'I have the best relationship with the Daily Mail - it has been everything to me. Why would anyone turn on the people who have helped their case the most?' In a profoundly moving interview, Stephen Lawrence's father breaks his silence and speaks his

By DAVID JONES, CHIEF FOREIGN WRITER Published: 00:16, 8 July 2026 | Updated: 00:16, 8 July 2026 Were it not for the unrelenting pressure the Daily Mail exerted on successive governments and the Metropolitan Police, Neville Lawrence tells me he is certain of one thing: No one would ever have been imprisoned for his son Stephen's murder. He describes our justice campaign as 'the best thing that has happened to me' since that cruel night in 1993, when a gang of white racist thugs stabbed Stephen to death at a South London bus stop. Mr Lawrence was therefore appalled and dumbfounded when he learned that his former wife, Baroness (Doreen) Lawrence of Clarendon, had been lured into the plot to destroy this newspaper, and with it the distinguished reputations of the journalists who had done so much to help his family. As someone who prizes loyalty, he regards her decision as the lowest form of betrayal. Why did she turn against the Daily Mail, and do so with such apparent willingness to accept at face value the destructive claims levelled against us? Reaching to comprehend her decision, Mr Lawrence recalls the indignity inflicted on him at a memorial service to mark the 25th anniversary of Stephen's murder. It was April 22, 2018, a month before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were due to be married, and with excitement over the wedding mounting, mobile phone cameras were trained on the couple as they arrived at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square. They were greeted at the entrance by Lady Lawrence and her second son, Stuart, and – as the reporter from Hello! magazine later noted – the American actress looked 'characteristically poised in a navy dress by Boss, nude heels, and gold jewellery by British designer Shaun Leane'. Neville Lawrence says he no longer speaks to his ex-wife Doreen and was bemused by her decision to join the court action against the Daily Mail An array of politicians and dignitaries were also eager to be seen at the high-profile event, including Prime Minister Theresa May and Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. But where, informed observers wondered, was Stephen's father? After all, while this self-effacing man shies away from aggrandisement, the singularity of purpose with which he has striven to end bigotry and put Stephen's killers in prison is no less admirable than that of his ennobled ex-wife, whose far more visible and vociferous campaigning style has made her something of a national treasure. Moreover, while Mr Lawrence spends most of the year far away from the public gaze in his Jamaican homeland, he unfailingly travels to Britain to commemorate the murder and attend other important events, usually staying for several weeks afterwards. As Baroness Lawrence would have been aware of this, he believes – rightly or wrongly – she deliberately chose to exclude him from the VIP list. 'When I arrived at the church, I was told my name wasn't down, so I'd have to queue at another entrance,' he tells me. 'As far as I know, Doreen would have been aware of the arrangements, so she mustn't have wanted me there. But Cressida Dick [then Metropolitan Police Commissioner] eventually got me in. I ended up sitting next to Lenny Henry, a couple of rows back from Harry and Meghan, and the other 'important' guests.' Pausing to allow the irony of this last remark to register, he adds: 'She may think she has a unique place in high society, but I don't have anything to do with that kind of people. I'm just an ordinary person. I'm not interested in lords and ladies. Some people have ambitions, but I don't want to be a bloody lord!' Mr Lawrence and his wife drifted apart after Stephen's murder and divorced acrimoniously, in 1999. While he still has a good relationship with their daughter, Georgina, and her two children, he says he no longer speaks to Stuart, who accuses him of always favouring Stephen when they were young, and sides with his mother. Lady Lawrence's most inexplicable act came two years ago, he says. To protect Stephen's grave from desecration at the hands of the murder gang's cronies, they buried Stephen on her family's remote land in Clarendon, the Jamaican parish from which she took her title after being made a peer by David Cameron. For three decades, Mr Lawrence – who lives some distance away in Mandeville – regularly visited the plot, tending the white marble headstone bearing Stephen's gentle face while 'talking' to him as though they were together. It gave him a sense of purpose. However, as I first revealed in the Daily Mail, in the summer of 2024 Lady Lawrence had Stephen's body exhumed and brought back to Britain. His father says he was not consulted about her plan, and his anguish was exacerbated soon afterwards when someone posted a video of the crudely smashed-open tomb, overlain by a ghoulish commentary, on