Broken Yard - Tom Harper - E-Book

Broken Yard E-Book

Tom Harper

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All to Play For, the anticipated follow-up edition to Going for Broke: The Rise of Rishi Sunak PRAISE FOR GOING FOR BROKE "The fullest account yet written of Sunak the rising star." – Andrew Gimson, ConservativeHome "Clearly written, lively and perceptive, and contains much insight on the complex world of Tory politics." – Vernon Bogdanor, Prospect Magazine *** The speed of Rishi Sunak's advance to 10 Downing Street is without precedent in modern British politics. In mid-2019, he was an unknown junior minister; seven months later, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer; and by October 2022, he had secured the highest office in the land. Aged forty-two, he was Britain's youngest Prime Minister in more than 200 years. Michael Ashcroft's biography – first published in 2020 and now fully revised and updated – charts Sunak's ascent to the University of Oxford, the City of London, Silicon Valley and Westminster before assuming the most powerful job in the country in chaotic circumstances. It is the story of a clever and hard-working son of immigrant parents who marries an heiress and makes a fortune of his own; a polished southerner who wins over the voters of North Yorkshire; a fiscal conservative who becomes the biggest-spending Chancellor in history; and a fastidious political operator tasked with reuniting the Conservative Party and repairing an economy in flux. Casting new light on Sunak's tense working relationship with his predecessor, Boris Johnson, All to Play For shows what makes him tick ahead of a general election whose outcome will have profound consequences for Britain.

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iii

Broken Yard

The Fall of the Metropolitan Police

Tom Harper

v

For Anna, Rachel and Maggie

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction Chapter 1: The SnowballChapter 2: InfiltrationChapter 3: Axe in the HeadChapter 4: Above the Law?Chapter 5: SabotageChapter 6: The ElectricianChapter 7: Damage LimitationChapter 8: The SupergrassChapter 9: Tory WarsChapter 10: Cover-UpChapter 11: PlebgateChapter 12: The Long FellaChapter 13: The AvalancheChapter 14: ‘Friendship of Convenience’Chapter 15: The FantasistChapter 16: Dick’s DownfallChapter 17: Future ThreatsConclusionAcknowledgementsCopyright

ix

‘For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.’

– Aristotle (350 BC)

 

‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’

– Edmund Burke (1770)

xi

Introduction

As former Metropolitan Police officers, Bethany and Paul Eaton are well aware of the disaster that has enveloped Scotland Yard: violent crime is soaring across London and thousands of officers have left the force.

Yet even they were shocked by the way police responded when their home in Chislehurst, south-east London, was burgled in 2019. The couple were on their way back from a family holiday in Dubai when their childminder called to say the back door had been smashed in. The Eatons, who now run a vegan yoghurt business, asked a neighbour – a Met civilian employee – for help and she immediately called the police. It was at this point that the first signs of institutional inertia emerged, when the operator who answered the call replied: ‘I’m sorry but you don’t have an appointment, so officers will not be attending the scene today.’

To this day, Paul, who worked as a Met response officer for almost twenty years, does not understand how he was supposed to book an appointment for a burglary that had not yet taken place. His friend was also confused. ‘My neighbour was flabbergasted and somewhat scared, not knowing if anyone was still in the house,’ Paul said. ‘She was told police would attend within twenty-four hours.’ The neighbour tried to persuade the operator that the Met should come, not xiileast as she had seen three police cars dawdling outside the local café around the corner. The person on the end of the line replied that was ‘just not police procedure these days’.

In the end, the only person willing to help the neighbour secure the crime scene was a passing Ocado delivery driver, who checked to see whether the burglars had fled. When Londoners’ emergency service of last resort is an online grocer, we can probably agree there is a problem. Fortunately, the house was empty, although Bethany’s jewellery had been stolen.

The Eatons, who have two children, followed the advice they’d been given and waited for their former colleagues to attend. When no one arrived after forty-eight hours, they tried again and Paul placed a call to his former employer. The response was shocking: ‘Oh yes, the lady who took the call has closed the case.’ A civilian operator had decided to record the incident as ‘no crime’, a move that improperly boosted overall police statistics at the expense of the victim. By this stage, the Eatons were furious. They had clear CCTV footage identifying the offender, but when they persuaded a scenes-of-crime officer to call around, he refused to take it.

The Eatons’ experience is sadly all too familiar for London’s 8 million residents, and millions of others across the country. They have seen the capabilities of local forces undermined by a combination of budget cuts and a dangerous passivity that has been allowed to evolve among the boys and girls in blue. In 2015, Leicestershire Police even briefly launched a policy of refusing to attend attempted burglaries at houses with odd numbers, apparently in a bizarre attempt to cut costs.

We are living through an unprecedented crisis in British policing, with a devastating direct effect on the victims of almost 6 million crimes that occur in England and Wales each year.1 The latest xiiifigures from the Office for National Statistics make grim reading. Before the unprecedented Covid lockdowns skewed crime rates, a national rise in murders and manslaughters in 20202 was mainly driven by a 28 per cent rise in offences in London (67 to 86).3 The number of knife crimes in England and Wales also rose to a record high, partly driven by a 7 per cent rise in London. This was 51 per cent higher than when data of this kind was first collected in 2011 and was the highest number on record.

By contrast, the proportion of crimes in England and Wales that are solved has fallen to a record low. In the twelve months to the end of March 2020, just 7 per cent of offences led to a suspect being charged or ordered to appear in court. That compares with 8 per cent the previous year and 16 per cent in 2014/15.4

These damning statistics are partly fuelled by a decision taken by the Met in 2017 – a decision that would have been laughed out of the police canteen thirty years ago. The ‘crime assessment policy’, drawn up by senior officers, ordered police to shelve investigations into hundreds of thousands of crimes each year, including burglaries, thefts and some assaults. The move has amazed former leaders of the force. ‘The violence and the knife crime and the death rate is deeply concerning,’ Sir Paul Stephenson, a former Met commissioner, told me. ‘The downscaling of the seriousness of household burglary means it’s almost seen as some sort of social misdemeanour. I think invading people’s homes should be treated as a heinous crime.’

