An undercover police officer has admitted that he spied on Keir Starmer when he was a barrister advising two environmental campaigners as they took on McDonalds in what became the longest civil trial in British history. Dave Morris, one of the so called McLibel Two, was giving evidence to the undercover policing inquiry about their epic fight in the 1990s with the fast food giant who had sued them for distributing a handful of leaflets titled: ‘What’s wrong with McDonald’s’.
The legal action spectacularly backfired on McDonalds – it was called ‘the biggest corporate PR disaster in history’ – when Morris, together with fellow activist Helen Smith, used the trial to expose practices including paying exploitative wages, cruelty to animals and damaging the environment. Smith and Morris represented themselves – they had been denied legal aid – in a trial that went on for two and a half years. The now prime minister Keir Starmer advised the pair on a pro bono basis. As was reported in the Guardian, the experience was cited in his leadership bid in his 2002 campaign launch video describing how ‘for 10 years he defended Helen Steel and David Morris when they were sued for libel by McDonald’s. They fought all the way and won’.
One undercover officer, John Dines, had infiltrated anarchist and environmental groups at the time. He had a two year relationship with Steel deceiving her by concealing the fact that he worked for the Special Demonstration Squad. Smith later confronted Dines after he abruptly disappeared more than 20 years earlier claiming to have had a mental breakdown.
The Guardian’s Rob Evans and Kiran Stacey report that Morris gave evidence to the inquiry in which he quoted from a witness statement made by Dines, saying : ‘It is accurate to say that I was by the side of Helen Steel and Dave Morris in 1991 and relaying the legal advice back to my bosses in the SDS.’ The court found some of the claims made in the leaflet were libellous and others to be true. The European Court of Human Rights later found that the pair had been denied a fair trial.