the internet. Baroness Doreen Lawrence at the High Court with her friend and lawyer Imran Khan Today, Mr Lawrence still doesn't know where his son's remains rest. Returning to Lady Lawrence's encounter with Harry and Meghan at St-Martin-in-the-Fields, it begs an intriguing question: Was this the first fateful meeting that ended with both on the losing side in the High Court? Scouring the news archives, one can find no record of her having met the prince before then. However, perhaps bonded by their mutual sense of victimhood (justifiable, at least, in Lady Lawrence's case) they exchanged contact details and agreed to remain in touch. And on January 12, 2022, four years after the church service, it was Harry who opened the floodgates to what she described in court as her 'personal watershed' moment. Using her closely guarded private email address, the prince sent her a message, urging her to meet his lawyers because they had uncovered information about her. In a devastating interview (which the BBC was all too keen to publish, regardless that the High Court proceedings were imminent) Lady Lawrence later elaborated, saying Harry had been 'busy looking at his own case and then my name kept cropping up ... so he felt I should know about it'. Given Harry's loathing for the popular Press – and particularly the Mail, which has uncovered embarrassing matters he would prefer to have stayed hidden and criticised his sometimes churlish behaviour – his intervention was unsurprising. What a piquant claimant she would make. After all, who better to side with him, and to undermine our credentials for society-changing public interest journalism, than a mother revered the world over for her struggle against injustice. The very woman whose crusade we had famously championed? Wounding though her attack on our reputation has been, it would be uncharitable to blame her too harshly for the debacle that followed. When a prince of the realm troubles to convey a warning of this magnitude personally, wouldn't most of us tend to accept its veracity? Particularly a woman who trusts few people outside her inner circle, and from bitter experience suspects skulduggery wherever she looks. And so, three days after Harry's explosive email, Lady Lawrence met barrister David Sherborne, self-styled scourge of the Press, and his disarmingly glamorous sidekick Anjlee Sangani. Deliberately or otherwise, the venue they chose underlined their power and status: The five-star Corinthia Hotel, on Whitehall Place, which featured in BBC1's A Hotel For The Super Rich And Famous. Any lingering doubts that this newspaper had double-crossed her were presumably dispelled by Sherborne's unctuous charm and righteous manner. As Lady Lawrence listened to the lawyers' litany of damning allegations, her sense of betrayal must have been overwhelming. Without producing any documentary evidence, nor even disclosing names, they told her how the Mail, while purporting to be her staunchest ally, had bugged her home and even the cafe where she met confidantes. Stephen Lawrence was murdered in London in April 1993 during a racially motivated attack They'd also listened to her landline conversations and illegally accessed her bank statements, she was told. We were accused of doing this, she would later say in her witness statement, to ensure she wasn't working with other newspapers, and 'to check my political activities with Left-wing groups'. It was, of course, all lurid and preposterous nonsense, as the Mail had made clear from the start. At the paper itself the sense of hurt and betrayal caused by her actions are difficult to overstate. Particularly affected was the Mail's then editor, Paul Dacre – who in 1997 had masterminded the 'Murderers' front page which unmasked the racist gang for the first time, and the subsequent Justice for Stephen Campaign – and the paper's award-winning crime reporter, Stephen Wright, who for over 20 years had spearheaded it. Lady Lawrence, indeed, had been Dacre's guest of honour at a 2017 dinner at Stationers' Hall, attended by the Prime Minister and every Fleet Street editor, to celebrate his 25 years as Mail editor. Later, these unfounded claims would be condensed into the allegation that five of the hundreds of stories the Mail has published about the Lawrence case were obtained by illegal means. In truth, all came from legitimate journalistic sources. What Sherborne and Sangani did not tell Lady Lawrence, at that initial meeting, was that their case relied on the word of a cabal of campaigners with a visceral hatred for the Mail and everything we stand for – while not a single document was produced in support of her claim. Nor was she made aware that their source, the private detective Gavin Burrows, was to be rewarded with a 'book deal' for his part in destroying the Mail. Burrows later recanted his witness statement, claiming it was the invention of the plot's ringleaders, and that his signature was forged. Lady Lawrence had been royally duped all right. But it wasn't the Mail that had done the duping. Small wonder, then, that Wright had vented his fury