How quiet Doreen Lawrence became the woman who roared

Elton John, Prince Harry and Doreen Lawrence may seem unlikely bedfellows in their breach of privacy claim against Associated Newspapers. But as she takes the stand at the High Court today, Lawrence will arguably give the most searing exposition of the very human side to this legal action: the tireless fight of the mother of a murdered son.

Her legal team have variously described her as “haunted”, “disappointed” and “determined” in the build-up to her legal action against Associated Newspapers, owners of the Daily Mail, the latest in a series of court actions that have been brought against newspapers in recent years.

But what marks out this week’s appareance on the stand is that Lawrence is facing the former media ally she believes betrayed her. Lawrence’s name has been intertwined with the Daily Mail for decades since the murder of her aspiring architect son, Stephen, in an unprovoked racist attack in southeast London in 1993.

From the start, Lawrence was convinced racism was key to the murder – and the deeply flawed police investigation.

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“Coming across a Black family who have no criminal background is new to them, an alien concept,” she told the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in 1998. “It was like you have to be a criminal if you are Black.”

Refusing to be silenced in the years after the murder, Doreen and Stephen’s father, Neville, started a high-profile campaign to spotlight the impact of racism on the case and Metropolitan Police failures. But still no one was prosecuted for Stephen’s murder, and they launched a landmark private prosecution against three suspects in 1994.

When the case collapsed, it seemed as if the Lawrences had reached the end of the road due to “double jeopardy” rules that did not allow suspects to be tried twice.

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Then in 1997, the Daily Mail published an explosive front page: “MURDERERS” ran the headline with pictures of five men underneath. “The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us.”

Lawrence, it seemed, now had a formidable media ally. A combination of the Lawrences’s inexhaustible campaigning, media coverage, public outcry and political will converged to trigger an official inquiry. In 1999, the Macpherson report ruled the investigation was incompetent and described the Metropolitan Police as “institutionally racist”. The “double jeopardy” rule was subsequently reformed, and in 2012, Gary Dobson and David Norris were convicted of murder.

After almost 30 years, Lawrence had finally seen her son’s killers brought to justice, and the Mail was an indelible part of that story. The paper had a story behind the story when Neville Lawrence worked as a decorator at the home of then editor Paul Dacre.

“The Daily Mail has been one of the biggest supporters for us over this story,” Neville Lawrence later told BBC Radio London. But then, in late 2022, the news broke that Lawrence was taking legal action against Associated Newspapers after joining forces with several high-profile figures.

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And across the court filings, statements and pre-trial hearings since then, details have emerged of the allegations: that Lawrence was subject to covert electronic surveillance “both before and during” the Mail’s campaign for justice on behalf of her son.

“She finds it hard to believe the level of duplicity and manipulation that was clearly at play, knowing now as she does that the Daily Mail’s outward support for her fight to bring Stephen’s killers to justice was hollow and, worse, entirely false,” barrister David Sherborne told the High Court in a pre-trial hearing in 2023.

“[She] now sees that the Daily Mail’s true interests were about self-promotion and using her and her son’s murder as a means to generate ‘exclusive’ headlines, sell newspapers and to profit.

“[She] cannot think of any act or conduct lower than stealing and exploiting information from a mother who buried her son for this reason. She feels used and violated, and like she has been taken for a fool.”

Yesterday, Baroness Doreen Lawrence claimed the Daily Mail was “pretending” to support her in getting justice for her murdered son, but was made to feel like a “victim again” after learning about alleged phone hacking.

While giving evidence at the High Court in her claim against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), publisher of the Daily Mail, the peer said the publication just wanted the “credibility of supporting a black family”.

In written submissions, Antony White KC, representing ANL, said the allegations in relation to Lady Lawrence “are denied in their entirety” and “are unsupported by the available evidence”.

He added: “They are the product of an attempt by members of the claimants’ research team, adopted by Baroness Lawrence and her legal representatives, to present a case of unlawful information-gathering against Associated based entirely on spurious and/or discredited information, none of which is before the court in the form of proper admissible evidence.

“In fact, the reality is that the information in each of the articles was obtained by entirely legitimate reporting and based on the sources identified by Associated in its defence and evidence.”

He also said that the publisher is able to call a witness or witnesses from the top down to explain how the article was sourced “in relation to almost every article alleged to be the product of phone hacking or phone tapping”.

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But if Lawrence has proved one thing over the past three decades: her capacity to keep fighting for what she believes in is tireless. Now aged 73, she was living an ordinary life as a 40-year-old bank worker and mother of three when Stephen was stabbed repeatedly as he waited at a bus stop and left to die.

Early experiences had taught Lawrence about the insidious impact of racism. After emigrating to London from Jamaica aged nine, for instance, she wasn’t encouraged by teachers at school, despite displaying a talent for maths.

“I think they looked at us Black girls and thought we probably wouldn’t come to anything much,’ she told The Big Issue in 2022. “That factory work is what we’d move into rather than an office job.

“We were so young, we didn’t understand quite what was going on, so when we were all put into the lower classes, we didn’t push for the opportunities the white students were getting.”

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When her son was murdered, however, Lawrence was not prepared to back down, and pushed to ensure her son’s murder was investigated with the same vigour as any other. She’s since said her “instinct was to fight” and in the almost 30 years it took to bring Stephen’s killers to account, she transformed into one of the UK’s most effective – and admired – campaigners.

Her work to highlight the failings in Stephen’s case soon led her to start advocating for other victims of racist crime and police reform. But in the intervening years, Lawrence has worked to challenge disadvantage and racial prejudice on many levels.

The Stephen Day Foundation, for instance, covers everything from education initiatives to career mentorship to “create opportunities for lasting change”. She sits on the board of human rights organisation Liberty and is a patron of anti-discrimination charity Stop Hate UK. In 2020, she was appointed the race relations adviser to the Labour Party and produced a report detailing how decades of disadvantage and structural racism meant Covid had a disproportionate impact on Black and minority ethnic communities. She continues to sit on the Joint Committee for Human Rights.

Given an OBE in 2003 for services to community relations, Lawrence was made a life peer in 2013, and 25 years after Stephen’s death, her long-held wish to see a national day of commemoration in her son’s name was realised. She has proven again and again that she is impassioned and dogged in her belief that the world can be a better place.

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But she has not, however, always found the spotlight easy. Despite all her accomplishments since, “I sometimes don’t even recognise myself,” Lawrence told the Royal Television Society in 2014. “I’m a very quiet person. I don’t like to stand out from the crowd – I like to be in the background. But I felt that because of what happened, I had to have a voice.”

At the heart of her story, however, remains a mother’s love for her much-mourned son.

“The truth is, Stephen died, he was killed, and nobody really cared,” she told The Big Issue. “A young Black boy – as far as the police and a lot of other people were concerned, he must have been a drug dealer. He must have been doing something wrong. They never saw the child.”

In rare moments, Lawrence has revealed that her energy and dedication have come at a cost. When she and Neville divorced after 28 years together in 1999, Lawrence stressed that it was not because of Stephen’s death or legal proceedings but the feeling of being “alone and unsupported”.

“For the past 32 years, I haven’t had the opportunity to grieve my son properly because I have had to challenge every step of the way,” she told the Undercover Policing Inquiry last November.

Today, as she steps into the witness box, Lawrence will once again challenge the next step.