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Blog 4 -June 1 2021


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Corruption in the Metropolitan  Police

-The neverending story that gives, and keeps on giving

The Murder of Daniel Morgan


1 'Negation of the rule of law' - The case against Sir John Mitting


Priti Patel, on May 18 delayed the publication of an independent Home Office panel review of the murder of a Croydon private investigator Daniel Morgan. 34 years ago in 1987. Like the Pitchford/Mitting inquiry the panel inquiry had been ordered by Teresa May when she was Home Secretary, and it his hard not to think that, like that and other enquiries she ordered, it reflected the significant exasperation from the home secretary the Metropolitan Police not only could get it is own corrupt and incompetent house in order and that after thirty years of trying MPS didn’t seem to know what the problem was, and even if did know it certainly was not going to tell the home secretary. 


On Friday May 28 the panel announced that after negotiation they had been given a provisional publication date of June 15. The delay was so that Priti Patel and small team a from the Home Office can review the supposedly independent review that has been reviewing the case since 2013. 


There must be many in the Metropolitan Police, and elsewhere who are hoping that Priti Patel is sufficiently shameless to simply bury this old piece of bad news. And Sir John Mitting is one of those who would be more than happy to see that happen. 


When I first heard about the delay, in a tweet from veteran Investigative reporter Michael Gillard, I realized that this was a story that I had not been following closely but I thought that it might be of interest because it involved allegations of corruption in the Met from, a period smack bang in the middle of the period of Interest to the Mitting Inquiry into spycops. I thought there may be Police involved who were part of the story of the special demonstration squad, which there are. But I hadn’t realised the role the Sir John Mitting played in the story, was central to the story, and that that role draws attention to a breathing bias in favour of the Metropolitan Police’s secrecy and dishonesty in in the way it goes abut its business that it calls into question whether he is a fit and proper person to lead the Inquiry that bears his name, 


To get to that point there is more than there is thirty years of conspiracy, deception evasion and corruption by the net to deal with first. Yes it is about corruption in the Met, but it is not just about backhanders, disrespect and cover ups, it is about cops participating being accesories to  serious organised crime, and murder. It is also about the hopelessness of the Met’s handling of Covert Human Intelligence Sources, and at the heart of the story was a bereaved and dissatisfied family challenging the Met to take the killing seriously. 


And if that does not ring enough bells, this was a private detective agency hand in glove with the detectives in the Met, at a time when another surrey based private detective, Garry Murray, was putting the finishing touches to a book about how the MI5, Special Branch and the Economic League used Private Investigators to do their dirty work for them. And the dead man’s office was just a short walk from the Economic League’s national research centre.


Eventually more than twenty years after the hideous and brutal murder police charged five men including a former Detective Sergeant from Catford with responsibility for the killing.  When the only trial of the dead man’s alleged killers collapsed because of the police’s coaching of un reliable super grasses’, it left the future leader of the Labour Party, and then Director of Public Prosecutions, with egg on his face. No sooner had the trial collapsed than two of the accused, the business partner of the dead man and his mate, a retired Detective Sergeant from the Metropolitan Police, were recruited again by Andy Coulson to continue to work for News International and Rebekah Brookes.


This is a story we don’t have to spell out in any detail to Sir John Mitting. He knows it only too well. The for of the accused in that collapsed trial, claimed damages against the Metropolitan Police Commissioner for malicious prosecution and misfeasance in public office. The claim was eventually heard by Mr Justice Mitting, who found in favour of the former detective and against the three other men.


To summarise Justice Mitting’s reasoning for this it couldn’t have been malicious prosecution by the Metropolitan Police  because the decision to prosecute was Kier Starner’s, even though the police withheld information about their coaching of the witness from him. It wasn’t misfeasance in public office because the officer responsible genuinely believed the accused civilians were guilty which is why he coached the witness.


Mitting’s judgement did not stand indeed could not stand. The three appealed and Mitting’s disturbing judgement was thrown out. One of the Appeal Court Judges, Lady Justice King wrote in  the judgement:


"To say that Det Ch Supt Cook, a prosecutor guilty of perverting the course of justice by creating false evidence against the appellants was, on account of his belief in their guilt, not acting maliciously, is rather like saying that Robin Hood was not guilty of theft.


One understands the motivation in each case, but any seeming endorsement of such dishonest behaviour, particularly within the police force, leads... to a serious and unacceptable 'negation of the rule of law'."


By the time that withering appraisal of Mitting’s understanding of the legal concept of corruption by police officers had been issued, he was shockingly already in charge of the inquiry into police corruption that bears his name.



In the absence of the panel report commissioned by Theresa May, the only published written official account of that failed case and misfeasance by the Met Commissioner is Sir John Mitting’s approved judgement in that claim. You can read it in full here:


https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/rees-ors-v-met-police-approved-final-jment.pdf


II The Killing Of Daniel Morgan - A Chronology of Corruption, Evasion and the Failure of Covert Human Intelligence


This is not a murder story that has been ignored by either the police, reporters, or investigative journalists, nor has it been sidelined by their editors and it has never been out of the public view for very long. 


But it is fair to say it hasn’t caught and stayed in the public’s attention either. Although it is not a difficult story, it is not straightforward, and it has played out episodically over thirty-four years. The number and complexity of the characters is Shakespearean, and as with Shakespeare most people hearing about it probably think it isn’t that sort of story that could have happened to anyone like them. But most of all it is unresolved, and unlike Shakespeare it starts with a brutal and horrific murder and there is no ending, just a bunch of unsavoury characters shuffling off into the Croydon sunset.


For someone like me coming to the story fairly fresh it has been a solid piece of work trying to piece it together. For those of us interested in in the spycops, blacklisting, covert human intelligence sources and from the different sources of variable. All the work has been done by other what I have tried to put it together in a way that is up to date and relevant to those following the Mitting Inquiry.


This isn’t a straightforward timeline, the lengthy cast list of the police officers will include officers who had a role to play in the story of the Special Demonstration Squad and National Public Order Intelligence Unit, whether Sir John Mitting, who now has a serious conflict of interest in this inquiry, will reveal this. I have tried to put some of that detail into an otherwise brief largely summarised chronological account. 


One of the most useful sources in doing this has been Sir John Mitting’s judgement referenced above. Although the judgement was wrong in law and in principle and wrong constitutionally, the premises on which he based it were factually accurate. The other was a three part, party dramatised or reconstructed, Channel Four documentary “Murder in the Car Park”. This is a extremely well-researched piece commissioned in anticipation of the recently delayed report, and it was broadcast last year and is available on All 4. It seems to have been made with the co-operation of the accused defendants who were all acquitted, the Met police officers responsible for the inquiries and the collapsed trial, and the victim’s family. That is some feat, and one wonders how much negotiation was in volved to achieve it,


The Guardian, By-line Times and even, heaven preserve us, The Daily Mail have reported the story regularly, and in detail. At one point a South London local newspaper called Shopping Times was helpful, If you want more information about the episodes in this story than I am laying out here, go and look for it. You might find it in unexpected places.


1987 Murder in Sydenham


On March 10, 1987, the body of a man in his late thirties was found next to his own car in the car Park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham in Southeast London. He had been stuck four or five times by an axe to his head, and the last blow, struck after he had hit the ground, left the axe embedded in his face. Although his watch missing, his wallet was not, and there was more than a grand in cash in his jacket, untouched. 


On the other hand his trouser pocket had been torn open and there was no sign of notes he had been writing in the pub.


The dead man was Danny Morgan, 37, the son of an army officer who had grown up in Monmouthshire and gone on to study agriculture before getting married in his late twenties and moving to London. The family and their two children lived in Norwood in Croydon.


Three years before this he had set up a private investigation company, Southern Investigations, with a younger business partner Jonathan Rees, aged 32 at the time of Morgan’s death. Before that they had been working together in a bailiff, legal services and private investigation agency run by Bryan Madagan. Madagan is now 82 and a Sydenham resident and is still a director of Madagan Associates. The firm is based in Brockley still in that area of Southeast London. Rees’ work for Madagan included the private investigation and legal service areas, and Rees was a regular visitor to Catford police station for local solicitors. The Golden Lion in Sydenham was a regular drinking haunt for Rees and for Catford’s detectives, Morgan was more involved in the landlord and bailiff side of the business.


This division of work was carried over to the two men’s own company, which was based in Thornton Heath, the area of Croydon next door to Norwood and not very far from Sydenham and Catford. Although Thornton Heath would not have been in Catford’s patch, Rees maintained a close friendship with some of the police from Catford and often employed them for one-off cash-in-hand jobs and presumably used them to get confidential information when he needed it.


As it happens it their new office in Thornton Heath was not far from 90 London Road where in 1980, The Economic League had centralized its research department including its notorious blacklist with perhaps as many as 30,000 alleged “subversives” on it. 


Morgan and Rees continued to regularly drink socially in the Golden Lion. The night Morgan was killed was a Tuesday night and they were there simply to talk business and it was all done before 9 O’clock when Rees left first to go home. The night before however they had been there drinking with some of Catford’s detectives.


Rees took his leave of Morgan at around 9pm, and returned home in his car which he had parked in front of the pub. Before, or during,  this relatively short journey he made some calls on his car phone.