on the witness stand. For a quarter of a century, he had gone in relentless – and sometimes brave – pursuit of Stephen Lawrence's murderers.The hundreds of stories he wrote about the case compelled the authorities to reinvestigate it more rigorously and led to two of the gang, Gary Dobson and David Norris, being jailed for life. Though Lady Lawrence had been slow to put her faith in Wright, describing their early dealings as 'transactional', they had eventually formed a friendly relationship. In fact, the 'watershed' Corinthia Hotel briefing came just as the baroness's long-time lawyer, Imran Khan, was preparing to appear in a podcast that Wright was making in memory of the Murderers front page. At that point he seemed only too willing to praise this newspaper. By way of an abrupt WhatsApp message, however, the solicitor told Wright he could not take part in the podcast. Khan didn't explain why. The reporter was on an assignment in the Far East when a member of our legal team phoned to tell him of Lady Lawrence's ruinous accusations. As the realisation that he was the victim of a monstrous 'fit-up' sunk in, Wright flew home in utter despair. Meanwhile, when Baroness Lawrence took the witness stand, her discomfort was only too evident and sorry to see. Under cross-examination it was plain that she hadn't found anything to support the claims, pinning her faith on the narrative drummed up for her. So what part, we might ask, did Imran Khan play in all this? After all, the baroness seldom makes an important decision without consulting her faithful lawyer, who began advising Stephen's family a few days after the murder, as a callow solicitor of 18 months standing for a small London law firm, and has been beside her ever since. One of his early tasks, he has claimed, was to rid the Lawrences of militant black activists who were attempting to use Stephen's murder by white racist thugs for their political ends. However, his dogged, uncompromising work undoubtedly played a major part in exposing the ineptitude of the Met (which resented his interventions and branded him as a 'troublemaker') and, as his reputation grew, he formed his own company. At that point he parted ways with Mr Lawrence – who remained with the original firm of solicitors – and he has been in lockstep with Stephen's mother ever since. 'We are a bit like a long-standing couple now,' Khan once told The Guardian. 'We finish each other's sentences. We know what the other is thinking. When we are in meetings, we don't need to speak. There is a sense of telepathy about where we want to go.' Lady Lawrence shaking hands with Prince Harry, who was influential in her joining the court action We can confidently assume, then, that Khan and Lady Lawrence were on the same political wavelength when it came to evaluating the claims against the Mail. In court they both said – very pointedly – that they did not read this newspaper. And in his witness statement to the hearing he referred, astonishingly, to the Mail's 'Murderers' headline as 'infamous'. The Mail's lead barrister, Antony White KC, produced evidence to suggest that the link between Khan and Hacked Off was closer than he cared to admit. Under questioning, Khan claimed he had 'no relationship with them whatsoever', and that he was not even aware of 'who they were and the work they did'. Lady Lawrence, in her evidence, had said something similar. However, Mr White produced a flyer for a public event staged by Hacked Off, on May 17, 2012, which announced that 'Stephen Lawrence's family lawyer' was to be a guest speaker. Khan accepted having addressed the meeting – on the Press's 'demonisation' of Muslims, he said, and possibly also the need for Press regulation – but he insisted he had 'very limited, if any' knowledge of Hacked Off. But when Hacked Off in October 2013 published Sir Brian Leveson's Royal Charter Declaration – the most stringent aspects of which threatened the very existence of trenchant popular newspapers such as the Mail – Khan was among a long list of media luvvies and human rights campaigners who signed in support of it. Interestingly, Khan told the court that the man who 'might' have invited him to speak at the Hacked Off meeting was Brian Cathcart, a Left-wing journalist-turned academic. Once all too ready to take the Mail's shilling for writing freelance articles, Cathcart – a founder of Hacked Off – rounded on this newspaper after becoming a controversialist media professor at Kingston University. Among the many slurs he has made against the Mail is that our Lawrence campaign was not only largely ineffective but designed to fend off accusations of racism elsewhere in our editorial pages – 'more bluster than reality', as he put it. Strangely, given that he has been in the thick of the plot to bring down the Mail from the outset, Cathcart chose not to be a part of this case. We can but guess why. At the 1997 general election, Imran Khan stood for Arthur Scargill's extreme Left Socialist Labour Party, in East Ham, but won only 6.8 per cent of the vote. He described his candidacy as a 'horrible experience' and