Ex-minister's claims of ignorance on spycops not credible, says Lawrence

The mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence has told a public inquiry she did not believe claims by the former home secretary Michael Howard that he did not know undercover police officers had spied on her family.

- Rob Evans

Doreen Lawrence told the spycops inquiry yesterday how Howard had invited her to a meeting shortly after the inquiry was set up in 2014.

It had been commissioned after revelations that undercover officers 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 southeast 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".

Asked by her barrister, Imran Khan, if she accepted at face value what he was saying she replied "no", adding: "I don't believe anything that he was saying." She suggested he would have known as the commissioner of the Metropolitan police reports to the home secretary.