Morgan stayed a little longer, completing notes he had made of the conversation. His body was discovered at 9.40. when customer driving into the car park saw it, stopped his car, and dashed in to tell the landlord. The first police, from Catford, were on the scene at 9.52.


1987 Operation Morgan


Operation Morgan, led By Detective Superintendent Douglas “Dougie” Campbell, started at this point. Although Campbell, presumably based at New Scotland Yard and on call, did not appear on the scene until eleven o’clock. Later there was evidence from some of the officers already there that Campbell had clearly been drinking, and the Daily Mail later carried allegations that the first thing he did on his arrival was to get the landlord to open a bottle of Scotch. 


Second in Charge was Detective Alan Jones and third in the line of command was Detective Sergeant Malcolm Davidson.


The following day 41-year-old Detective Sergeant Sidney Fillery, a member of the flying squad based at Catford Police station, joined the investigation. He was a vey close friend and regular drinking companion of Rees, knew Morgan and occasionally did work for their agency presumably cash in hand. Campbell was aware that he knew Rees, but not that they were close friends and none of the senior officers knew at this initial stage about the work he undertook for Southern Investigations, or that, as it later turned out, Fillery had been drinking with Morgan and Rees in the Golden Lion on the very night before the murder. 


Fillery was to become part of the story very quickly and therefore his involvement in the investigation was extraordinarily problematic. As a detective sergeant, Fillery was an experienced officer and he would have known that, whether or not he had played any part in the events that led to Morgan’s death, it was his duty to make clear his connections to the firm and the dead man’s business partner.


Not only did he not do this, he also took the first witness statement off Rees the day after the murder but after that he remained an investigating officer only for another 5 days. 

As Fillery’s closeness to Rees and the firm became clearer Campbell removed him from the team. With Fillery out of the way, Campbell’s team started to explore the motive for the murder and identify possible suspects. 


Southern Investigations was more like an unincorporated association than a limited company, a partnership, in which the partners – Rees and Morgan, were liable for all debts. The firm’s business was mainly private investigations, bailiff’s work and security. But  although it was only a few years old it was already profitable, and its turnover was growing. However, they had two outstanding debts at the time of Morgan’s murder the first was about £24,000 unpaid tax, which was not perhaps unusual for a recently established and growing business. The other though slightly smaller was a claim being brought by one of their security customers, Belmont Cars Auctions.

Belmont were claiming £18,280.62 which was the takings from one of their car twice weekly car auctions that Rees had, in March the previous year, been in the process of banking for the company when he was attacked and robbed. 

This debt was making its way through the court and Rees and Morgan had just been given leave by the court to defend Belmont’s claim of debt, but as a condition they had to lodged £10,000 with the court within 21 days. Their meeting in the Golden Lion had therefore been to discuss how to raise this and they had hoped to meet there a friend or relation of Rees to discuss it. But he didn’t turn up.

This would not have a sufficient motive for murder, but Campbell was working on the hypothesis, for which he found some evidence, that that Morgan believed that the robbery was a put up job and that it in fact been carried out by the two Catford Police Officers. These were different officer Fillery. Within a month of the killing Campbell had arrested Fillery, and the two other Met Police officers from Catford Police Station whose names seem never to have been disclosed. Rees and his two brothers in law, Glenn and Garry Vian, had also been arrested and questioned under caution about the murder. His brothers were local hard men certainly good with their fists and happy to put them to use; but they had no significant criminal records.

If Campbell’s hypothesis was right this suggested that the working relationship between the two partners must have been difficult to say the least, and in reality probably pretty impossible.  But this was exactly the picture that emerged from the small number of regular staff employed at Sothern Investigations. Its office manager was Peter Newby, there was an employed investigator called Yvonne Bartlett and a self-employed bookkeeper Kevin Lennon. 

The employees all testified at the time, and continued to testify for the next twenty odd years that the relationship between their two bosses was acrimonious and quarrelsome They also confirmed that the main reason for this disagreement was the Belmont Robbery and resultant debt, and Morgan’s belief was that it was a put-up job by Rees and police from Catford. Newby and Lennon also knew that Fillery, who had been at the Belmont Auction with Rees on the day he was robbed, was also aware of the difficulties the two men had about the job. 

Newby told Campbell’s team that when Fillery had visited the office, the day after Morgan’s murder, he left with the Belmont file which had not appeared in the evidence that Campbell had before him.

Kevin Lennon, at this time, was on bail awaiting trial for serious offences of tax fraud involving some of his other clients. In July a friend of his, former Detective Chief Inspector called Bucknole, covertly recorded record a conversation with Lennon in which he claimed that Rees had asked him to find someone to kill Morgan. As a result, Lennon was formally interviewed by Campbell’s team on July 21 when he confirmed that Rees had expressed his desire to kill Morgan at least a year before he was in fact killed and that Rees had at least asked him to find someone to carry out the act. This was confirmed in a written witness statement on September 4. In a second statement given on September 15 he said that Rees had also discussed the proposed murder of Morgan as early as in May 1986.

In the end Campbell concluded that although he thought Rees may have commissioned Morgan’s killing, by his brother-in-law that there was insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.  All six suspects were released from their bail conditions. He told the Coroner of his thoughts but they were not put to the inquest jury. 

1988 The Inquest

On April 25, 1988, a year after the killing, the inquest jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing as you might expect of a man found dead in a pub carpark with an axe sticking out of his face. The only finger of suspicion pointed at Rees or Fillery at the at the inquest was that of Kevin Lennon, and with his impending serious court case he would not be a reliable witness.

Although there was no immediate prosecution of anyone in relation to Morgan’s death, his mother and brother and sister were not prepared to let it go. Nor it seemed were the press who continued to scratch away at the unsatisfactorily outcome of the investigation.

Rees had not been the only partner with a friend in the Metropolitan Police and and in Mprgan’s case they weren’t Catford based. Detective Constable Alan “Taffy” Holmes aged 44 was a Croydon resident and although he was only a Detective Constable, low down in the Met’s quasi milltary pecking order, but working in the force;s Serious Crimes Squad he had friends in high places. including Commander Ray Adams a rising star within the met but who by 1987 was under investigation particularly with Gangland criminal Kenneth Noyes who had been jailed for the Brinks Mat robbery. Holmes was a golfing buddy of Adams and fellow freemason of both Adams and Noyes.

Morgan had been talking to Holmes about his concerns about his business partner’s corrupt dealing with detectives in Catford, which went beyond the one incident with Belmont Auctions. We can only speculate what their plans were, or whether Morgan knew that is friend was himself being investigated for corruption. 

Holmes was not exactly the best or safest person to confide in,  and four months after Daniel’s murder. Alan Holmes who was being drawn into the investigation of Adams and Noye, shot and killed himself in his own back garden. He left a suicide note blaming that corruption investigation and named a fellow officer, DC Derek Haslam from Croydon CID for naming him to the anti-corruption investigation. 

It transpired later that as many as four or five people in Morgan’s immediate circle knew about his plans to expose knew about his proposed expose. What we do not know is how big that expose was, how close to the truth it was  and how dangerous it was to Serious Organised Criminal Organisations. And critically we do not lmpw how far DC Holmes might have spread the word about it and how far it spread in the Met or into the criminal community.


1988 Operations Drake and Plymouth


Just after the first anniversary of Daniel Morgan’s murder and the inquest, his family made a formal complaint to the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) about their handling of the investigation and its outcome.  The MPS passed it to the Police Complaints Authority who arranged for the Hampshire Police to undertake a review. The Hampshire police had been involved in Operation Countryman, the investigation into Met Corruption were then asked to reopen the investigation. 


Operation Drake commenced in July 1988, under the lead of DCS Alan Wheeler and DCI Paul Blaker of the Hampshire force. This operation was specifically the reinvestigation of the murder. The parallel review of the allegation of corruption was named Operation Plymouth, and remained under the auspices of the PCA,


As a result of Operation Drake, Rees and another man Paul Goodridge who had been supposed to meet them at the Golden Lion to talk about a loan to cover the £10k deposit a court were charged with Morgan’s murder. But the DPP, then Sir Thomas Heatherington, felt the evidence was not strong enough for a prosecution and the family were told that a hearing was booked for the end of April but that the crown would offer no evidence.


The Morgan family’s only hope of justice was the PCA and operation Plymouth. That did not report its conclusion to the family until early 1990. The letter was blunt. The first inquiry was satisfactory and there was “no evidence whatsoever” of police involvement in Morgan’s murder. The only crumb of comfort was that they had in the process recognised the high level of incompetence in the handling of the crime scene and gathering of forensic evidence, which was an irredeemable mistake that would continue to hamper and limit future inquiries,


After this Fillery retired from the police on medical grounds and became, as planned, Rees’s new partner in Southern Investigations. And the good times were about to roll for him.


1990s


The new Southern Investigations, led by Rees and now Fillery, with their lack of scruples about gaining access to privileged information was just the sort of outfit that the tabloid press were looking for to help them fill their papers with salacious stories, and thus win the ratings wars and the advertising that went with it. 


At some stage early in the nineties Rees had developed a  good working relationship with Journalists on Rupert Murdock’s “News of the World”. By the end of the decade the News of the World alone was paying them more than £150,000 a year for leads on stories.