The measures were a response to historic government curbs on police spending that have been implemented since 2010. Scotland Yard was attempting to save £400 million by 2020, in addition to the £600 million the force had already lost from its £3.7 billion annual budget. But the flaws in the strategy were criticised on the xivday they were announced. Mick Neville, a former Met detective chief inspector, said:

This is justice dreamed up by bean counters in shiny suit land. No consideration is being given to victims. The new principles will focus police attention on easy crimes where there is a known suspect. Few professional criminals target people who know them, so the worst villains will evade justice. Not investigating high volume crimes like shoplifting with a loss of under £50 will give junkies a green light to thieve.5

Stephenson, who led Scotland Yard between 2009 and 2011, agrees. He told me: ‘It is entirely legitimate to ask the Met to try and do more with less. However, the scale of the cuts to policing was simply foolhardy, and you didn’t need hindsight to come to that judgement. We can see the consequences of it now.’

The crisis deepened in March 2020 when London was hit by the coronavirus pandemic. As the Met ‘war-gamed’ for potential mass sickness or a breakdown in law and order, I was passed documents that detailed its contingency plans. In the event that Scotland Yard’s threadbare resources were overwhelmed, senior officers were considering pulling traditional bobbies off their beats and suspending all ‘proactive’ police operations, where officers investigate to prevent crimes and conspiracies before they take place. The worst-case scenario outlined in the documents was to respond only to incidents involving the potential loss of life. The once-mighty Met, the first modern police force and a model for much of the world’s policing, would reduce its priorities to ‘major, critical and emergency incidents, serious crime, firearms incidents, protecting xvvulnerable people, serious public order and fatal and serious road traffic collisions’.6

Scotland Yard was further embarrassed in July 2021 when thousands of intruders without tickets managed to break into Wembley Stadium during the final of the European men’s football championships. With the world watching on, crowds of troublemakers, including known hooligans and gang members, forced their way into the stadium as England played its first major men’s final since 1966. One yob was filmed putting a lit flare up his bottom outside Wembley and even managed to enter the stadium without a ticket.7 The father of England defender Harry Maguire was one of dozens of innocent spectators who were injured in the chaos. Ministers, London mayor Sadiq Khan, Wembley staff and the Football Association later blamed the Met for allowing public disorder and drunken and violent behaviour to develop outside the stadium in the hours before the high-profile game kicked off.8

Just before Mark Rowley was announced as the new commissioner in July 2022, Scotland Yard suffered the ignominy of being placed into special measures, a status applied by regulators of public services in the UK to providers who fall short of acceptable standards. The Met will now be subjected to increased monitoring and scrutiny. It is a measure commonly applied to failing schools and hospitals, not one of the world’s most famous police forces.

Step by step, the Met has strayed from the nine principles laid down by its founder, Sir Robert Peel, and issued to every new police officer since 1829. The ninth of these is ‘to recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them’. The new contingency plans meant that they would potentially have to xviignore hundreds of thousands of serious offences such as robbery and fraud. Peel’s promise would not have been kept.

The force is not only suffering from chronic under-funding. Barely a week goes by without the Met finding itself at the centre of a new crisis, lambasted by MPs and criticised in once-friendly newspapers. Scandal after scandal has buffeted the force. Many are linked to the abuse of power. Two of the most recent examples include Ben Hannam, a PC who was jailed for belonging to a neo-Nazi terrorist group, and Benjamin Kemp, sacked for hitting a vulnerable teenage girl at least thirty times with a baton. The early departure of several recent commissioners has added to the sense of misery. Demoralised and depleted in numbers, the Met is a shadow of its former self.

This is a tragedy that harms each and every one of us, not least because so many of the 32,000 police officers inside Scotland Yard perform heroic acts on behalf of the public every day. Former detective superintendent John Sutherland was forced to retire early with crippling depression and has become a powerful advocate for the good that police officers do. But even he accepts that the current malaise is partially self-inflicted. ‘There are times as a police officer when I just want to bury my head in my hands,’ Sutherland writes in his memoir, Blue:

Stephen Lawrence, Plebgate, Hillsborough – the list goes on. The sins of the past and the sins of the present, conspiring and causing even good people to doubt us. There can be no escaping the fact that we have, to a very significant extent, brought it on ourselves. Society has every right to expect higher standards of police officers than they do of anyone else. That is because of the promise each of us made and the powers each of us has been given. Where we betray xviithat promise or abuse those powers, it is absolutely right that we are held to account … Some of our failings have been catastrophic and some of the consequences unthinkable. Sometimes it’s an individual officer at fault, sometimes it’s the whole institution. And, either way, the responsibility for putting things right is ours and ours alone.9

It should never be forgotten that police officers work in a uniquely challenging context, operating at the margins of society in the face of hostility and conflict. In recent times, no one has epitomised the Metropolitan Police at its finest more than PC Keith Palmer. In May 2017, the officer was stabbed to death by Islamist terrorist Khalid Masood while defending the Houses of Parliament. Masood had mown down dozens of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge before he was shot dead by armed police officers. Palmer’s heroism should remind us of the individual acts of courage that police officers undertake on our behalf. After his death a permanent memorial was placed at the spot by the Carriage Gates where he lost his life. At the unveiling ceremony, Met commissioner Cressida Dick spoke of the pride all police officers felt for their dead comrade. ‘PC Palmer was an outstanding police officer,’ she said, adding:

He acted that day with no thought for his own safety, intent simply on doing his job and protecting members of the public and Parliament. He paid the ultimate price for his selfless actions and this memorial is a fitting and lasting tribute to the tremendous bravery he showed on that terrible day.10

Yet PC Palmer’s death, which had so touched the nation, soon blew up in the Met’s face in familiar circumstances, the inability to admit to mistakes. The descent into acrimony began when the xviiidead officer’s sisters, Angela Clark and Michelle Palmer, made their own enquiries into the case. They could not understand why – in an apparent breach of police procedures – their brother had been left alone and unarmed. After hearing that the over-stretched force had ordered firearms officers to conduct roving patrols to cover a wider area, rather than stay permanently on duty at the gates, the sisters began asking questions ahead of the official inquest. It was then that the shutters came down. Their requests for information were ignored and the relationship between the Met and the family broke down. The two sisters accused Scotland Yard of blocking their pursuit of the truth. They also expressed concern that the Met was ‘scapegoating’ junior officers over apparent security failures during Masood’s attack. In an interview with The Times, Angela Clark said the family had ‘put our faith in this system’ and had been left ‘utterly demoralised’, adding: ‘There are certain people at command level who are perhaps finding it easier to blame the people that were on the ground.’ Michelle Palmer said, in the same interview:

Keith gave his life and we are left with no answers. Eighteen months on we were hoping for some closure, but we’re not going to have that. We feel like we come below Khalid Masood. We are not valued, not wanted, we feel like we are on trial. We feel like we are being battered.11

I have covered Scotland Yard as a journalist for sixteen years. Investigative reporters are often drawn to examine people or institutions who wield significant power over ordinary people, particularly unaccountable power. It seems to be an inexplicable part of our DNA, and almost impossible to resist. While most police officers perform incredible feats on behalf of the public, the potential for terrible xixbehaviour is rife simply due to the power they are afforded over others, granted by statutory legislation. But when those powers are abused, it can result in innocent people suffering mental trauma, physical injury and worse.

