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At the centre of many of the inquiries was Jonathan Rees, Mr Morgan’s business partner, and a man with extensive connections within the police, as well as sections of the tabloid press, particularly the News of the World, to whom he regularly sold stories. That he was a man capable of serious and devious criminality is not in doubt: he was sentenced to seven years in prison for conspiring to plant cocaine on an innocent woman as part of a custody battle. Was he – or were other suspects – protected by corrupt officers within the Met? Could it even be that police officers were themselves responsible for Morgan’s murder? The questions the nation’s largest police force must answer could hardly be more serious.
So when in 2013 Theresa May, then Home Secretary, announced the establishment of the independent panel, the force promised to cooperate. Yet its promise was soon shown to be empty. Instead of receiving the assistance it expected, and that Mr Morgan’s family deserved, the panel found itself obstructed at every turn. For seven years the Met denied the panel access to evidence, and in particular to the vital ‘HOLMES’ computer system. The officer primarily responsible for what the panel regarded as disreputable delaying tactics was assistant commissioner Cressida Dick. She was in due course appointed commissioner. If the panel’s assessment of her behaviour is correct, she is unfit to be a police constable.
Of course it is right that commissioner Dick should be given an opportunity to defend herself. There are dangers in the panel report delivering its final verdict without hearing her explanation. But the report adds to a growing sense that the Met is in urgent need of reform.
So disastrous have been some of its failings in the last decade that one might have expected the senior officers responsible to have taken some responsibility for them. Instead, they have been showered with rewards.
Steve Rodhouse, the Gold Commander of Operation Midland, was made a director general of the National Crime Agency on a pay package of up to £245,000.
Bernard Hogan-Howe, who headed the Met both during Operation Midland and for much of the time it was engaged in frustrating the Daniel Morgan panel was given a peerage.
And Dick remains Commissioner.
What confidence can the public now have in a Metropolitan police that cannot police itself? What confidence can we have that it investigates offences properly and impartially, or that it discloses unhelpful evidence fairly, or that it is free of any taint of corruption? What confidence can we have in a police force accused by the panel of ‘dishonesty’?
The dreadful answer seems to be, as Daniel Morgan’s family have been telling us for years, that despite the conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty shown by thousands of individual officers, we can’t have confidence in the Met. The organisation is rotting from the head down.
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Also by Matthew Scott
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