Saturday 22 April was the 30th anniversary of the day Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racist youths while waiting for a bus in south-east London. Lawrence’s family along with public figures including Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan attended a memorial service in central London, but not his friend Duwayne Brooks, who was with him when he was attacked. “I was refereeing,” he says matter-of-factly. Like he does every weekend, for his south London football league.
Not that Brooks believes the occasion shouldn’t be remembered. “In my opinion it’s got to be marked every year,” he says. “It’s not just the Lawrence family that suffered because of what happened to their son – there are families across Britain who have suffered similar in terms of their children being taken so young.”
Nor could Brooks himself ever forget. “I remember Stephen all the time,” he says. “In things that we do, discussions that we have. It’s never really out of the press.” But, he says: “I’ve managed to come out the other side.”
When we meet at the Royal Festival Hall cafe, on London’s South Bank, Brooks is keener to talk about the future than the past. On the same day as Lawrence’s memorial, he announced that he was planning on running for mayor of London in next year’s election, as the Conservative candidate. Dressed in a suit and tie, he is energised and passionate, and eager to discuss his plans, even if, over the course of the next two hours, we find plenty to disagree about.
The timing is grimly apt. London policing is back in the spotlight as a result of the Casey review, whose findings on the Met’s recent failings are depressingly similar to those of the 1999 Macpherson report, published in the aftermath of Lawrence’s death, which famously judged that the Met was “institutionally racist”.
Although Brooks had been a victim of the attack, and a witness, the police treated him almost as a suspect in Lawrence’s murder. At the scene of the crime, they seemed convinced that the two boys must have done something to provoke the incident. They accused Brooks of stealing a Coke and breaking a window at the police station when he came in for questioning that night (both untrue). He received no support whatsoever. For years after the attack, Brooks suffered from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Macpherson report also concluded that Brooks “was stereotyped as a young black man … whose condition and status simply did not need further examination or understanding. We believe that Mr Brooks’ colour and such stereotyping played their part in the collective failure of those involved to treat him properly and according to his needs.”
In such traumatic situations, people often self-medicate with drink or drugs, but Brooks could not be that person, he says. “I had to be the model citizen, right? Because if I fall into that trap, and make a real bad decision on a particular day, and commit some kind of crime, then it always comes back to Stephen. ‘Best friend of Stephen convicted of armed robbery’ or something like that. And then it drags his name down … If I fail, Stephen fails.”
But the Macpherson report was just the beginning of Brooks’s ordeal. After its release, he was targeted by the Met in what can only be described as a vendetta. He was arrested multiple times on spurious charges, accused of stealing his own car, even remanded in custody on a false charge of attempted rape (which was later dropped). “That was the beginning of the hardest fight of my life,” he says.
He was living two separate lives, he explains: “The Stephen Lawrence life was going to ID parades, speaking about the incident, doing what I could for the family, battling the police – everything involved in the investigation and trying to get justice. It was having too much impact on the Duwayne Brooks life: what’s going to happen to me? What am I going to do? What am I going to achieve? So I had to push that to one side and focus on the Duwayne Brooks life.”
Brooks, 48, didn’t decide to go into politics, he says – he fell into it. In about 2002, when he was working as a photocopier engineer (which is still his day job), he was asked by Brian Paddick, then borough police commander for Lambeth, to attend a police complaints authority meeting with Brixton residents. It concerned Derek Bennett, a young Black man whom the police shot and killed, believing he had a gun – which turned out to be a novelty cigarette lighter. “And Brian comes over, introduces himself to me, and says: ‘The commissioner’s talking shit [referring to the police’s justifications for the shooting].’ From that day, him and I have been friends, because that told me he saw me in a different light to everybody else.”
When Paddick ran for mayor as a Liberal Democrat in 2008, Brooks joined his team. Paddick told him he had a voice, and should be involved in politics himself. At the time Brooks had no particular party affiliation, he says. When he phoned a Labour councillor’s office, in his home borough of Lewisham, “they told me to fuck off: ‘No one wants to talk to you.’”
Literally? “Yeah, yeah. Literally!” His reputation preceded him, he suspects.