Most investigative journalists take a good look at the police at some stage of their career. I began not long after the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent Brazilian killed by Met Police officers after being mistaken for a terror suspect in 2005. The Yard rightly took a lot of flak over that case, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 10. But despite the shambles of that operation, the Met at that time still seemed immensely powerful, was largely trusted, and was not to be trifled with. Since then, reporting on Scotland Yard – and British policing in general – has been akin to witnessing a slow-motion car crash.

This book is an attempt to explain how London’s world-famous police force got itself into this sorry mess – and how it might get itself out of it. During my research I interviewed Home Secretaries, Cabinet ministers, Downing Street advisers, Metropolitan Police commissioners, detectives, victims and villains to explore the most calamitous chapter in Scotland Yard’s near two centuries of existence. Reporting accurately on any force is a tricky task, and the Met is no different. The police are obsessed with controlling what information leaks from their stations, canteens and databases and into journalists’ notebooks. They can also be dangerous. As we shall see, police officers who publicly embarrass or shame the Yard are, at best, placed under extreme pressure. The force has its own moral code of behaviour, a version of the Mafia’s omertà. Speak out, and you’re no longer ‘one of us’; you’re ‘one of them’. Given the risks, it has sometimes been difficult to ask people to put their heads above the parapet. To provide a truly authentic account, therefore, I have xxconsulted thousands of intelligence files, witness statements and court transcripts provided by police sources, and have masked the identities of those who helped me most.

* * *

Not that long ago Scotland Yard was riding high: the crime rate was low, newspapers were full of glowing stories about the police, and ministers were falling over themselves to give the force whatever it wanted. Throughout the 1980s, the government led by Margaret Thatcher relied on the Met and other forces to maintain public order in the face of wide-ranging and controversial economic reforms. The result was bumper pay packets, lucrative overtime and an establishment tendency to turn a blind eye to anything murky.

The apex of the relationship came during the miners’ strike of 1984–85, a major piece of industrial action that had shut down the British coal industry. Violent confrontations between pickets and police characterised the strike, which ended in a decisive victory for the Conservative government and allowed Thatcher’s successor, John Major, to close most of Britain’s collieries. Mike Bennett, a leading member of the Police Federation, a union which represents more than 100,000 rank-and-file officers, said members who took on the miners ‘had so much money thrown at them it was embarrassing’, adding: ‘People had caravans and boats named after the Home Secretary.’12

Ron Evans, a Special Branch protection officer, joined ‘the job’ in Thatcher’s era and rose through the ranks to end up guarding the Prime Minister. He is effusive about his charge. ‘I was one of Thatcher’s boys, to whom she had given a 40 per cent pay rise as soon as she came into power in 1979,’ he said. ‘Most of us in the xxipolice thought she was simply magnificent … my heroine. One of the best people I worked with – tough and fair, which is all you can ask.’13

Norman Tebbit, a Cabinet minister during the Thatcher era, was also very fond of his protection officers: ‘They are all marvellous characters and there is a fund of family jokes that includes them,’ he once said. ‘I value them all tremendously and not just for the security.’14

It was not only the UK government that was in thrall to the Met during the 1980s. Across the globe, the words ‘Scotland Yard’ meant something. The Met has been immortalised since Victorian times in books and television programmes, including works by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and P. D. James, and shows such as Dixon of Dock Green and Prime Suspect. In 1981, when the then Met commissioner, Sir David McNee, visited the United States to brief American law enforcement on his latest strategies, the trip was covered in glowing terms by the Washington Post. McNee was described as a ‘big, bluff, hearty man with an air of authority’ who led a force renowned for cracking ‘puzzling cases’ in a ‘most civilised manner’.15 McNee was guest of honour at a dinner in Washington attended by representatives from the FBI, the Justice Department and the Secret Service, all of whom marvelled at Scotland Yard’s low murder rate.16

Such was its prestige that London’s finest also used to field requests from overseas governments keen to tap into their expertise. In 1991, Scotland Yard started to nurture fledgling South African law enforcement officials in preparation for the imminent collapse of apartheid. The courses were held at the Civil Service College, a vast, white mock-Palladian building in Sunningdale, Berkshire. This came following a personal request from Nelson Mandela, then xxiileader of the African National Congress, to Prime Minister John Major. One of the attendees, Zelda Holtzman, said it was ‘remarkable to see the police moving in the streets, unarmed, talking to people, playing with children – we only see our police in armoured vans … carrying heavy guns’.17

Scotland Yard, and policing in general, rode so high during the Thatcher years that it seemed any scandal that might have caused embarrassment was merely swept under the carpet. Those inside the Met certainly felt more protected than in the days of Robert Mark, the commissioner from 1972 to 1977, who famously remarked that a ‘good police force is one that catches more crooks than it employs’. During his five years in charge, Mark – a steely Normandy veteran who brought a missionary zeal to his work – launched the most far-reaching anti-corruption drive in Scotland Yard’s history, prosecuting, sacking or forcing out more than 450 officers.18

In his autobiography, In the Office of Constable, Mark said: ‘I had never experienced institutionalised wrongdoing, blindness, arrogance and prejudice on anything like the scale accepted as routine at the Met.’ He was particularly concerned about the influence of the detective class, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), which had been exposed in a series of scandals linked to organised crime. After becoming commissioner, Mark assembled representatives of the CID and gave them an almighty dressing down.