The decade from the mid 1990s saw an explosion in mobile phone use. In 1996 just 16% of households had a mobile phone, within five years it was 50% and in the next five year it rose to 80%.  Starting a little earlier, while people were using land lines as their main contact number most households would have an answering machine. There was nothing technically sophisticated about phone hacking. It involved listening to voice messages and to do this all you needed was the personal mobile phone number and a few tricks on how to listen to messages remotely. The same applied to landline with answering machines, Southern Investigations which had a well-developed network providing personal telephone numbers, well now very well placed to take advantage of the new and very leaky technology. It would come as no surprise they would be deeply implicated in the phone hacking scandal.



1993 Stephen Lawrence’s Murder


Just after 10.30pm on Thursday 22nd of April 18 year old black young man, Stephen Lawrence, was stabbed to death in a racially motivated attack by 5 or 6 white youths. He was with another young black friend Duwayne Brooks travelling home to Plumstead. They were just south of Lewisham and north-east of Catford.


The circumstances of the two brutal killings of Morgan and Lawrence, and the motives of their killers were different, but the incompetence of the investigations by essentially the same division of the Metropolitan Police was similar. It was a level of incompetence that seemed to many observers to look like there was a deliberate, internal attempt to frustrate their own investigation. 


If it was deliberate, at the most fundamental level the motivation for that disguised incompetence was very different. In the case of the killing of Daniel Morgan it would have been driven by the fear of exposure of police corruption. In the case of Stephen Lawrence’s killing the Macpherson report would find that it was the result of the Met’s institutional racism, not corruption. But that finding had been reached because evidence was deliberately withheld from them  of the involvement of Clifford Norris with the local division of the Met Police. Norris ran  a serious organised criminal group involved drug dealing. His son was one of the leading suspects for the killing of Stephen Lawrence.


1998 MacPherson Inquiry


Home Secretary, Jack Straw, ordered an inquiry into the failure of the Lawrence murder inquiry  it was carried out by Sir William Macpherson and officially titled "The Inquiry Into The Matters Arising From The Death of Stephen Lawrence". It was completed in two years despite seeing over 100,00 documents.

It concluded that the Metropolitan Police Service investigation had been incompetent, that officers made serious errors, including not giving first aid failing to follow obvious leads during their investigation; and failing to arrest suspects, failure. It concluded there had been a failure of leadership by senior MPS officers in a force that was institutionally racist. In all there were 70 recommendations.


1998 Operations Nigeria and Two Bridges 


Morgan’s unsolved murder was a severe embarrassment for a police service, the led by Commissioner John Stevens remained keen to solve the Morgan Murder to demonstrate that it had changed dramatically from the endemically corrupt force of the sixties and seventies and eighties. 


In 1998 more than ten years after Morgan’s death Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Roy Clark, who were responsible for CIB3, known as the “Ghost Squad” was given the go ahead to re-opened the investigation covertly, this included including bugging the office of Southern Investigation, which was still trading and making a handsome living from its work News International. 


Southern Investigations became Law and Commercial at around this time and the surveillance operation became Operation Two Bridges. Interestingly it certainly then also seemed to have been looking at Rees’ current activities with the News of the World. One intelligence report from September 26th reported on a meeting between Rees and Mazher (Maz) Mahmood of the News of the World. Rees and Fillery had set the Journalist up as the “Fake Sheik”, his most famous coup.  It took place  pub in Gillet street in Thornton Heath and describes Maz meeting “a plain clothes officer aged about 45 – officer was selling a story to Maz about inter-race marriage and the payment in dowry in the form of livestock”.


There is obviously a unpleasant and racist undertone in this story and has a police officer passing information on to media in the expectation of financial reward, But in the greater scheme of the corruption in the Met Police around Southern Investigations it is fairly minor.  But this was information that would later be interesting to the Levenson Inquiry, even though it had been generated incidentally by the reopening of the inquiry into Morgan’s murder. 


Bob Quick who by the time of Levenson was Assistant Commissioner at the MPS had given evidence about this to the inquiry without it seems revealing the real nature of Operation Two Bridges which had in 2000 become Operation Nigeria:


“Following these events and as a result of Operation Nigeria, in around 2000, I wrote a short report highlighting the role of journalists in promoting corrupt relationships with, and making corrupt payments to officers for stories about famous people and high-profile investigations in the MPS… I recommended the commencement of an investigation into such activities. I believe my report also names some newspapers but I cannot recall which ones. I proposed an investigation of these newspapers/officers on the basis that I believed that the journalists were not paying bribes out of their own pockets but were either falsely accounting for their expenses and therefore defrauding their employers or, that the newspaper organisations were aware of the reasons for the payments and were themselves complicit in making corrupt payments to police officers.”


During these investigations into Rees and Southern Investigations at least 30 of these corrupt payments were identified. Bob Quick had joined the force in 1978 at the age of 18 and served in a number of roles in uniform and CID. At the time of Daniel Morgan’s murder in 1987 Bob Quick was a sergeant, based at Catford Police Station.


However in terms of the murder of Daniel Morgan, Operation Nigeria did not go anywhere. Rees was still the only person they had in the frame for commissioning he killing and in December 2000, Jonathan Rees was found guilty, with a serving police officer, Detective Constable Austin Warnes, aged 47of planting cocaine on a woman in to win a child custody battle for the father, Simon James, who was his client. 


Rees got a seven-year sentence for this despicable piece of skullduggery, leaving Sid Fillery in charge of Southern Investigations. Warnes, who had pleaded guilty got four years, and two other alleged accomplices Dave Courtney and builder and associate of Rees, James Cook were acquitted,


Clark had only told the Morgan Family that the Daniel’s murder had been reopened just as it was about to be closed again.  They were unhappy because they been lobbying for this for a decade,  that even at that time they were not allowed any information about the previous re-investigations.


What many commentators fail to recognise is that that the Jailing of Rees which ended the secretly reopened inquiry into Morgan’s death was a direct consequence of the covert surveillance of Rees for Morgan’s murder.


In 2004 Clark retired from the force to become the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s (IPCC) first director of investigations. The Morgan family complained in the strongest terms to the IPCC. In July 2015 news emerged that The IPCC was investigating it own director of investigations about whether he and his former boss Lord Stevens had deliberately withheld information about corruption from the Macpherson Inquiry. Macpherson had concluded that while the met had been intuitionally racist corruption had not played a part in the mishandling of the murder inquiry. How this investigation end is not clear but Clark is now the Head of Criminal Investigations at HMRC.


2000 The Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson Years


Southern Investigations role with the tabloid press, and especially that owned by Murdock, was lucrative in the nineties but it stepped up a gear as two of Murdock editors made it a lynch[pin in their strategies for the papers.


At the millennium and at the age of 32 Rebekah Wade became editor of the hugely popular and salacious Sunday newspaper the News of the World. It made her the youngest ever editor of a national newspaper and her energy and single minded-ness in finding the salacious stories that sold the paper revitalised the News of the World. In 2002 she bagged a trophy husband in the form of actor Ross Kemp and in 2003 was editor of the Sun. In 2009 she divorced Kemp and married racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks and became Rebekah Brooks and CEO of Rupert Murdock’s News International the company that owned the News of The World and the Sun.


Brooks and the News of the World didn’t invent the use of private detectives to string stories or do some of the secretive and grubby investigations around newspaper stories, especially those that involved celebrities and sleaze. She and they industrialised it, through using Illegal phone hacking especially the relatively straightforward trick of playing voicemails. 


When she moved to the Sun her place as editor of the News of the World was taken by Andy Coulson who held the post from 2003 to 2007 when he resigned following the conviction of one of the paper’s reporters for illegal phone hacking, at which point he became the Conservative Party's director of communications until  in May 2010 he briefly became the Director of Communications for the Government at Downing Street. It was a post he really only held until the end of the year when media stories about his role in illegal phone hacking made his position untenable,


2002 Operations Abelard and Morgan II


In October 2001 the Met’s cold case review panel – The Murder Review Group –recommended re-investigating Morgan’s Murder.  Presumably they were not aware that Roy Clark and his “Ghost” squad had already done this. No doubt they were optimistic that progress was possible with Rees’ credibility blown as a witness almost certainly as a result of Clark’s operations. 


In May 2002 they launched a sophisticated covert operation targeted on those who they believed Rees had paid to carry out the hit, the Vians and the builder called Jimmy Cook who they believe had driven a getaway vehicle for the killer. 


Because there was no time when Glenn Vian’s terraced house was empty they went to the expense of buying the house next to enable them to place their bugs in place.

In 2002–2003, while Rees was still serving his sentence another suspect's car, and Glenn Vian's house were bugged. 

But it was decided that so long after the event it would be necessary to generate discussion in Abelard’s bugged environments and so an overt reopening of the case, called Operation Morgan II was launched, built round an new appeal for witnesses on Crimewatch on Jun 25  2002. 


Morgan II and the new appeal was led by Detective Superintendent David Cook, whose then wife, Jacqui Hames, was a former police officer and now presenter on the programme.  Although this combination of overt and covert activity seems to have generated new information and identified potential accomplices which resulted resulting in eight arrests, the DPP turned down a prosecution because of the evidence remained weak.