vowed never to stand for Parliament again. He has since concentrated on a career that has seen him take on a plethora of 'impact cases', as he calls them; representing the widow of the 7/7 bombing plot leader, and the parents of Victoria Climbie, the eight-year-old tortured to death by her great aunt and her boyfriend. He also obtained a £170,000 settlement for the young British Asian man injured in an altercation involving Leeds United footballers outside a nightclub in 2001. Yet he complains that cuts in the Legal Aid budget would have prevented him representing the Lawrences, had they sought his services today. Unusually for a solicitor, he has been made a King's Counsel, and in many ways the former socialist firebrand is as much an establishment figure these days as Lady Lawrence herself. He presents himself as a patriot, proud of British values. However, in that revealing Guardian interview his low opinion of the police appeared to have altered little since Lawrence Inquiry chairman Sir William Macpherson accused the Met of 'institutional racism'. They were 'still doing exactly what they used to – protecting each other, not letting the cat out of the bag', he said. Now aged 61, and silvery haired, Khan has admitted that it feels 'morally fantastic' to be involved in the Stephen Lawrence case, and that he finds the recognition it brings uplifting. Former Tory Cabinet minister Michael Gove offers a different perspective, however. 'Khan was undoubtedly driven to take up the Lawrence family case by a very human identification with her sense of grief and powerlessness,' he has averred. 'But it also dovetailed neatly with the political priorities of the hard Left.' During his three decades on the Stephen Lawrence case, Khan admits to being 'incredibly embarrassed' by one mistake. It came when he and his fellow Left-wing lawyer Michael Mansfield KC urged Stephen's parents to press ahead with the private prosecution of three of the racist gang, against the express advice of the Crown Prosecution Service. It failed disastrously. But for the subsequent advances in forensic science, aligned with the Mail's successful campaign to repeal the double-jeopardy law (which had prevented anyone from being tried twice for the same crime) it would have allowed Gary Dobson – who was later convicted of Stephen's murder – lifelong immunity from prosecution. In fairness, Khan's judgment has otherwise been sound. Assuming Gove's assessment of him is right, though, it seems fair to wonder whether – when he was presented with the allegations by David Sherborne – Khan unwittingly allowed his judgment to be clouded by his own socialist prejudices. If so, Lady Lawrence probably didn't need much convincing. Though David Cameron gave her a platform for her trenchant and multifarious views on matters of race, she sits on the Labour benches in the Lords, and since 2020, when she endorsed Sir Keir Starmer's leadership campaign, she has been his race relations adviser. She has since accused the Prime Minister of failing to listen to her. As her own bitter experience can cause her to suspect anti-black prejudice too readily, this may be true. (She even asserted that firefighters would have done more to rescue the Grenfell Tower fire victims had they been white. She later apologised for the remark.) Sadly, those of us who have dealt with Lady Lawrence over the years have formed another perhaps significant opinion of her. She appears to resent the fact that it was the Right-of-centre Mail – and not a newspaper of her political persuasion – that chose to champion her cause. Yes, she has co-operated closely with us down the years, but only, I would venture, as a matter of expedience. Re-reading her moving biography, And Still I Rise, what strikes you is that, despite the enormous impact of our campaign, she makes only a brief reference to it. The contrast between her views and those of Neville Lawrence (whose politics, incidentally, also tend towards the Left) could scarcely be greater. Here I must make an admission. I am proud to call Neville a friend. Since I first interviewed him, more than two decades ago, we meet socially as well as professionally, and I am the only journalist to have been invited to visit him in Jamaica. Therefore, when Stephen's now 84-year-old father says he will always be grateful to the Mail, and our former editor, Paul Dacre, I can vouch for his depth of feeling. Had he been called to give evidence in the High Court, he tells me, he would have flown to London in a heartbeat – to assure the court of this newspaper's integrity and denounce our accusers. 'I don't know what's wrong with Doreen, or why she has gone against you, because I no longer talk to her,' he says, as angry as he is bemused. 'Some people think she has always wanted to be among the British establishment, so maybe that's it. Or maybe she is just jealous of the relationship I have with you and resents me talking to you. 'Whatever it is, I have the best relationship with the Mail – it has been everything to me. Why would anyone turn on the people who helped their case the most?'