I told them that they represented what had long been the most routinely corrupt organisation in London, that nothing and no one would prevent me from putting an end to it and that, if necessary, I would put the whole of the CID back into uniform and make a fresh start.

xxiiiTo dilute their power, he pushed through reforms that saw them placed under the control of a uniformed commander.

But when Mark retired in 1977, more traditional forces reasserted themselves. It seemed many in positions of power believed that taking on Scotland Yard – or the police in general – would trigger a loss of confidence in the overall ‘system’. Any official recognition that corrupt behaviour existed would be more damaging than the consequences of the corruption itself.

In 1980, an outrageous judicial ruling offered an insight into the mindset of the time. During an appeal by the six Irishmen who had been wrongly convicted for the 1975 IRA bombings in Birmingham, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, decided that the men should lose. In his view, the strength of the evidence against the bombers, known as the Birmingham Six, was irrelevant. In the judgment Denning said:

If they [the appellants] won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous … That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.’

The innocent men would spend a further eleven years in jail until a more objective judge heard another appeal and freed them without further delay. Denning believed that although police officers might be criminals, any official acknowledgement of this would be too destabilising for the nation to deal with. In effect, society should turn a blind eye. xxiv

Nowhere was Scotland Yard’s shift from Robert Mark’s fearless tenure through to the loose oversight of the Thatcher years more apparent than in Operation Countryman, one of the most acrimonious and ill-fated police corruption investigations in modern history. The probe, which started off by examining three City of London robberies in 1978, eventually mushroomed into a massive inquiry into eighty-four Metropolitan Police officers variously accused of taking bribes, planting evidence, conspiring with bank robbers and improperly facilitating bail. The operation resulted in just two successful prosecutions, to the frustration and anger of the independent investigators who had been recruited from Dorset Constabulary. There were two key figures at the heart of the investigation: Alf Sheppard, a bank robber who was prepared to be wired up to get evidence against corrupt officers, and DCI Phil Cuthbert, a City of London officer and leading Freemason who was one of the two men later jailed.19

Countryman soon found that the files they requested from Scotland Yard would disappear, or it would take weeks of pressure to get them handed over. Senior Met officers were also suspected of tipping off subordinates when they were under investigation.20 Bizarrely, the rogue officers seemed to have some support from Sir Thomas Hetherington, then the director of public prosecutions. When he learnt that Cuthbert had been remanded in custody, Britain’s top prosecutor promptly dropped the charge, informing the detective’s solicitor before the investigating officers on Countryman. Arthur Hambleton, Dorset’s chief constable and a decorated war hero, was furious. ‘That indicated to me that we were not going to get the help and support that we expected,’ he later said. ‘My chaps had worked very hard cultivating the informants and at a xxvstroke that confidence in us was lost.’21 Countryman was eventually handed back to the Met to investigate itself. The inquiry then withered and died. John Alderson, a former chief constable of Devon and Cornwall involved in Countryman, said that he believed ‘political reasons were behind the winding down of the exercise’.

‘The Home Office … were finding that the whole inquiry was reaching such dimensions that it had become embarrassing,’ he later recalled. ‘The Home Secretary [William Whitelaw] said that Countryman was getting into channels that it was never intended to do, deep into the Metropolitan Police, and that it was unlikely that there would never be another exercise like that.’ Alderson added that Whitelaw seemed concerned that Countryman ‘was getting so much more serious than anyone had contemplated in the first place’.22

‘Countryman was there to inquire into two crimes, but within weeks the flood of information was of such a proportion … and it was becoming something of a scandal,’ he said. The cover-up was so brazen that it divided opinion across the policing community. Frank Williamson, then the inspector of constabulary, was disgusted at the turn of events. ‘If the morale of the police service depends on failing to reveal things that ought to be revealed in connection with misbehaviour and malpractice, then I want no part of it,’ he said, adding:

No one needs to remind me of the gallantry, integrity and efficiency of a high proportion of the police service, but that cannot be used to offset and damage the reputation of the service done by people who misbehave. It is not the people who draw attention to misbehaviour who are being disloyal and undermining the morale, it is the people who are misbehaving themselves.23

xxviCertainly, any impact that Mark’s 1970s anti-corruption drive had had on the Met seemed to have been completely lost by 1983, when Edwin ‘Laurie’ Cork, a Flying Squad officer, was accused of involvement in a mass cocaine importation syndicate. He was acquitted but still dismissed by the Met. When later talking about corruption in the Met, he discussed officers planting evidence but seemed mystified as to why this was wrong, complaining: ‘Everyone does it. I’m not a rotten apple in danger of rotting the barrel. It’s a fucking rotten orchard, that’s what it is.’24

The strange way that Scotland Yard dealt with alleged criminality in its ranks would be further exposed during the notorious case of Tony Lundy. In the 1980s, the detective superintendent became one of the Met’s top thief takers when he recruited a leading London gangster as an informant. Roy Garner was an armed robber, a fraudster and a fence from north London who earned massive taxpayer-funded rewards for his information.25 But serious questions about the relationship between the two men began to emerge, leading many to wonder whether Lundy was actually working for Garner, who was also a Freemason.

In March 1980, a trusted supergrass previously used by the Metropolitan Police alleged that Lundy was involved in the hijack of a lorry at Tilbury Docks in Essex. The supergrass allegations against Lundy were investigated for more than two years by deputy assistant commissioner Ron Steventon. His 4,000-page internal report on whether to bring criminal charges against Lundy was submitted to the director of public prosecutions. Steventon concluded: ‘I feel bound to express a personal opinion and regrettably there is a dearth of evidence to support it, but it is my belief that Lundy is a corrupt officer who has long exploited his association with Garner.’26 Lundy has always denied allegations of corruption and xxviiclaims he has been the subject of a smear campaign by criminals and the media.

