The mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence has told a public inquiry that she does not believe claims by the former home secretary Michael Howard that he did not know undercover police officers had spied on her family.
Doreen Lawrence told the spycops inquiry on Thursday that Lord Howard, a former leader of the Conservative party, invited her to a meeting shortly after the inquiry was set up in 2014.
The inquiry was commissioned after revelations that undercover officers had monitored the Lawrences’ campaign in the 1990s to persuade police to properly investigate Stephen’s murder by a racist gang.
Howard was the home secretary between 1993 and 1997, when the police came under intense pressure over their failed investigation into the murder in south-east London.
Lady Lawrence said that at the meeting, Howard was “quite keen to express that he knew nothing about the undercover police that was happening around my family … that was his agenda”.
She was asked by her barrister, Imran Khan: “Did you accept at face value what he was saying to you that he knew nothing about it?” She replied: “No,” adding: “I don’t believe anything that he was saying.”
She suggested he would have known, because the commissioner of the Metropolitan police reports to the home secretary.
The inquiry has previously heard that surveillance reports compiled by an undercover officer about the Lawrences’ campaign were sent directly to Paul Condon, the then Met commissioner, who congratulated the officer on his “excellent” work.
Earlier, Lawrence told the public inquiry she had found it “deeply painful” to discover how police had deployed the undercover officers. She said the police’s priorities were “completely misplaced” as they should have been concentrating on bringing the racist murderers of her son to justice.
She called the covert surveillance “disrespectful and dehumanising”. “Stephen was an innocent young man. Our family did nothing wrong,” she said.
In a statement she described how the surveillance took place while she struggled to cope with Stephen’s murder, care for her other children and earn a living. “All the while I neglected my own wellbeing. I was simply surviving,” she said.
The inquiry was set up after Peter Francis, an undercover officer turned whistleblower, revealed in the Guardian the existence of the secret monitoring.
The failure to investigate Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1993 has long been seen as a seminal case in Britain’s race relations, exposing the reality of institutional racism within the police.
The inquiry is examining the conduct of undercover officers who spied on thousands of mainly leftwing campaigners between 1968 and at least 2010.
Lawrence said it was “deeply troubling” that the undercover unit, the special demonstration squad (SDS), gathered information about her separation from her husband, Neville, at a time when it was not public knowledge.
She said: “To see the extent of the resources, time and effort that were directed towards monitoring our family and the campaign – rather than towards finding and prosecuting those responsible for Stephen’s murder – is deeply painful. It is hard not to feel that the priorities were completely misplaced.
“I can only imagine what might have been achieved if that level of determination, coordination and institutional focus had been used to investigate Stephen’s killers from the outset. Instead of pursuing justice, those in power chose to observe us.”
Francis, who infiltrated anti-racism campaigners between 1993 and 1997, has previously said his superior tasked him with finding information that could be used to discredit the Lawrence family and their campaign. This allegation is denied by the police.
Lawrence said: “To have spent their time looking to smear and to find things to destroy us as a family, it’s hard to believe that people would go to that extreme.”
The inquiry examined reports compiled by an undercover officer, David Hagan, who spent five years infiltrating anti-racism and leftwing groups.
Bob Lambert, one of the SDS managers, noted in September 1998 that Hagan had “unique insight into the behind-the-scenes machinations of the Lawrence campaign” that was “invaluable” to Scotland Yard.
Hagan has said his reports on the Lawrence campaign were “incidental” to his main task, which was to infiltrate anti-racism activists.
Lawrence dismissed this argument and said: “Regardless of how he frames it, the effect of his actions amounted to surveillance and intrusion into my family and our campaign seeking justice.”