Cook like the previous Met Police investigators was convinced guilt lay exclusively with the Private Investigator, Rees and his associates, and not any of the policer officers who probably had more to loose had Morgan lived, that Rees had to gain from Morgan’s death.


But following the launch of the key Crimewatch element of Operation Morgan 2. Rees persuaded the  News of the the World to put DSI Cook and his high profile wife, Jacqui Hames, under observation by undercoverreporters.


This was ramping things up dramatically and disturbingly. Hames had been a co-presenter with 

Jill Dando who had been assassinated on her door step in 1999. That crime was still unsolved and it was certainly believed the press had her under surveillance.


The observation was heavy handed and barely covert. It involved a sleazy hack sat in a van in the deserted street outside the family home. Hames eventually confronted the man who readily explained that he was from the NoW.

Cook and Hames marriage didn’t survive the scrutiny of the Murdock Press, but subsequently they joined Hacked Off and got a generous settlement from Murdock.



2005 Operation Abelard II


Two years later when Ian Blair took over as Metropolitan Police Commissioner the case was reopened for a fifth time and again in secret. Detective Superintendent David Cook was again given the job of reviewing he evidence, and new evidence was collected by bugs on Glen Vian’s house, and more importantly from interviews with “supergrasses”. Rees and the Vians were held on remand while Cook assembled the case that would he expected convict them


2009 The trial of Rees, Fillery, Cook and the Vian brothers


Finally with the evidence of three supergrasses the Met felt there was enough evidence to charge Rees, Fillery, the Vian brothers and builder Cook and in  2009, now  twenty years after the murder, the trial of began at the Old Bailey.  Sir Kier Starmer, the DPP, was clearly hoping to deliver delayed justice for the Morgan Family in the same in the same way that he would later do for the Lawrence Family.


Rees and the VIan’s were held on remand for two years before the trial started.  But the trial started to unravel quickly when in February 2010 the trial judge dismissed a key super grass witness and Fillery's prosecution was halted. And then it carried on unraveling. In November James Cook was discharged as a second supergrass was dismissed third supergrass witness was dismissed in January 2011. By March the Director of Public Prosecutions and future Labour Leader, Sir Keir Starmer, threw the towel in.


The last defendants, Jonathan Rees and his brothers-in-law, were acquitted leaving Morgan’s murder unsolved. The trial’s collapse had stemmed from the fundamental unreliability of the evidence of the covert human intelligence sources (CHIS). 


Supergrasses were a particular sort of CHIS – unlike the salaried undercover officers, unlike the informers who could be paid and even expect the police to turn a blind eye to crime they had committed , unlike the unpaid informers who provided evidence to the police pro bono inspired more by a sense of civic responsibility or in some cases personal animosity.


The prize for a “supergrass” was life-changing: Exoneration from prosecution for previous crimes, a new official identity for you and your family, if you had one.  A new home, ideally in a sunny non-UK climate, and a stipend to support your new lifestyle.


The price was high, but a lot was expected in return, it included admission of all crimes they had participated in, and naming the organisers and their colleagues. In Northern Ireland they avoided the expression “supergrass” preferring the more formal and perhaps misleading term “Assisting Offenders” for para militaries who named their comrades in arms. 


The problem with super grasses was that they were all professional liars, and often not the sharpest knife in the draw. And to win the prize of a new life and a slate wiped clean they tended to be eager to please and willing to deliver what their police handlers wanted to hear, and it was tempting for the lead detectives to coach them as witnesses which is of course a serious offence. 


The ultimate problem was that even when they convinced the jury, if there was one,  and the judge at the original trial,  they often failed to convince the appeal court judges. 


In a typical case in Northern Ireland in 1983, as a result of Christopher Black’s supergrass testimony 22 “members of the provisional IRA” were convicted and sentenced to a total of 4000 years in jail. Three years later 18 of these convictions were overturned at appeal.


In the case of the trial of those involved alleged to be responsible for Morgan’s death there was no need to appeal. The three super grasses were dismissed by the judge during the trial. The key super grass in the case against Rees was Gary Eaton, a man with mental health problems who was seriously coached by DSI cook. When this came out in court the case collapsed. 



2011 Levensen Inquiry



Following a string of revelations about the press, but largely Rupert Murdock’s News International Group use  of private investigators to illegaly tap and hack the mobile phones of celebrities and people in the Public eye David Cameron finally called a public inquiry  lead by Mr  Justice Levenson which started taking evidence in 2011.


2011 The Trial of Dobson and Norris


In November 2011, 18 years after Stephen’s murder two initial suspects who had been arrested  during the failed investigation were put on trial for his murder.  Gary Dobson had been 17 at the time of the murder and David Norris, the son of Drug boss Clifford Norris had been 16, 


In 1994, the year after Stephen’s death, and in the absence of the MPS’ willingness to prosecute, the family had brought a private prosecution against the youth’s thought to have been in the group that killed him. It was unsuccessful. There was not enough evidence against Norris, and Dobson was acquitted. For the trial to go ahead in 2011 that acquittal had to be set aside in court, which it was. In January 2012 Norris and Dobson were finally convicted,


2014 the Ellison review of the Stephen Lawrence Investigation


In 2014 at the request of Home Secretary Theresa May, Mark Ellison QCs later review of the evidence about the Lawrence investigation, concluded that information about corruption by one of the officers involved in the original investigation should have been passed to Macpherson.


The officer referred to was Detective Sergeant John Davidson, not to be confused with Malcolm Davidson the number three in the original Operation Morgan. In 2019 after a five-year investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA), which they named Operation Probitas it concluded there was no evidence of corruption against him. The original evidence had been given by a super grass, not a criminal super grass but a police super grass: Detective Constable Neil Putnam was a Met Police officer in the South East Regional Crime Squad found to be recycling heroin, cocaine and cannabis seized by the drug squad. 


In return for a vastly reduced sentence, he gave up evidence about a group of corrupt detectives in the Drugs Squad, nicknamed the Groovy Gang they were based at East Dulwich also in South East London.


On April 17, 2009 Detective Constable Thomas Kingston, 42, and Detective Constable Thomas Reynolds, 39, were jailed for three-and-a-half; Detective Sergeant Terrance O'Connell, 43, was jailed for two years. Their ringleader, Detective ? Robert Clark , had already been jailed for 12 year and his "enthusiastic" lieutenant, Detective ? Christopher Drury, was jailed for 11 years. 


The rounding up of the Groovy Gang put John Yates career into the fast Track and when he was forced to resign in the wake of the phone hacking scandal and Levenson report he was Assistant Chief Constable. The Groovy Gang were re-tried and acquitted when it transpired that key evidence concerning the supper grass evidence had been withheld from the defence.


John Davidson had in fact retired from the force in 1998 and initially set up a private investigation firm in Croydon, called Reid Davidson Ltd, but later moved to Menorca where he operated a Bar and Restaurant.


Some reports say that The NCA had not interviewed Putnam when looking into the claims against Davidson because they regarded him as a tainted witness,



2017   Rees, Vian, Fillery and Vian vs the Metropolitan Police Commissioner    -  The Mitting Judgement


Following the collapse of the trial in 2010 the four claimants had claim damages against the Metropolitan Police Commissioner for malicious prosecution and misfeasance in public office. The case was heard by Mr Justice Mitting. The Vians and Rees lost their case, but Mitting found in favour of the Police officer. They took the judgement to appeal and won. This was how the Barristers at 5 Essex Court representing the Commissioner reported the findings of the appeal court.

“The Court of Appeal gave judgment today in the case of Rees and others v The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis upholding the appeals of Jonathan Rees, Glenn Vian and Garry Vian arising out of their prosecution for the murder of Daniel Morgan in 1987.

The appellants had brought claims for malicious prosecution and misfeasance in public office following the collapse of criminal proceedings in March 2011. Relying in part on findings made in those proceedings that the senior investigating officer (SIO) had mishandled a prosecution witness, the appellants alleged that the re-investigation of Daniel Morgan’s murder between 2006 and 2008 and their subsequent prosecution had been conducted in bad faith.

At first instance, Mr Justice Mitting dismissed the claims finding that the police were not the prosecutor; that there was sufficient evidence to provide reasonable and probable cause for prosecuting Mr Rees and the Vian brothers for Daniel Morgan’s murder; and that, in any event, the prosecution was not brought maliciously.

The Court of Appeal overturned the decision of Mitting J finding that the SIO was the prosecutor for the purposes of the tort of malicious prosecution as he had deprived the CPS of its ability to exercise independent judgment by putting before it the evidence of a suborned witness. Although the Court upheld Mitting J’s finding that there was, on an objective analysis of the admissible evidence, reasonable and probable cause to prosecute the appellants, it found that the SIO did not honestly believe that there was a proper case to lay before a court and thus acted maliciously. The Court concluded that the appellants would not have been prosecuted if the CPS had known of the SIO’s misconduct at the time of deciding whether or not to bring charges.

DSI Cooks introduction into the story with Operation Morgan 2 had provided  unexpected links with the frustratingly disparate elements of the story including the wider picture of corruption in the South East London Met Police and Rees and Fillery’s  life in the big time thanks to Rupert Murdock and Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson.