In July 1986, his relationship with Garner exploded into the public domain during an investigation by HM Customs and Excise (HMCE) into the largest-ever cocaine importation into the UK. The deal was arranged by Garner, who had teamed up with Nikolaus Chrastny, an international bank robber and gemstone smuggler who was on first-name terms with the Colombian cocaine king Pablo Escobar. Garner and Chrastny tried to import 392 kilograms, worth more than £100 million at street prices and far more than all British seizures for the previous year.27

The shipment arrived in the UK, but Customs officers were closing in on the gang when Lundy suddenly turned up in Florida, allegedly trying to intercept evidence that implicated Garner in the affair. Soon afterwards, the gang found out they were under investigation. Secret recordings of two American conspirators plotting in Florida revealed the source of the compromise: ‘They heard from this fucking guy at Scotland Yard … they’ve got the guy paid off.’28

Chrastny was arrested at gunpoint in Harley Street, central London, by Customs officers who found £9 million of cocaine in his nearby flat. Chrastny agreed to turn informant in a bid for leniency, telling HMCE that Garner had assured him that he was ‘getting information about necessary intelligence directly from the Yard’ and ‘whatever will be going on, we will know exactly about it’. The Czech-born criminal said he had pressed Garner, who eventually ‘gave me the name of Mr Lundy’. Chrastny said he then made enquiries of his own and discovered ‘there was actually such a man very high up in Scotland Yard’.

Two BBC investigative journalists, the late Andrew Jennings and Vyv Simson, tried to make a documentary about the affair. xxviiiThe Met responded by placing Jennings under surveillance for two months and wielded its considerable power to lobby the BBC behind closed doors. An assistant commissioner wrote privately to BBC assistant director general Alan Protheroe urging restraint, and the programme was later pulled, with the Corporation citing ‘insoluble legal difficulties’.29 The journalists resigned on a point of principle and took their work to ITV’s World in Action, where the grisly detail was laid bare for millions of viewers.

Garner was jailed for twenty-two years over the cocaine importation in 1989. Lundy was never charged with any offences but retired sick in December 1988 soon after he had been interviewed by the Met’s anti-corruption squad. Not long afterwards, Jennings, the intrepid World in Action journalist, tracked down Lundy on a 10-mile run near his home in Hertfordshire. He tried to ask Lundy about Garner and allegations that he was corrupt, but the super-fit former detective managed to outrun the film crew.30 A video of the wonderful encounter is still available on YouTube.31

There is little doubt that ministers, the director of public prosecutions and even the judiciary were much more willing to close ranks and protect Scotland Yard in the 1980s. Today, that kind of unquestioning support for the police has drained away.

But what has brought the Metropolitan Police to its knees, and is there anything we can do about it? Perhaps the best place to start is with the horrific murder of an innocent schoolboy in south-east London, not long after Margaret Thatcher left office. The case of Stephen Lawrence would open up Scotland Yard – and British policing – to independent scrutiny like no other.

Notes

1. Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2020, Office for National Statistics

2. Year ending March 2020

3. Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2020, Office for National Statistics

4. Ibid.

5.The Sun, 16 October 2017

6. Confidential documents seen by author

7.The Sun, 15 July 2021

8.The Times, 14 July 2021

9. John Sutherland, Blue: Keeping the Peace and Falling to Pieces (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017)

10. Evening Standard, 20 February 2019

11.The Times, 1 October 2018

12. BBC Radio 4, The Tories and the Police: The End of the Affair (2014)

13. Ron Evans, On Her Majesty’s Service (John Blake, 2008)

14. Ibid.

15.Washington Post, 7 March 1981

16. Ibid.

17.The Observer, 2 April 1994

18. Graeme McLagan, Bent Coppers: The Inside Story of Scotland Yard’s Battle against Police Corruption (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003)

19.The Guardian, 19 August 2018

20. McLagan, Bent Coppers

21. ‘Cleaning Up the Yard’, World in Action, ITV, 2 August 1982

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Peter Walsh, Drug War: The Secret History (Milo, 2018)

25. Ibid.

26. Andrew Jennings, Paul Lashmar and Vyv Simson, Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection (Jonathan Cape, 1990)

27. Walsh, Drug War

28. Jennings et al., Scotland Yard’s Cocaine Connection

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Andrew Jennings/YouTube, 19 May 2009, https://www.youtu.be/i7E0ydCfziE (accessed 30 June 2022)

1

Chapter 1

The Snowball

Seventeen-year-old Stephen Lawrence and his best friend Duwayne Brooks stumbled out into the cool night air, chatting and laughing as they zipped up their coats in preparation for the journey home across south-east London. It was just after 10 p.m. on an April evening in 1993 and the boys, who had become friends on their first day at Blackheath Bluecoats Church of England School,1 had been visiting Stephen’s uncle to play a popular computer game, Street Fighter II.

As they headed off to catch a bus at Well Hall roundabout in Eltham, a sprawling suburb on the borders of London and Kent, Stephen and Duwayne were engrossed in a conversation about Arsenal Football Club.2 Days earlier, their favourite team had triumphed in a League Cup final against Sheffield Wednesday. The quality of the football had been forgettable, but the game would be remembered for its post-match celebrations, when Arsenal’s captain Tony Adams accidentally broke the arm of his match-winning goal scorer, Steve Morrow.

Stephen was keen to get home, but no buses were in sight. The friends split up to monitor different bus stops on the several roads exiting the roundabout. When Duwayne called out to Stephen to ask if he’d seen a bus, a gang of five or six white youths suddenly 2appeared from the other side of Well Hall Road. One of them yelled at Duwayne: ‘What, what, n****r?’

Duwayne, more streetwise than Stephen, instinctively sensed danger. ‘I said to Steve “run” and then I just turned and ran,’ Brooks later recalled in his autobiography. No one will ever know why Stephen did not follow his friend’s advice. Duwayne sprinted a few hundred yards away before a ‘bad feeling’ struck him and he realised he had left Stephen behind.

Everything flashed in my head. Why hasn’t he run? What’s he still doing there? Maybe he has run. I hope he has run. All these things were flashing in my head in that split second before I turned round to make sure he was behind me … I was sure he was running but couldn’t bring myself to turn around. I was too scared. I started to cry … then my legs went to jelly.3

Members of the gang had cornered Stephen, stabbing him repeatedly. 4 The assault lasted seconds before the gang melted away.

By the time Duwayne looked back, his friend was somehow lurching towards him, mortally wounded, looking confused and scared.5 Stephen collapsed 130 yards from the spot where he was attacked, bleeding copiously. Some of his wounds were 5 inches deep. A pathologist would later pay tribute to Stephen’s physical fitness, saying it was remarkable that he managed to get so far.6

As the teenager’s life ebbed away, a passing couple who saw him fall rushed to his aid. The woman placed her hand on his head and whispered in his ear: ‘You are loved, you are loved.’7 Duwayne ran off to call an ambulance. An off-duty policeman stopped his car and covered Stephen with a blanket. By the time he reached hospital 3shortly after 11 p.m., Stephen Lawrence was dead. One of the longest, most painful and furthest-reaching murder investigations in the history of British policing was about to begin.

