Spycops whistleblower says bosses stopped him revealing surveillance of Stephen Lawrence family

Senior police officers resisted the idea of disclosing the covert monitoring of the family of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence to a public inquiry, a whistleblower has alleged.

Peter Francis, the whistleblower, said that he wanted to reveal the surveillance of the family and their campaign by undercover police officers to the public inquiry that was led by Sir William Macpherson in the late 1990s.

Francis said he was opposed by his managers in “hostile and heated” exchanges.

The Macpherson inquiry was examining how the Metropolitan police had failed to investigate properly Stephen’s racist murder in 1993. The police faced intense criticism from the Lawrence family and their supporters in a case that came to symbolise police racism.

The Lawrences did not find out about the sec