The relevance for the spycops inquiry is the insight this terrible tale should bring of the pervasive corruption and casual dishonesty of the Metropolitan Police Service during the period being considered, and the unreliability of judgements routinely made by detectives and senior officers. 


But it is that extraordinary mis-judgement by Mitting, shockingly endorsing evidence tampering by police officers to secure prosecutions and convictions, which should give the greatest concern about a fair outcome to an inquiry under his leadership.


For Priti Patel, currently pouring over the independent panel review a fair outcome from the Inquiry will not be at the forefront of her mind. The damage that panel review might do to Mitting’s ability to deliver the expected whitewash will be her main concern.



Mike Hughes 1/6/21









Blog 3 -April 21 2021


Spycops Inquiry

It is Time to Put History

in the Witness Box 

-   and The Mitting (Spycops) Inquiry

Needs to start with Churchill’s Home Secretary,  Sir David Maxwell Fife


My first blog on the second phase of the spycops first tranche of witness statements I made the point that Historical “Context is everything” and was missing from the inquiry. It was posted before the first opening statements were delivered in this face, but imagine when I found to my surprise that the Lawyers representing both the Met Police Service (Scotland Yard) and the police core participants (spycops) made the same point.


Surely that discredited my argument? In my defence unlike them I didn’t then go on to make a pitch for a particularly partisan historian to do the job. Robert Service, their preferred candidate, is a historian who is the most partisan anti-Russian, anti-communist historian writing in English. But then I did not need to have a preferred candidate, because as Peter Hain forcefully put it in his evidence, history was on the side of those who opposed fascism and apartheid. So from my perspective any historian, other than probably Robert Service or David Starkey, would do. 


History was definitely not on the side of the UK police who I the seventies provided the National Front with an honour guard that enabled the NF to march and “swager” in a thoroughly intimidating way through largely black and black neighbourhoods across England. At the same time the police were doing their best to enable the racist South African Government to promote its now discredited regime to the northern hemisphere.


As I have followed the of evidence being gathered in this second phase of the first  tranche I feel even more strongly the need for context of a both a political historian and also a constitutional lawyer. 


The bizarre and authoritarian way this inquiry is being run, and the stranglehold the inquiry the young and apparently narrow-minded legal team has over the questioning of witnesses, makes this critical now. It is become clear that this team is and trying to intimidate and criminalise the witnesses – which may of course be at the behest of the spycops’ and Scotland Yard’s briefs. 


But it is hard to tell because the pleasure they seem to derive from this part of their task reminds me of the shameless, smug, smirks on the faces of the coppers providing an honour guard to the Fascist Marchers in the 1970s.


Another worry is that the way statements are being read into the inquiry suggests that if the historical and legal context is not deliberately also read into the proceedings then Mitting and his team will feel, or decide, that they should, or must, ignore it. What they will not do, despite their supposed “inquisitorial” approach, is use their own knowledge and expertise or otherwise track that knowledge or experience to make a rational assessment of the credibility ppf the evidence being presented by the state and its former employees.


Over the last couple of weeks listing and reading the evidence I have found myself having to do a fair bit of research. I do not mean research into the Inquiry’s evidence  vaults – to make sense of this inquiry. That is worrying because I was old enough to remember the events of 1968, to vote in 1973, and to be a trade union  and anti-fascist activists by 1977. With so much more evidence to follow over the next few years I am trying to put some of this research into a background briefing for those following the inquiry, it will be an e-book so watch the space for the details.


I now want to spend the rest of this blog looking at one, one-page, recently submitted of evidence that is crying out for informed context. It is the Document entitled ‘The Directive to the Director General of the Security Service’, issued by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, then Home Secretary.

- UCPI0000034262 [https://www.ucpi.org.uk/publications/document-entitled-the-directive-to-the-director-general-of-the-security-service-issued-by-sir-david-maxwell-fyfe-then-home-secretary/ ]


It is very short so here it is in full:


THE DIRECTIVE TO THE DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE SECURITY SERVICE

 

“In your appointment as Director General of the Security Service you will be responsible to the Home Secretary personally. The Security Service is not, however, a part of the Home Office. On appropriate occasion you will have right of direct access to the Prime Minister.

 

The Security Service is part of the Defence Forces of the country. Its task is the Defence of the Realm as a whole, from external and internal dangers arising from attempts at espionage and sabotage, or from actions of persons and organisations whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged. to be subversive to the State.

 

You will take special care to see that the work of the Security Service is strictly limited to what is necessary for the purposes of' this task. 

 

It is essentia1 that the Security Service should be kept absolutely free from any political bias or influence and nothing should be done that might lend colour to any suggestion that it is concerned with the interests of any particular

section of the community, or with any other matter than the Defence of the Realm as a whole.

 

No enquiry is to be carried out on behalf of any Government Department unless you are satisfied that an important public interest bearing on the Defence of the Realm, as defined in paragraph 2, is at stake.


It was sent to Sir Percy Silitoe, Director General of MI5, on 24 September, 1952, by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, who was Home Secretary in Churchill’s 1951 government, that had replace Clement Attlee’s one-and-a-bit term post war Labour government.


In fact, the copy admitted into evidence in the Mitting Inquiry is not a copy of the one sent to Sir Percy in 1952. And on the Mitting copy you will after the title and before the directive itself:


“(Denning, para 238) 

 

On 24 September, 1952, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, then Home Secretary, issued this Directive to the Director General of the Security Service, which is the governing instrument today:” 

 

The text in brackets indicates its source, Lord Denning’s report following his Judicia; inquiry into the Profumo Affair in 1961. The report was published in the Autumn of 1963 and contained, for the first time in public, the Maxwell Fyfe directive.

 

The text following the reference is not part of the directive but Denning’s description of the directive, which is not controversial or misleading but should be read precisely. 

 

It is days correctly a “governing instrument”, but that has virtually no legal weight. It has the weight of being a written management instruction it is certainly not a “statutory instrument” which the Home Secretary could have generated.  It does not have the weight of law. Indeed it was not a public or published directive until its inclusion in Denning’s juddicial Inquiry. and it had not been approved or seen in either house in parliament or even the cabinet. Only handful of senior Conservatives ministers would have known about it.

 

And while it was the only governing instrument for MI5 in 1963, it would change secretly after that and then finally abandoned, as the Security Service was given a formal statutory basis as a result of the Security Service of 1989.

 

The directive was intended to make clear the aims and objectives and in some firm boundaries. Before we look at the text and details, and implications we need tion understand the wider context and also put Maxwell Fyfe’s considerable reputation and influence in the witness box.

 

He was born in Edinburgh in May 1900, and after starting his classics course at Oxford, je served year in the Scots Guards at the very end of the Great War before returning to Oxford and graduating with a third class degree. 

 

After graduating he worked for the British Commonwealth Union, one of the ultra-conservative organisations which played a key role in helping he wartime Director of Naval Intelligence, Sir William Reginald Hall to create the Economic League when he left the role of DNI to enter Parliament in January 1919. 

 

Fyfe combined these political activities with studying law part time with being employed as the political secretary to Sir Patrick Hannon MP. Hannon was a one of the Tory Diehards with whom Admiral Hall was closely associated in Parliament. He was called to the Bar in 1922, practicing in Liverpool, and became a King Council in 1934. The youngest for 250 years.


He had clearly anticipated a career in politics and in 1922 stood for the unwinnable seat of Wigan, and had hopes of standing in Spen Valley, outside Leeds, in 1929. It was a more winnable seat then in liberal hands but the party in the end decided not to contest it. 


His early political ambitions frustrated e finally entered Parliament, still only 35, for the Liverpool tory constituency of West Derby. Whether coincidence or not, this happened to be the seat that had first provided Admiral Hall with his first seat in Parliament. Fyfe represented the seat until his elevation to the House of lords nineteen years later.


In 1939, in anticipation of the war, he joined the territorial army, and was immediately deployed to the department of Judge Advocate General who was responsible for all courts martial in the armed services. In 1942 Churchill made him Solicitor General, in which role he did much of the British preparatory work for the post-war trials of the war criminals. In Churchill’s brief caretaker government before the 1945 election he made Fyfe Attorney General, and Fyfe would have expected to have been the Chief British Prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials, had Attlee not won that election in 1945. The role went to the new Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, who invited Fyfe to be his deputy. In that role he was remembered for the way he led the painstaking and devasting cross examination of Goering.


After the trials he returned to parliamentary responsibilities as the shadow minister of Labour. If in his early political life had showed an affinity to Diehard conservatism, his period in opposition was more liberal-leaning; introducing the party’s Industrial Charter in 1947  which included a "Pledge to the Consumer", a "Woman's Charter" and a "Workers' Charter" and accepted the idea of a mixed economy, gave a commitment that the party would protect workers’ rights thus paving the way for consensus government of the late fifties and sixties.


He also led the party’s support for Attlee’s British Nationality Act of 1948, which confirmed Commonwealth citizens’ unrestricted entry to Britain. Like Churchill he favoured greater European integration and became a British Delegate to the European Council from 1949 to 1952 were he played a key role in drafting and securing British support for the European Declaration of Human Rights.