* * *

A few months after Stephen Lawrence’s death, Britain’s police forces gathered to confront a very different challenge. Coaches from all over the country converged on London for an unprecedented mass protest by the men and women charged with protecting the public and maintaining law and order. More than 23,000 officers – around half of all those off duty that day – headed for Wembley Arena in north-west London. It was a warm midsummer day, but the police were in no mood for frivolities.

In July 1993, Britain’s police force faced its biggest shake-up in more than 150 years. A government-sponsored report written by Sir Patrick Sheehy, chairman of British American Tobacco, had recommended the most far-reaching reforms to police pay, rank structure and working practices since the founding of Scotland Yard. The report, which was commissioned by then Home Secretary Ken Clarke, had taken a truncheon to decades of police tradition. Its 270 recommendations included the abolition of three ranks, the end of lucrative overtime payments and the replacement of automatic annual pay increases with a performance-related model.

Behind Clarke’s outwardly genial demeanour and laid-back personal style lurked considerable reformist zeal. The veteran Conservative Cabinet minister felt the police were the ‘last great unreformed Victorian public service’, a relic of a previous age that had somehow been ‘left untouched’. He told me in an interview 4twenty-eight years later: ‘It was based on a Victorian army with multiple layers. The Sheehy reforms were an attempt to tackle this extraordinary rank structure.’

Clarke was concerned that vast swathes of the force were not crime fighters or protectors of the public but pen-pushing plodders ‘whose main job was to hold the person below them to account for their performance’, and whose ‘main obligation was to account for their own performance to the people above them, without doing very much else’.8 Yet such was the force’s aura of public rectitude that a clear-headed, critical assessment of its flaws had seemed almost inconceivable until Clarke took on the challenge.

‘The idea that a Tory Home Secretary would reform the police – would change them – was unthinkable to them,’ he said.9 A Labour government attempting to dismantle the establishment might be something to worry about, but the Conservatives were supposed to be the party of law and order. Why would the Tories go to war with the police? Scotland Yard, by far the most influential of Britain’s forces, rallied its troops for a counter-offensive. Their pleas for protection from interfering politicians were to prove a potent riposte.

Sir Paul Condon, the Met commissioner, had initially impressed Clarke with reforms he had introduced as chief constable of the Kent force. Newly arrived at Scotland Yard in 1993, his credentials proved short-lived. Condon swiftly threatened to resign if the Sheehy reforms were implemented. At the same time, stories critical of the proposed shake-up began to appear in national newspapers sympathetic to the Met. The anti-reform campaign culminated in the rally at Wembley Arena, a 12,500-seat indoor facility which normally hosts sports events and rock concerts, not protests by furious police officers.

The arena was full more than an hour before the protest began; 56,000 officers were put in two overflow halls and an estimated 3,000 more were locked out.10 There was rapturous applause as the audience listened to a succession of speakers condemn the Sheehy report. Alan Eastwood, chairman of the Police Federation, which then represented 127,000 officers up to the rank of chief inspector, said it was a ‘monumental blunder’ which had led the service to the edge of a cliff.

Eastwood warned that the police’s role as guardians of the public was becoming vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by unscrupulous governments:

A force stripped of its identity. A force without shape or expectations … cynically hired and learning to cynically serve, semi-casualised, a force whose members expect to be used and turned-over … Policemen under Sheehy will not be policemen, they will be units of manpower. Will units of manpower take the same risks?11

As for Clarke, portrayed as the agent of pending police ruin, there was little but contempt. In one reference to the man who had moved on from the Home Office and was now Chancellor of the Exchequer, Eastwood described the proposed reforms as the work of a ‘vainglorious politician who decided that the police were fair game for a shake-up’.

Mike Bennett, another senior official at the Police Federation at the time, said that ‘putting Kenneth Clarke in charge of the police was like putting King Herod in charge of Mothercare. He didn’t have a clue what he was doing.’12 Bennett declared that the scale of the police protest had surprised everyone. ‘It looked very impressive. We didn’t frogmarch people there … It was a genuine show of support against the Sheehy recommendations.’ In an aside 6that inadvertently hinted at some of the murkier concerns about modern police practices, he added: ‘They weren’t getting a backhander [for attending the protest], they weren’t getting paid for it.’

All this proved quite a headache for Michael Howard, who had recently taken over from Clarke as Home Secretary. The two men had been political rivals ever since their time together at the Cambridge University Conservative Association in the 1960s. Ron Evans, the Special Branch protection officer who guarded both Clarke and Howard when they were Home Secretary, believes that Howard ‘inherited a spectacular mess … He didn’t agree with the Sheehy inquiry but couldn’t ditch a policy from his predecessor and had to go along with it.’13

Howard asked Evans about the Wembley protest during a trip in the car on the morning of the rally. ‘I told him I was going to go,’ the officer said. ‘He was surprised and asked if he should go too. I said not to, because he would only come out of it looking bad from a policy that had been thrust upon him.’

Howard saw very quickly that fighting the police would bring him little but grief. A shrewd but largely anonymous figure with leadership ambitions, he was once memorably described by a Cabinet colleague as having ‘something of the night about him’. Howard soon shelved most of Sheehy’s proposals, distancing himself from his predecessor by showering the police with praise. He later recalled: ‘One of the things you learn in politics is you can’t fight too many battles at the same time. I looked at those reforms and some of them I did put into effect and some of them I didn’t … I wanted to avoid all-out war with the police.’14

It was a resounding victory. For a while it seemed that 1993 would be the year in which the police fought off the hostile scrutiny of those who had come to question its role as the frontline enforcers 7of state power – most notably through the long period of public protests that greeted Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms of the 1980s.

But that was not how 1993 would ultimately be remembered by police forces across the country. The murder of Stephen Lawrence, and the subsequent police investigation, would strike deep into British life, confronting every level of society with uncomfortable questions about racism, justice and the conduct of the Metropolitan Police. The death of a black teenager on the streets of Eltham would shake the foundations of Scotland Yard, reverberate for years through the committee rooms of Whitehall and Westminster, and change the way many Britons viewed the police for ever.

