This interview is part of a series, which asks if newspapers have become Above the Law.

Read & watch further expert views & testimony from the campaign’s homepage.

By Jerry Richardson

In 1987, private investigator Daniel Morgan was murdered in the car park of The Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, South London. Five police investigations into the circumstances surrounding his death were then obstructed by a combination of police and press corruption.

The Daniel Morgan Independent Panel, which reported in 2021, revealed that corruption at the highest level of the Metropolitan Police had obstructed justice for the family to preserve its own reputation. It also unveiled a clandestine network of corrupt police officers, dodgy private investigators and senior News UK journalists and found that evidence strongly supported the allegation that journalists at News of the World had interfered with the murder investigation, under the direction of someone who would later become a suspect.

Daniel Morgan’s family have long called for Leveson Two to examine the relationship between the police and the press. His brother and anti-corruption campaigner, Alastair Morgan, who has fought for decades to establish the truth around his brother’s death, joined us to give his account of how the police and the press have obstructed justice for his family for over 35 years.

Southern Investigations – the private detective agency that Daniel Morgan was running with his business partner Jonathan Rees – was at the heart of illegally obtaining information that would later be published by News of the World. In the aftermath of Daniel Morgan’s death one of the first investigating officers on the case, Sid Fillery, who later became a suspect in the case, took over Morgan’s position at Southern Investigations. Fillery had been moonlighting at Southern Investigations prior to being assigned to the case but allegedly failed to declare this. From the late 80s onwards, Southern Investigations had a long and criminal relationship with News of the World that would span decades.

During the 1992 election, Southern Investigations was reportedly involved in obtaining documents from the safe of Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, which included confidential information that he had shared with his lawyer about an affair that had taken place years prior. This information was stolen and published by News of the World. In the same year, Southern Investigations is also alleged to have been involved in bugging the car of conservative MP David Mellor, which exposed his affair with a young actress.

“So they were working on a high level politically if you like, for Murdoch and his malign influence on British politics.”

At the 1988 inquest it was first alleged that Daniel Morgan had revealed he was about to sell a story to the Sunday press of allegations of police corruption. Morgan had multiple contacts in the press and according to reporting by Byline Tines, Derek Haslam, a former CID officer, was one of the sources supporting this allegation. Though the inquiry found no “hard evidence” to support this claim, his family have long believed that he was on the brink of exposing links between corrupt police officers and organised crime. It was also alleged by a bookkeeper at Southern Investigations that Jonathon Rees and Sid Fillery had planned Daniel Morgan’s murder. Fillery and Rees had already been arrested on suspicion for the murder in April 1987, but no charges were brought against them at this time.

Alastair Morgan said that it took him six years after the 1988 inquest to get a mainstream publisher to write about the case. At this point, he knew the Hampshire Police investigation into the Met’s handling of the case was a cover up “because of the things they hadn’t done”, but aside from sporadic coverage in the Guardian, none of the major newspapers were interested in covering it for several decades.

“Television on the other hand, there were outlets and media companies that were willing to have a look at it and I was very grateful for that. But the press, that’s another story… The Mail did some pieces on it and The Mail have done some good pieces on the police but the rest of them, Murdoch in particular and in general… minimal.”

During the fourth investigation into the murder in 2002, News of the World put the lead investigating officer on the case Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook and his family under surveillance. The fifth investigation, which was supposed to be highly classified was known to the suspects before even the family, through a leak from the “inner sanctum of Scotland Yard”, which through News of the World made its way back to the suspects. It was around the same time in 2005, that the Met finally admitted that the first inquiry, during which Sid Fillery had been the lead investigating officer, had been “compromised“.

Daniel Morgan’s family began looking for a judicial inquiry in 2004 but the Home Office, and the political establishment “were not interested”. At the time, Alastair Morgan says he spoke to the Minister for Policing but “it was impossible to get through to them that they were being lied to by the police about the quality of the investigation and these lies persisted right up until 2021 when the report came out,”

“In 2011, the prosecution against the suspects was dropped because of the weight of police corruption in the case. It had been so fouled up by corruption over the years. It was the weight of police corruption and incompetence that the case collapsed.”

Alastair Morgan lobbied the media “endlessly” to put pressure on the police. Between 2011 and 2012 he spent significant amount of time campaigning on Twitter to bring awareness to the case and also to try to convince journalists to cover the story; “I literally spent a whole year non-stop doing nothing but that.”

“The lying and corruption that I encountered 35 years ago has now permeated right through us, right through our political culture. I think everyone, anyone who’s got eyes and ears can see that lying has penetrated right to the top of our culture, our parliamentary culture. I look back on all the lonely times and I’m pleased that I did what I did. I would not ever have that undone. But when you look at the institutional corruption in the police; the racism and the misogyny… It’s been tolerated and kept under wraps for so long and now it’s kind of exploding because you can’t press something down for decades and decades. And finally, that the cork is going to pop out and it’s going to overflow.”

By Jerry Richardson

Tell your MP that newspapers shouldn’t be above the law.