When Churchill wiped out Attlee’s landslide in the election of 1950 and then replaced it by a by a narrow majority of 5 in 1951, Fyfe became Churchill’s Home Secretary. He then hoped to succeed Churchill as prime minister, when he stood down on health grounds, but with this role going to Eden he sought, and got, the role of Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords. Eden won the new election with a comfortable 60 seat majority a month later.


His period as Home secretary was perhaps not as distinguished and liberal as the immediate post war as a prosecutor at Nuremburg and period in opposition and in Europe. It is primarily remembered for his stubborn refusal to commute the mandatory death sentence for Derek Bentley despite the request for mercy attached to the guilty verdict by the jury. Bentley, who had only been an unwilling but powerless accomplice in the shooting of a policeman had in fact suffered severe head injuries when his home was bombed which had left him vulnerable and with severe intellectual impairment. 


As Home secretary he yjen encouraged the police to pursue a campaign against “male vice” and from his position in the Lords throughout the sixties he actively and aggressively opposing attempts to decriminalise homosexuality. He died in in the new year of 1967 - six months before decriminalisation bill received the royal assent.


After the Fyfe directive to MI5 became public in 1963. Fyfe management of MI5 was seen by some commentators as evidence of a liberalising episode in his tenure as Home Secretary. Recent research and examination of its purpose cast doubts on this reading of Directive and its supposed originality. This background is important to ensure that the Inquiry understands its serious limitations for their purposes.


The first mistake is that this was a new and radical development. It was not, it was a reworking of a directive that Attlee had given Sillitoe shortly after he was appointed as Director General of MI5. 


The previous Director General of MI5m Sir David Petrie, had decide to retire in the Autumn of 1945 not long after the summer general election in which Attlee won in a landslide. The appointment process was undertaken by panel Chaired by Sir Edward Bridges, the cabinet secretary and son of the poet Robert Bridges. Sillitoe was a career policeman and had not served in MI5 and this was a cause of concern for MI5 officers. But Sillitoe was not hand-picked by Atlee in an leftist attempt to control MI5 and there were no politicians on the panel that drew up the short list, interviewed and appointed the new DG. 


The evidence for the relationship between Attlee and MI5 from this period of was only released to the National Archives in 2009, and the principle historical commentator to bring this to anyone’s attention is Daniel W, B, Lomas, Lecturer in International History at the University of Salford since January 2014, and the author of Intelligence, Security and the Attlee Governments, 1945 – 1951,  An Uneasy Relationship? -Manchester University Press. Published in 2016 it is revelatory but but is stuck behind a prohibitive academic paywall of £80. But it it presents a very clear picture which for the sake of this blog I will compress thus:

 

Atlee was intertester in anything the MI5 could dig out on “subversive” I the labour Party itself and the wider labour movement. He didn’t want this to be in the public domain but nonetheless felt that MI5 need a statutory position or justification.

 

After Sillitoe’s appointment he asked Sir Findlater Stewart, a senior figure in the wider Intelligence community and a member of the appointment panel for the Director General to conduct a review of the service and to come up with a constitutionally supportable description of the service. What came out of that exercise was the what Lord denning was to describe as a the government instrument tat he attributed to the then Lord Chancellor,  Lord Kilmuir, formerly Sir David Fyfe. It is clear that the draft of the Attlee Directive went through a number of stages and negotiations with Sillitoe even though it was not going into the public domain and its very existence would not be known for sixty years.

 

The Stewart Report was not even circulated to the cabinet, but to hand picked ministers: Attlee, Bevin, Morrison and the new po Home Secretary, Chuter Ede. It was discussed at ministerial level in March 1946 just before Petrie’s retirement. The final draft of the directive was made by Bridges. Although there where phrases which were straight from Attlee’s pen including:


“It is essential that the Security Service should be kept absolutely free from any political bias or political influence. It is concerned with the Defence of the Realm as a whole. No action should be taken that would give colour to any suggestion that it is concerned with the interests of any particular section.”

 

At this stage it was still envisaged that the  that MI5 would report directly to the prime minister. But in this directive as in Fyfe’s version the purpose of MI5 was unequivocally

 

“….the Defence of the Realm as a whole, from external and internal dangers arising from attempts at espionage and sabotage, or from actions of persons and organisations, whether directed from within or without the country, which may be judged to be subversive of the security of the State.”


What Attlee, Stewart Sillitoe and Bridges were doing here was providing the was MI5, the Security Service, with a statutory mandate the common law concept of  “Defence of the Realm”.


Last Year (July 2020) the OUP published a book looking at the same Archive material but more constitutional and legal perspective than from a political and historical perspective. Unfortunately, “MI5, the Cold War, and the Rule of Law” by Keith Ewing, Joan Mahoney, and Andrew Moretta is locked up behand a prohibitively expensive academic pay wall. They recognise the real significance of the little known Stewart Report but a very critical of manoeuvre by which he attempted to provide a proper statutory footing for MI5. 


All of this prompts the questions about why the Maxwell Fyfe directive has been admitted as evidence, why the Attlee directive hasn’t been admitted and why any amendments of the Maxwell Fyfe version of the directive up to 1988 have nit been admitted.


The directive cannot have any significant bearing on the purpose and legal status of the undercover police since:


·      it specifically concerns the Security Service

·      the police, with possibly the exception of one special force,  are not part of the defence services and not except in particular situations (such as invasion) responsible for the Defence of the Realm

·      “Defence of the Realm” as justification for the Security Services covert operations has never been tested in law

·      the only common law concept that generates a mandate for policing is that of the “King’s Peace” or the “Queen’s peace” which is not mentioned in the directive


Possibly in all its manifestations over time, and certainly in its two main versions while it mentions subversion it offers no insight into the meaning and scope of the concept of “subversion of the state” and makes no mention of parliamentary democracy in any of its stages of its evolution as a necessary feature of the state.

Atlee’s relationship with MI5 might have been an uneasy, his relationship with Sillitoe wasn’t, and his commitment to the cold war, nuclear weapons and blacklisting communists was enthusiastic, That might be unwelcome news for some who look back on his six years of  radical economic government as a beacon  of radical spcialism. But history has a habit of letting you down, as whoever admitted into evidence the Maxwell Fyfe Directive will possibly find out.

Blog 2 -April 21 2021

Context is everything

 – The Spycops Scandal  emerged within Scotland Yard at a time when 

Police Corruption was all pervasive in a service that was hand-in-glove with Serious Organised Crime




The Mitting inquiry today goes into its second phase of hearings following a deeply flawed set out in phase 1 evidential hearings in November. Phase 1 covered the establishment of the Special Demonstration Squad within the Metropolitan Police in the years from 1969 to 1972.


If you want to get a feel for the scale and nature the constraints placed upon the inquiry you can do worse the read the opening statement by Slater and Gordon,  lawyers for 12 individual spycops. [ https://www.ucpi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/20201023-Opening_Statement-SlaterGordon_Clients.pdf ]


But at the heart of the this flawed process are two particular decisions: the first is to shroud the evidence given by the spycops in mystery despite the fact that the evidence so fa given is from 50 years ago;  the second is to make it “inquisitorial” rather than “adversarial”. 


This second flaw means that the Chair, who seems to have not a single curious bone in his body, exerts absolute power over the questions which are can asked and those which cannot be asked. He or his legal team ask the questions, and there is little, if any, opportunity for follow ups. 


Thus the Inquiry chair, and his tightly managed, team of lawyers, gag the victims of the spy cops scandal, and their lawyers.


The most striking evidence of this flaw in action is that the absence of any serous evidence being admitted into the inquiry’s record about the integrity at this time of the metropolitan Police force or, as it was more popular known in the tranche one days, “Scotland Yard”. 


In the preamble to evidence being taken there was reference made to the fact that the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) had acknowledged management failures in relation to the women tricked into sexual relationships by the spycops. But this seems to be regarded as a no more than a local breakdown in practice, not evidence of systemic breakdown.


There have also been references made to the Macpherson Inquiry which reported in 1999. There will be more to come on this later in the inquiry. 


And during the preamble to the evidence being taken the lawyers for the spycops themselves and their employer - Scotland Yard or MPS, whichever of the names you prefer to use -made the case for Mitting’s inquiry not to apply today’s moral standards in judging the appropriateness of actions and decisions taken in the tranche one period. They didn’t say so explicitly, but it was  an unequivocal call on the inquiry to turn off their moral compasses and adopt the values of the Scotland Yard in which violence towards and intimidation of woman and black people was the common in police officers personal and professional lives.


Of course this wasn’t the approach taken by the post Brexit Supreme Court when they threw out convictions of the Shrewsbury pickets recently. But the reality is that standards of integrity have not changed over time and the overwhelming evidence from before 1969 and up to and beyond Macpherson that Scotland Yard fundamentally dishonest. That is true whether it was carrying out parochial metropolitan responsibilities in the capital or wider duties for the state as a whole and or its constituent countries as with the Demonstration squad.


But the metropolitan police were not only directly discriminatory in the inquiry’s tranche one period of the late sixties and seventies. They were profoundly corrupt and many officers were working hand in hand with Serious Organised Crime.


“Fundamentally Dishonesty” is a legal expression common to personal injury law but it could equally apply to and arm of the stare, as to someone filing a fraudulent insurance claim. The insurance claimant is fundamentally dishonest if “dishonesty goes to the root of either the whole claim, or a substantial part of it”.


