LONDON (Bywire News) - More than 30 years after his brother Daniel was brutally murdered in a car park, Alistair Morgan is hoping to finally get some answers.
Despite last-minute interference from the Home Office, the report into his death is now due to be published on 15th June. However, even at this late stage, distrust hangs in the air.
Responding to news of the publication date, the family issued a statement saying:
“We hope that the Home Secretary [Priti Patel] does not seek to go behind that agreement, and we call on her to ensure that she co-operates with the panel to allow the publication of the report to proceed as announced without any further delay.”
Cynicism? Perhaps. Justified? Absolutely. The family have gone through decades in which hopes have been raised and then dashed, as investigation after investigation reached a dead end.
More often than not, the government has been part of the problem. The second part of the Leveson Inquiry was meant to shed some light on Daniel’s case, as well as scrutinise situations such as phone hacking and the subsequent bungled police investigation. However, the government announced in 2018 that the second part of the Inquiry had been officially dropped.
Alaistair Morgan has previously said that, without Leveson 2, they might never see justice for his murdered brother.
Theresa May announced the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel (DMIP) in 2013, which would examine the police handling of the murder investigation. Eight years later and the Home Office has delayed the publication of the Panel’s report at the last moment.
The Home Office argues that the decision to delay was down to national security and human rights considerations, but these claims hold little water. Under the terms of the inquiry, the government department is supposed to oversee its publication, report to Parliament on it, and issue the government response. The Home Office has had eight years to make provisions to check national security issues, and have never said anything. Yet, as the publication date loomed, they met with the authors to argue that publication would be best put back until after the period of mourning for Prince Phillip’s death. No mention of national security was made.
Instead, this is part of an extensive pattern in which the government works to delay, neuter or bypass any report whose contents it doesn’t like. Indeed, last year, after a Home Office report found no credible evidence that Muslims were over-represented among grooming gangs, Priti Patel wrote in the foreword that she was ‘disappointed’ by the conclusions and commissioned further reports.
It is thought than the Daniel Morgan report will contain home truths that the government simply does not want to hear, as well as confirm the presence of institutional problems that they simply don’t want to solve - such as police incompetence, and corruption and collusion between the media and suspects which served to hamstring the murder investigation throughout.
Even now, with publication due, the authors and Morgan family remain suspicious of the government’s motives. Indeed, that 15th June date remains ‘provisional’, and the Home Office could well intervene to push it back even further.
Concerns remain about a further delay or possible redactions. In a statement, the family confirmed that the provisions have been made that, if redactions are made, the entire report will be shared with them:
“We understand further that, in the unlikely event of the home secretary seeking to redact anything in the panel’s report, any such redaction will be highlighted on the face of the published report, and the redacted content will be shared with us.”
Even so, distrust hangs in the air. Only if the report appears unredacted, and the government commits to enacting its recommendations, can they escape claims of a cover-up.
(Writing by Tom Cropper, editing by Jess Miller and Tom D. Rogers.)