After eight years, an independent inquiry set up to investigate the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan finally delivered its report, weighing in at 1,251 pages and drawing on some 110,000 documents, amassing more than a million pages. Its findings can be summed up in two words: ‘institutional corruption’.
It is a damning judgment against the Metropolitan police that comes 22 years after the same force was identified as ‘institutionally racist’ by Sir William Macpherson after his inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
The Daniel Morgan Independent Panel was set up by Theresa May when she was home secretary in 2013 in an attempt to shine light in one of the murkiest moments in recent legal history. I called Priti Patel’s interference with the publication of the report (she had insisted on prior approval) ‘another ignominious chapter’ in an epic tale of cover-up.
Police corruption was ‘a betrayal of everything that policing stands for in this country’, the home