Unfortunately, Mitting seems to be exclusively operating, in appropriately, another legal concept drawn from insurance law that of “utmost good faith” (Uberrima fides). He certainly seems to be working on the assumption that the MPS and its spycops are witnesses of utmost good faith. In personal Injury there is no question of applying a concept that explains the integrity of the parties agreement of a contract, to the subsequent behaviours of the party’s when a claim is made and assessed. 


The evidence that the metropolitan police, and every element of their activities, during the early tranches of this inquiry were fundamentally dishonest is in the public domain and tested within law. In 1969 the Times newspaper began an investigation into corruption in Scotland Yard which did not just identify the taking of bribes, but included not prosecuting criminal activities, or withholding evidence but included collusion with organised criminal gangs, planting evidence, and even went to extorting money from criminals. One officer described it as a “firm within a firm” in is negotiations with one  criminal. Further up the ladder of command, a senior officer took holidays with a.  gangland pornographer and in 1973 the Home Secretary himself, Reginald Maudling, was forced to resign when it emerged, he had a chaired a fraudulent American company called the Real Estate Fund of America and at home had been a key part of John Poulson’s corrupt property development empire.


Sir John Mitting is clearly worried about resources and mission-creep under the gaze of a government which is completely antipathetic to the terms of his inquiry. But this work has already been done, and probably to a higher standard than his inquiry can hope to achieve. He needs to admit as evidence into his inquiry the final Report of Operation Countryman (1973-1982) conducted by Hampshire and Dorset Police. Although the final report was never published it was presented to Home Secretary and Home office. According to the labour MP Dale Campbell-Savours speaking in a Parliamentary debate on the Police Act in 1988, as a result of Countryman  "over 250 police officers were forced to resign and many faced criminal charges after investigations revealed that police membership of particular [Masonic] lodges formed the nucleus of a criminal conspiracy”. Later reports suggest that between Countryman and the Met’s internal clean up as many as 500 officers may have been moved on.


According to a Home Office response to a FoI request  “files related to Operation Countryman are in the possession of The National Archives, details of which are available at”:

http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/results/r?_q=Operation%20Countryman&_hb=tna. “

If Mitting were to discover a curious bone in his body, then he might want to read a concise summary of the Times’ investigation and its aftermath. “The Fall of Scotland Yard”. Penguin 1977, by Barry Cox, John Shirley and Martin Short.


There is a World in Action Documentary about Countryman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcr6Ol7pKUU/ .


While doing research into the Poulson Scandal which is approaching its fiftieth anniversary I had the opportunity to read one of the official reports that followed I the wake of the scandal. It was Lord Salmon’s Royal Commission on Standards n Public Life. While the main focus of the report is the corrupt behaviour of hundreds of public servants - councillors, mps, local authority officers civil servants and public servants and nationalised industries  it does acknowledge that the police would come with in this umbrella. Lord Salmon, managed to extract some information, reluctantly from the Home office about its’s scale during the tranche one period. They only had obtained figures for convictions not prosecutions or disciplinary action. It also excluded bribery:


 “Conviction under the Prevention of Corruption Acts of policemen (and of those who bribed or attempted to bribe them) are also excluded. We were told that fulI information about this could not be extracted without undue difficulty.”


1970                        Police Officers convicted under Prevention of Corruption Act           2

1971                        Police Officers convicted under Prevention of Corruption Act           7

1972                        Police Officers convicted under Prevention of Corruption Act           4

1973                        Police Officers convicted under Prevention of Corruption Act           2

1974                        Police Officers convicted under Prevention of Corruption Act           2



With the second phase of evidence for the first tranche of the inquiry about to open it is timely that BBC is Broadcasting a documentary series about police corruption called Bent Coppers, the first episode of which covered the Times investigation from 1969 onwards.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v4h4 It would be nice to think that it’s broadcast was time to coincide with the inquiry but it has more to do with promoting the final series of “Line of Duty”.


But such was the endemic nature of corruption in the Met at this time in that James Callaghan had appointed an outside officer, Robert Mark, into the role of Deputy Commissioner of police in 1968 and he then became the commissioner for five years in 1972. 


Mark was a determined opponent of police corruption and set up A10 in 1971, the first anti-police corruption unit that cracked down on the Scotland Yard CID’s crime spree under the Commandership of Kenneth Drury and DCI Bill Moody the head of the Obscene Publications Squad and Anti-corruption squad. Both were jailed.


But though determined to root out corruption he was a strong advocate of the police policing themselves, and of public order and political policing and he was responsible for introducing the Special Patrol Group. He left the role after falling out with the Home Secretary over the proposal in the Police Act 1976 to introduce an independent police complaints authority.


The historical information that must be waiting to be accessed from Mark’s attempts to fix the fundamentally broken and dishonest Scotland Yard, and then from Countryman should be available to Mitting and his team. The question remains how many of the hundreds of corrupt officers rooted out by the reforms either shaped the operations of the spycops, or perhaps became spy cops. Even a cursory examination of the already nature of Scotland Yard in its most shameful period from 1967 to the end of the seventies reveals that there is no evidence that the radical and liberal left was in league with serious organised crime, or even worse the equivalent of serious organised crime. The police, and the Yard, on the other had were.


On this we can give the last word to Sir Robert Mark, who famously said "A good police force is one that catches more crooks than it employs". For all his dedication to rooting out corruption in the force that sets the bar very low. Despite pressure from the spycops and the Scotand Yard’s lawyers Mitting needs to do much better than that.


"A good police force

is one that catches more crooks

than it employs"


Sir Robert Mark

Assistant Commissioner, Metropolitan Police, 1967-1971

Commissioner, Metropolitan Police, 1972-1977





Blog 1 - December 2020

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The Under Cover Police Inquiry (UCPI) Calls Out the Senior Special Branch Officer Running the Economic League’s Secret Registry


The Economic League always liked to give subscribers, and potential subscribers, the impression they had a close working relationship with the police and security services. The police were clearly embarrassed by these claims, but the League’s staff made no bones about it, and even as the faced more scrutiny from the media, a parliamentary select committee and their own subscribers towards the end of their organisational life in 1993.


But for the victims of blacklisting, and campaigners against it, concrete evidence has always proved elusive. Without a significant name in the frame, special branch denied collusion between the secret state and the employers’ private blacklisting intelligence services. The principle private agency was the Economic League, but from 1972 the League set up and ran a blacklist for Construction Companies called The Services Group, which after the collapse of the League in 1993 was reincarnated immediately as The Consulting Association. There was also a separate blacklist run by British Leyland, the state-owned car makers. There is reason to believe that this received information form the League. 


This elusiveness was true even during the massive and successful group legal action brought by blacklisted workers, in spite of the revelation of thousands of pages of secret documents during the preparation for the court case.


Such was the potential sensitivity of information about any sort of collusion between Special Branch , MI5 and the League the League itself made sure its tracks were always covered even though its officers was happy to imply to subscribers that there was collusion. 


In the 1980s this discretion was even to be seen among the disgruntled League employees who, distressed with the management cost-cutting and down-sizing of the League’s operations, had started leaking damaging information and material to the media. 


Their grievance with their League managers was, in essence, that they were not sufficiently robust in prosecuting the League’s assault on trade union rights, democracy and civil liberties. Their naivety was in believing that the carefully chosen evidence that they were releasing to some of the best and dogged investigative journalists in television and Fleet street would have a limited impact on the League’s reputation. 


What was quite incredible was that they thought, as employees they could get away with effectively sabotaging the operation of an who main purpose was be protecting companies and organisations from being sabotaged by workers with a grievance. 

They weren’t in the conventional sense morally outraged “whistle-blowers”, who had seen the errors of their ways and were putting into the public domain information and evidence of bad practices witnessed they had seen and participated in.


In fact it was quite the reverse, and of course they didn’t get their way.  They League did not significantly change their ways and the limited information about blacklisting that they had released was enough to create outrage at the practices they were intending to reinforce.

As an aside it is worth noting that, as a journalist, there are some very particular traps in handling leaked material from people whose aim is to make the world a worse place. In this case I cannot think of any journalists who received this material - professionals, or citizens - who fell into those traps. Despite the intentions of the mischievous League insiders the outcomes had all been positive and liberating and more than thirty years on they continue to be so.


If only they had not stopped so short of complete honesty about the collaboration of the state in denying employment to workers on the basis of their trade union or political affiliations those positive outcomes and sense of justice being done might have been  greater and come faster . 


What we have only just found out in the last two weeks the British State, secret and otherwise, could have incurred massive reputational damage and quite possibly liability for costly and unwinnable litigation 


The evidence which finally surfaced in the very first two weeks of evidence being presented to Sir John Mitting’s Under Cover Police Inquiry. A former spy cop, using the cover name “Dick Epps” revealed in his sworn written evidence that his former boss in C Squad of Special Branch, Chief Superintendent Lawrenson, had retired  soon after he joined special branch and gone to work for the Economic League, and that this was common knowledge in the Branch. The revelation is contained in a single since of HN336 statement:


"Shortly after I joined the branch, the then Chief Superintendent of C Squad, I think his name was Lawrenson, retired and he joined the staff of the Economic League, and I was aware of that."


