395657008032931840
The nature of the offence, and of the police operation, is irrelevant.
The Home Secretary could be attending the arrest of the most notorious criminal in the land, and it would not make a difference.
There is something wrong – and crass – about Home Secretaries using such operations as photo opportunities.
And there is something sinister about doing it in a quasi-police uniform.
Not even Churchill did that over a hundred years ago as a similarly opportunistic Home Secretary (and he was more entitled to wear a uniform, as a former soldier):
(And even John Terry had some claim to be able to wear his Chelsea kit in that famous 2012 incident.)
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Exploiting – indeed weaponising – police operations for political purposes is unwise and illiberal – whether the politician is Conservative or Labour or even Winston Churchill.)
It points to the misuse and abuse of law and law enforcement – that certain things are being done not for the straight purposes of justice and due process.
It also speaks to the increasing authoritarianism in our political culture.
There is, of course, a good reason why impersonating a police officer is banned.
And there is a very good reason why in 1936 – of all years, if you think about it – the wearing of uniforms for political purposes was banned.
Nationalistic populist authoritarianism is something to be opposed, not encouraged.
And that, at least, was something Winston Churchill (despite his many manifest faults) got more right than his current day Conservative successors.
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20th May 2021
Yesterday’s post was about the home secretary making an extraordinary intervention that would delay the long-awaited publication of report of the independent panel on the death of Daniel Morgan.
And then came further news that the panel were refusing to give the report to the home secretary:
Daniel Morgan murder investigation panel refuse to hand over their report to Priti Patel for vetting. https://t.co/fZleFCjFmX
— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) May 19, 2021
This is a splendid and spirited response from the panel to what is an unconvincing attempt by the home secretary to intervene.
And alluding to that infamous parish council meeting, one wag caught it perfectly:
"You have no authority here Priti Patel, no authority at all!"
— @blurbfly (@blurbfly) May 20, 2021
(Though, of course, in that other instance, the recipient of that comment was the one in the right, as this blog then explained.)
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The move by the home secretary may not only fail – it may be counter-productive.
Last week those who followed the Daniel Morgan case were wondering whether the impending publication of the independent panel report would get any press or public attention.
And then our clumsy bullying Home Secretary sought to clumsily bully the independent panel.
Well.
Such PR is priceless.Without her intervention, the report may have generated little interest beyond those who had an interest anyway.
Now there is far more interest.
And as someone was quoted in the news report:
“There are no national security issues involved. There are national embarrassment issues.”
If this is correct (and I have no idea) then, thanks to the home secretary, more people will now be aware of this.
Before attempting to intervene, the home secretary should have read the terms of reference of the independent panel – read them, and understood them.
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(With apologies to the great Jackie Weaver)
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19th May 2021
This is not a conspiracy theory blog.
Conspiracies do, of course, exist – often to cover up cock-ups, for that is usually the only time when any given group of people have the focus and motivation to act in concert.
But a conspiracy is rarely the first notion that comes to my mind to explain any odd state of affairs.
And so, in respect of the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan, I do not know why he was killed and who killed him.
This is just not safe legal-libel speak: I genuinely have no idea, and I offer no theory.
But what is odd about this murder was the aftermath: a remarkable succession of failed investigations and prosecutions.
Here, again, there may be explanations short of a conspiracy.
Court cases and so on fail all the time, and for various reasons.
And even if those reasons point to systemic failures, often those system failures are not conspiracies but just, well, system failures.
But.
The succession of failed investigations and prosecutions in the case of Daniel Morgan also indicate that there may be concerted wrongful conduct.
And nobody who knows anything about the metropolitan police and their relationship with the tabloid media at the relevant time would be surprised if there had been undue pressure and corruption.
Still: we do not know for certain.
And this is why an independent panel inquiry was set up in 2013 to, as far as possible, get to the bottom of what happened and what, if anything, went wrong.
(My 2012 piece calling for a formal inquiry is here.)
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The panel spent eight years putting together a detailed report.
The eight year period indicates the complexity and perhaps the seriousness of the matters being investigated.
And this long-awaited report was about to be published…
…when in an extraordinary intervention Priti Patel, the home secretary, has delayed its publication.
https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1394982007093043201
We even have the remarkable sight of Patel relying on the Human Rights Act as part of the excuse for the delay.
As the panel has pointed out – in an impressively robust statement (which you should read) – there is no good reason for this intervention.
None of the supposed reasons add up, and it appears to me that the home secretary’s stated reasons are mere pretexts.
This is an extraordinary intervention by a politician in an independent inquiry.
And it also may be counter-productive – as it is drawing attention to a report that – even if it were critical – may have had little press or public attention.
After all – as I aver above – few would be surprised that bad things were happening at the time with the police and the media.
So, even if there is something in there which Patel, for political reasons, did not want in the public domain, her delay may be bringing attention to a thing others may have preferred were left not emphasised.
Some commenters believe that the report will be an exposure of the corrupt relationships between the media and the police of the time.
I have no idea.
But many will be even more interested in the report now after Patel’s extraordinary and perhaps clumsy intervention.
And we should hope that the report when published finally brings some justice for the family of Daniel Morgan who have campaigned tirelessly since his death for the truth to be revealed.
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25th April 2021
After every miscarriage of justice there is the question of how the wrong was possibly allowed to happen.
And often the miscarriage comes down to the evidence before the court.
In essence: the court is presented with evidence that [x] is the case, and unless that evidence can be undermined then the court will be satisfied that there is guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
The evidence can come from police officers. or from an ’eminent’ expert witness, or (as with the Horizon scandal) an IT system.
(See my Horizon posts here and here.)
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In a criminal case a court is presented with substantive (-looking) evidence on one side of the scale and nothing – other than perhaps bare denials – on the other side.
And so the scales tip to one side.
To dislodge such (on the face of it) compelling evidence is a difficult task.
To an extent the situation is alleviated by the obligation of the prosecution to disclose relevant evidence, and not just the evidence on which they are relying on.
To an extent the situation is also alleviated by a prosecutor assessing the soundness of the evidence before bringing any prosecution.
To an extent proper preparation for trial from everyone involved – judge, prosecution, defence – should be a safeguard.
And the main safeguard, of course, is (or should be) the forensic process itself.
Evidence – especially evidence which comes from supposedly authoritative sources – should be relentlessly tested for its cogency.
There should not be mere nodding-along in deference – whether to a police officer, a ‘respected paediatrician’ or a ‘robust’ computer system.
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But.
Disclosure exercises are sometimes not easy – or cheap.
A properly resourced prosecution authority is not cheap.
Proper case preparation is not cheap.
And skilled in-court lawyering and cross-examination is not easy – or cheap.
For justice to be served, however, requires all of this is done well – which requires funding and other resources.
Else the court will be prone to placing the wrong weight on evidence before it.
Or as techies put it: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
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