Thread by @BrianCathcart

Priti Patel has thrust herself into the formally *independent* business of the *independent* panel on the #DanielMorgan murder, demanding more time to read the report before MPs or the public see it and threatening to black out passages of text. 1/6

Bear in mind that this case is all about corruption. It is the most investigated unsolved murder in UK history because of corruption – corrupt police officers, corrupt journalists, and perhaps others. The panel report has been 8 years in the making. 2/6

That long gestation may itself owe something to corrupt interference with witnesses. We'll see. But we know this: after 34 years of being cheated, the Morgan family deserve from the British state a good, trustworthy report delivered by clean process. 3/6

So Patel just had to stick her grubby oar in, and as the Panel itself points out, she has offered the most transparently feeble excuses for doing so. Her only formal role was to place it before MPs and the public, and as a courtesy she should have seen it 24 hours early. 4/6

Instead, she wants it for days and is reserving the right to redact the text. So a report 8 years in preparation, which was explicitly designed to clear the air over an appallingly murky episode, may now turn up with passages blanked out. 5/6

Is she protecting the police? The Murdoch press? Who is pulling the strings? Legitimate questions, because if you know anything about the Daniel Morgan case you know that it is a deep sewer of wrongdoing and there are people who will stop at nothing to keep it closed. 6/6