The inquiry is protecting the real name of “Dick Epps”, or HN336  as they refer to him,  from being disclosed. This non-disclosure is also being applied to anyone identified in evidence documents or witness statements, with the exception of some people who are dead and those whom are both core participants and were spied on.  That Lawrenson’s name wasn’t redacted or given a code number in HN336’s statement suggests that not only that Lawrenson is dead, but it also suggests that his role  with the Economic League is viewed by Mitting as no longer sensitive or relevant.


That it is sensitive and relevant can be gauged by the reaction of a large number of core participants to this revelation, who were also subject to surveillance and blacklisting by the Economic League, Services Group and/or The Consulting Association as well as Special Branch’s undercover cops.


This judgement by the Inquiry chair must also explain the weakness of the inquiry’s legal team examination of this witness’s evidence.  It may come a surprise to know that the lawyers acting for the “core participants” who are the spycops’ victims have to ask the inquiry lawyers to ask the question for them. If the victim’s lawyer want to ask to supplementary questions at the end of the witnesses’ appearance in person they have to ask for permission from Mitting. So while evidence is sworn or attested to, the inquiry is not a court and there is no cross examination of witnesses. 


The resulting weakness of this allegedly inquisitorial process is harshly exposed when, the evidence is ambiguous or in complete as it was in HN336’s case, and the failure of the the inquiry fails to resolve the ambiguity.


We know from his statement that HN336 had joined the police in the late 1950s (the precise date is redacted). 


We know that he applied for, and was accepted into, Special Branch in 1964. 


The three paragraphs describing his service between 1964 and joining the Special Operations Squad in early 1969, are also redacted, but we are told in a comment by Mitting’s lawyers that this included service in B, C and D squads of special branch.


A straightforward reading of HN336’s sentence in his witness statement would suggest that Lawrenson had left the police in 1924 or 1965. In fact this is unlikely because there another document in the evidence to the inquiry that suggests that Lawrenson was still special branch in 1968. This is a note from the Home Office, dated August 1968 describing a meeting set up by Lawrenson for civil servants to meet with Chief Inspector Conrad Dixon the head of SOS and a Senior Superintendent called Cunningham.


The Undercover Research Group plausibly take this to be mis-speaking on HN336’s part. That is he is using “branch” to indicate the SOS rather than “Special Branch”’. 


I think it is implausible that a very experience Police office would make this sort of mistake in a written statement under oath, and subject to intense scrutiny by the Met Police’s legal team before it was submitted to the Inquiry.  But unfortunately Mitting’s legal team did not challenge this ambiguity.


The other thing that hasn’t been picked up is that at the meeting described in the home office note Lawrenson was the most senior officer present, and though substantively a superintendent he was in fact an acting Chief Superintendent. And although SOS was to become the SDS and ultimately answer elsewhere in the Metropolitan Police, the question should have been whether the SOS in its early weeks and months was under the remit of C Squad of Special Branch, in which Lawrenson was almost certainly the most senior officer.  But that is another question still hanging in this “investigation”.


But these points also challenge the real intent of the ambiguity and apparent tentativeness of HN336’s witness statement. Again a straightforward reading of the sentence in the witness statement would leave you with a feeling that Lawrenson was barely known to  HN336. 


In contrast, Conrad Dixon who was the head of SOS had, according to HN336’s witness statement in effect headhunted him for the SOS, because he had forked for Dixon when he was a Detective Inspector in B squad.


This is downright implausible, HN336 had been working in C Squad when Lawrenson had been in charge, As an Acting Chief Superintendent Lawrenson was now a very senior officer at the time HN336 was joining the SOS. 


A Chief Superintendent is just four grade below the role of Metropolitan Police Commissioner. HN336’s former boss in C squad was also probably his new boss, Dixon’s, boss. The failure to attribute a fist name to Lawrenson adds another layer of ambiguity and seems deliberate even 50 years on. 


The ambiguity of HN336’s evidence, and lack of fact checking by the inquiry legal team, takes us back to the fundamental question of why would the police, and the lawyers acting for them, want to be evasive about Lawrenson and the Economic League?


Until now the police and special branch response to accusations about collusion between the League and Special Branch was that there had been no,  or minimal, contact. If they are going to continue to maintain this line, Lawrenson and his role in developing the secret state and political policing to be confined to a footnote in history. 


One of the witness papers lodged with the inquiry is a paper prepared for the Metropolitan Policy that justifies the debilitating secrecy and anonymity with which Mitting has shrouded his inquiry. 


It describes the process by which isolated pieces of information have been brought together to identify spycops undercover identities names and in some case real names, and calls it a “Mosaic”. 


The Undercover Research Group are particularly identified as practitioners of this technique. Anyone interested in the technology of political control can and should read it.


The christening of Lawrenson, the repair of his timeline has relied on the Undercover Research Groups’ Mosaicing skills. It is a shame that Mitting’s legal team are not showing the same sort of diligence, but it now enables us to tell some the rest of his Lawrenson’s story.


Lawrenson isn’t a particularly common name in the UK. In 2000 for example there were just 377 people with that name. (By contrast there were almost a quarter of million Hugheses, nearly 2.5 million Smiths, and mysteriously no one called Mitting).


Scouring “The Police and Constabulary Almanac” the Undercover Research Group found that there was “Bert” Lawrenson who had left the Metropolitan Police in 1969 as an Acting Chief Superintendent. They suggest that he was probably the Herbert Guy Lawrenson born on July 12th 1915 and who died in Ruislip in 1995 who would have been 65 in 1970.


The recruitment of a Chief Superintendent from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, who had been responsible for the monitoring domestic subversion for the best part of a decade, was a major achievement for the League, at the time was reaching the height of its power and influence. 


The seventies were a decade that would culminate in in the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, a prime minister who was to would come to represent the vision capitalism most close to that promoted by the Economic League. But her 11 years in power resulted in a cataclysmic decline for the Economic League. As the country’s economic centre of gravity moved away from the manufacturing sector to finance and  insurance, this only the construction sector with a direct interest in blacklisting. International free trade and and unregulated free enterprise had destroyed the League’s customer base.


We know what that decline looked like for the League, because we have had, since around 1990, an internal document calling for an urgent "Need for a Change of Direction". It had been prepared in early 1984 for League members and non-executive directors by Richard Brett, the most high profile of the discontented League Employees. His day job was as the north west regional director of the League, where he had the encouragement of his Regional Chair as well as from some other regional directors.


It compares League’s activities between 1978, in the final full year of Callaghan’s government,  with those in 1983, the year after Thatcher’s first re-election. 


In 1974:


18 million leaflets had been distributed 

11,500 apprentices trained

44,ooo apprentice newsletters sent out

1,500 supervisors trained

54,000 supervisor newsletter’s distributed

3,300 managers trained

102,000 “Two Minute News Review”’s distributed


 In  1983


just one million leaflets had been distributed

no more than 1000 apprentices trained, 

no supervisors had been trained or communicated with

no managers had been trained 

only three quarters of the number of 2 Minute News Reviews were being circulated


Most tellingly Brett tells the great and good members of the League that in 1978 the London Regional head quarter had a research department “who had a professional police or security background”. 


In 1980 the League’s director general, Peter Savill, took direct responsibility for the department, we may assume from Bert Lawrenson, and relocated it to Thornton Heath in Croydon. Not one of the four men with police and security backgrounds made the move to Croydon.


That is the likely end of Bert Lawrenson’s 20 year career at a senior level in blacklisting and political policing. We know from an anonymous note to Labour Research at about the same time that “The Need for a Change of Direction” that Lawrenson was succeeded by a chap from Crawley with no security background called Derek Knight-Jewell. According to a short obituary in the Crawley News he was scout master and organiser of scout jamborees and gang shows. 


“The Need for a Change of Direction” also points out to the Leagues membership that construction companies which were members of the “Services Group” paid a fee over and above their routine subscription for a dedicated blacklisting service and a dedicated league officer in each region. According to the paper there were no dedicated service group staff left by 1984. Although some time before the League folded in 1993 a dedicated member of staff, Ian Kerr, would be appointed to look after the Services Group. 


According to evidence given to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee the construction companies led by Laing’s paid £10,000 to the General Secretary of the bankrupt Economic League to give the black list to  Ian Kerr, who was Running the Services Group within the Economic League. 

This enabled Kerr and his wife Mary to run the Service Group as an unincorporated organisation - The Consulting Association - with just a two week break in service. When the Consulting Association was raided and subsequently prosecuted by the ICO in 2010 he became the only person prosecuted for blacklisting to date. He was fined £5,000. He died shortly after giving evidence to the Scottish Affairs Select Committee


Anyone who has followed the first two weeks of public hearings of Mitting Inquiry with all its tortuous and theatrically unnecessary secrecy will be forced to agree with Dave Smith, a representative of the Blacklist Support Group, who in his opening statement said the Inquiry looked like an “old fashioned establishment cover-up”. 


However HN336’s mysteriously timid and ambiguous witness statement about a very senior Metropolitan Police Special Branch officer who went to work for the Economic League in 1970 has disclosed a vital missing link in the evolution of political policing in the UK.



Mike Hughes

This Blog Published 8/12/20



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