* * *

Cressida Dick, the Met commissioner from 2017 until 2022, has admitted that Stephen’s murder ‘defined my generation of policing’ and said she could not ‘think of any other case that has come close to the same impact’,15 while the BBC home affairs editor Mark Easton described it as a ‘watershed in British cultural life’.16 Yet no one in the immediate aftermath of the Eltham attack could possibly have seen it coming. Stephen’s murder may have borne some of the hallmarks of the lynchings once inflicted by white racists on black youths in America’s Deep South, but it was scarcely the first such attack in Britain. It wasn’t even the first such attack in Eltham, a notorious hotbed of far-right activity.

The London suburb had long been home to large numbers of white working-class families from east London who were moved as slum housing was cleared along the river Thames from Tower Bridge to Deptford. Families who might have previously earned a 8living at the docks, in haulage, in the wholesale markets or in the print industry found themselves decanted into the politer surrounds of Thamesmead and new council estates in Welling, Bexleyheath and Eltham.

Some of the new arrivals were members of criminal gangs, typically organised around individual families and their relatives. They made their money from armed robbery, hijacking lorries and protection rackets. The more successful crime families – known locally as ‘firms’ – would plough their proceeds into legitimate businesses such as garages, scrap yards, pubs and nightclubs. These budding entrepreneurs still imposed their criminal will the old-fashioned way – through beatings, stabbings and shootings. Their gangland culture often incorporated hardened racist ideas derived from Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and, later, the right-wing bully boys of the National Front.

By the early 1990s, Eltham was a dangerous place not to be white. One month before Stephen Lawrence’s murder, Gurdeep Bhangal was attacked with a kitchen knife outside his father’s branch of the Wimpy franchise after confronting a group of abusive white youths. The knife punctured his stomach and bowel, missing his spine by half an inch.17 Police investigated the attack, but no charges were brought.

In February 1991, Rolan Adams, a fifteen-year-old black boy, was stabbed in the throat with a folding butterfly knife during a confrontation with a gang of fifteen, some shouting ‘n****rs’. The following year Rohit Duggal was murdered by a white youth outside a kebab shop.18 The families of the victims later claimed that the failure of Scotland Yard to pursue the killers had created a culture of impunity.

In Stephen Lawrence’s case, the Met’s response to yet another 9unprovoked murder would be slowly unpicked and then pored over in microscopic detail for decades to come. Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, it would continue to gather speed and mass. In the final reckoning, there would be no escape for Scotland Yard from a devastating account of incompetence, racism and corruption.

* * *

Most detectives agree that the first sixty minutes after any murder represent the ‘golden hour’ when opportunities for forensic discovery are at their greatest and the chances of solving the crime – or at least identifying principal suspects – are at their highest. Unfortunately for the distraught Lawrence family, the investigation into Stephen’s death got off to the worst possible start when one of the first police officers to arrive on the scene decided to leave almost immediately. He headed for the Welcome Inn public house, in the opposite direction to the route taken by Stephen’s attackers.19

None of the fifty-plus officers who were initially assigned to the case recorded Duwayne Brooks’s claim that the attackers had said ‘What, what, n****r?’ No house-to-house enquiries were conducted and there was no search of the surrounding area,20 in contravention of police protocols. The most charitable interpretation of the initial police response is that officers treated the murder as some sort of falling out among hooligans, a gangland reprisal unworthy of serious investigation. That is certainly Duwayne Brooks’s view: ‘I don’t think they [the police] believed – well, they didn’t believe – that we were just two black boys waiting to get on a bus.’21

At one point, Scotland Yard suggested that investigating officers had struggled to break down a ‘wall of silence’ in the local 10community, which was said to be terrified of marauding gangs. This would later prove to be entirely untrue. Within hours of the murder, local police were inundated with anonymous tip-offs. Letters left in local telephone boxes and stuffed onto the windscreen of an empty police car claimed that the murder had been committed by a gang of violent white racists. Some tipsters even offered names. In the next two weeks, five white men – Gary Dobson, brothers Neil and Jamie Acourt, Luke Knight and David Norris – were identified to detectives by no fewer than twenty-six different local sources.22 All five would remain central to the Lawrence case as it unfolded over the next two decades.

Any outsider might have concluded that handcuffs would swiftly be applied to the leading suspects. Yet the senior investigating officer in the case, Detective Superintendent Ian Crampton, made a ‘strategical’ decision not to arrest anyone after the murder. Another Met detective with detailed knowledge of the Lawrence case says he has always been surprised at the failure to do so. ‘The early ’90s were a different time,’ he said, adding:

In 1993, if I’m honest, we arrested almost for fun – we didn’t give it a great deal of thought. We certainly didn’t, as happens today, almost prepare the whole bloody court case before you go out and make an arrest. Back then, if you thought someone was guilty, you’d go out and arrest them and work out the details afterwards. At the very least you would search them or their property, especially within the first hours after a crime.23

One of the few things that the police did do in the early days of the investigation involved surveillance of the suspects, but even this 11simple act of police work proved bewilderingly inept from start to finish. Inexplicably, the surveillance did not begin until three days after the murder, allowing plenty of time for any incriminating evidence – such as a bloody knife or clothes – to be dumped. Then, when surveillance teams photographed suspects removing material from their homes in black bin liners, the information was not passed on to the investigating officers, who might have been able to seize whatever the bags contained. Someone then decided to divert one of the surveillance teams away from the home of a murder suspect in order to observe a black youth who was believed to have been involved in a minor theft.24 For Stephen’s friend Duwayne, the police interest in a potential black thief rather than a suspected white murderer ‘summed it all up’. He added: ‘If it hadn’t been in such tragic circumstances, the surveillance would have been hilarious.’25

Complaints about the police investigation quickly multiplied. Stephen’s father Neville and his mother Doreen, members of the ‘Windrush’ generation, having both immigrated to Britain in the 1960s,26 constantly pressed the police for information, to no avail. Two days after the murder, Neville found himself being questioned about a pair of gloves Stephen had been wearing. Furious, he retorted: ‘What are you implying, are you implying my son was a cat burglar?’27 Doreen said: ‘We got the impression that if you are black, you must be a thief. If you are black, you must be into drugs. You are a criminal.’28 And in an interview she gave to gal-dem magazine in 2018 she went further: ‘We were being treated as if we were criminals ourselves, and the ones who murdered Stephen were being protected by the police.’29

The Lawrences still believe that no arrests for Stephen’s murder would ever have occurred had it not been for an intervention from 12Nelson Mandela. Then the president of the African National Congress, Mandela had recently been released from a 27-year jail sentence for opposing South Africa’s apartheid regime and made time in his schedule to meet Stephen’s bereaved parents during a visit to the UK.

The Lawrence family spent twenty minutes alone with Mandela, who then emerged to declare to the waiting crowd that the Lawrences’ tragedy was ‘our tragedy’. He went on: ‘I know what it means to parents to lose a child under such tragic circumstances,’ adding that public brutality was all too commonplace in his native South Africa, ‘where black lives are cheap’.30

Mandela’s involvement offered the first indication that the Lawrence case was no ordinary murder, and that the police investigation would not escape scrutiny. All five suspects in the Lawrence case were arrested the day after Mandela’s speech.

The gang was questioned before being released without charge. During their brief spell in custody, the police committed another error which hampered the inquiry. Some of the suspects appeared in identification parades at Eltham police station. Among the witnesses who might have recognised the attackers were Duwayne and another black youth, Joey Shepherd, who had also been waiting at the bus stop on Well Hall roundabout that night. Minutes after the murder, Shepherd fled to the Lawrence house to tell the family Stephen had been attacked.

Joey bravely agreed to take part in the line-up, which at that point involved Gary Dobson and the brothers Neil and Jamie Acourt. He was already nervous of possible reprisals should white extremists learn he was helping the police in the case. Despite the obvious danger, police officers mentioned his name in front of a line-up that included the prime suspects. Joey became terrified and refused to 13help the investigation further.31 Yet another cardinal policing rule – protect your witnesses – appeared to have been blithely disregarded.

Duwayne, meanwhile, picked out Neil Acourt as one of the attackers – potentially a huge breakthrough in the case. But his evidence was fatally undermined by subsequent statements from DS Christopher Crowley, who accompanied him home following the parade. Crowley claimed that Duwayne had privately confided to him a number of things: that he had been ‘prompted’ by friends prior to the ID parade and hadn’t actually seen Acourt’s face at the time. Crowley also claimed Duwayne had told him he had picked out the suspect wearing ‘tracksuit bottoms’32 because he looked as though he had come from a jail cell.

While Duwayne disputed a lot of what Crowley said and was furious about it, he accepted he had said things that the court felt justified excluding his evidence without going into the disputed claims. This demolished any chance of Duwayne’s evidence being relied upon in a future prosecution. Duwayne remains furious to this day and disputes the detective’s complete version of events:

The police said Crowley couldn’t have made it all up. I said he hadn’t, told them which bits were true, and suggested that he was lying about other things he claimed I had said. The police wouldn’t let me say ‘lie’. They refused to put it down in the statement. They insisted I be more tactful and say that he had ‘misunderstood’ me.33

Crowley has always stood by his version of events despite Duwayne’s anger.* Whatever the truth, the Lawrence investigation, it was clear, was getting nowhere fast.

14Despite the public complaints from the family and their growing band of supporters, there had been little criticism of Scotland Yard from Westminster or the media. The Conservative government’s law and order strategy once Michael Howard was installed as Home Secretary was still very much to court Scotland Yard in an attempt to cut rising crime rates. ‘I did see the police as allies in the fight against crime,’ Howard later recalled. ‘Home Secretaries can’t do these things single-handed.’

Ministers were also relying on the Met’s counter-terrorism command to deal with an escalating threat from the IRA. During the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool that October, Special Branch officers received intelligence that Irish terrorists were planning to kill a senior minister in an attempt to recreate the infamous bombing of the 1984 Brighton conference, in which five people died.34

The warnings arrived in mid-conference, requiring a fast response. Howard’s bodyguard Ron Evans said the police ‘had no idea or way of knowing’ exactly when the attack might be launched. So each protection officer sped their minister away from Blackpool at different times, using different routes.35 Ministers seemed in no mood to pick fights with police officers who were trying to save their lives.

In time, however, the diffident handling of a seemingly routine murder case in Eltham would become a national scandal. And as the years passed, the Met’s moral and practical authority was fatally undermined by its handling of that case. The early mistakes in the investigation into Stephen Lawrence’s murder would prove to be a far more sinister indication of decay at the heart of the force.

* * *

15The footage was grainy, but the pictures and audio were clear enough. A smiling David Norris reclined on a sofa at the Eltham flat of his friend Gary Dobson, his casual demeanour entirely at odds with what he was saying:

If I was going to kill myself do you know what I’d do? I’d go and kill every black cunt, every P**i, every copper, every mug that I know. I’d go down to Catford … with two submachine guns and … I’d take one of them, skin the black cunt alive, mate, torture him, set him alight.

Warming to his theme, Norris laughed as he declared he would ‘blow their two legs and arms off and say “Go on, you can swim home now”’.36

The comments were recorded on a concealed listening device that police had installed in Dobson’s flat. After the failure of the early arrests, the Lawrence case had gone stale. But in 1994 it was picked up by Detective Superintendent Bill Mellish, who was perplexed by the absence of progress.

Mellish, an experienced detective, could not understand why officers on the night of the attack had wrongly concluded Stephen’s murder was ‘drug-related’.37 He applied for authorisation to install hidden cameras and probes in Dobson’s living room, which captured conversations between the gang members over a two-week period.

Norris was not the only one to air repellent views. Neil Acourt was recorded saying ‘every n****r should be chopped up’38 while Luke Knight ranted barely coherently about the right-wing politician Enoch Powell, who in his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in April 1968 had warned that mass immigration from Commonwealth 16countries was turning Britain into ‘a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre’.

Knight said of Powell:

That geezer, he knew straight away, he went over to Africa and all that. He knew it was a slum, he knew it was a shithole and he came back here saying they’re uncivilised and all that, and then they started coming over here and he knew, he knew straight away, he was saying, no, I don’t want them here, no fucking n****rs, they’ll ruin the gaff and he was right, they fucking have ruined it.

The hidden camera also showed them brandishing a variety of long-bladed knives. Most chillingly, Neil Acourt could be seen acting out the same ‘over-arm bowling’ stabbing movement thought to have been used to inflict one of Stephen Lawrence’s fatal wounds.