No one from the Conservative office got back to him. But the Lib Dems gave him the time of day, and invited him to a meeting, where he felt like “a Coco Pop in a bowl of Rice Krispies”. In 2009 he was elected as a Lib Dem councillor for Lewisham. The same year he became the party’s lead member for community safety on the Local Government Association – the national body for local authorities. “It was wonderful,” he says. “I went all over England and Wales giving speeches on all types of subjects, from metal theft to violence against women to Prevent [the government’s counter-terrorism programme]. I learned so much – in terms of what I believe, my views and my values, how things should be, the kind of help that we should be giving people.”
So how come he left the Lib Dems and became a Conservative? “I am entirely grateful for the Lib Dems’ support, their guidance, encouragement and everything they’ve done for me. But our values are a bit different: I’m about hand-ups, not handouts.” Brooks was always a “small-c conservative”, he says. “I think most of us are, especially from the Caribbean. We want our children to have the best education. We respect authority, respect the law, we believe in family, family values, tradition – all of that stuff is just normal.”
He peppers our discussion with initiatives he would enact as mayor: reading groups for schoolchildren, a debating competition across schools, compulsory first aid training, social media communications, plans to fix problems of crime, racism, education. Not to mention making sweeping changes to the Met.
But isn’t the Conservative government responsible for creating these problems? “Well, we’re only talking about London, and the mayor is responsible for London.”
So the mayor is more to blame for London’s problems than the Conservative party?
“Yes, 100%. Because if you’re going to blame the Conservative party, which you have a right to do, why are you the mayor?” He has no personal animosity towards Sadiq Khan, he adds. “I can definitely say: ‘Bro, your achievements are fantastic, but your policies just haven’t worked.’ We live in a London where trust and confidence in the Met has never been so low, housing conditions have never been so poor and crime on the street has never been so high.”
Understandably, policing is high on Brooks’s agenda. In 2000, he told the Guardian: “We hear all those things – the Met is changing, the Met is doing this and that, but the Met is not changing. The Met will stay the same. They will never change, because the government does not want them to change.”
Louise Casey’s review of the Met’s culture and standards, published in March, suggests he was correct. It was carried out after the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, among other outrages, and it found the Met to be institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic, internally and in its policing. In particular, Casey reported that the Met “underprotects and overpolices Black Londoners”.
Brooks has another quote from the Casey review that he reads out from a sheaf of printed notes: “‘The Met have in the past avoided scrutiny, holding Mopac [the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime] at arm’s length, and not sharing information and data.’ That’s the mayor! Basically, she’s saying Mopac has failed to monitor the police effectively. Hence why we have this decline.” He holds Khan responsible for the appointment of former Met commissioner Cressida Dick, but does not mention former Conservative home secretary Amber Rudd, who also played a part in the appointment. Nor does he mention Khan’s role in removing Dick, in February 2022.
There is plenty more we discuss and disagree about in terms of Conservative policies, on education, health, cuts to social services, policing, the Windrush scandal, or the fact that Khan’s predecessor – a certain Boris Johnson – did even less to fix the Met. Brooks accepts some of my arguments as “valid points” and pushes back on others, combatively but cordially, enjoying the exchange.
Does Brooks have reservations about aligning himself with broader Conservative policies?
“No. What I don’t like, I will openly say I don’t like. The Conservative party is a broad church of people with all different views. There’s policies that I agree with and some maybe I don’t agree with.” Unprompted, he brings up home secretary Suella Braverman’s scheme to deport some asylum seekers to Rwanda. “In principle, I support the policy,” he says. “The way the home secretary is speaking about it, I would never use that language. There’s no ‘invasion’, there’s no ‘swarm’. To use those words devalues the person as an individual, and I know how that feels. Because after the murder, it was always ‘the witness’, ‘the witness’. I’m a person, I have a beating heart, I have feelings.” It was also the kind of language that was used against his parents, he says. “Politics doesn’t come before people.”
Perhaps Brooks’s conservative values make sense in the context of his own history of self-reliance, which began before Lawrence’s murder. He was brought up by a single mother, of Jamaican descent, who became pregnant with him when she was 18. His father was married to another woman at the time, but was present in his childhood. He has a half-sister 10 years younger than him. There was not much money, he says. Aged 16, Brooks left his mother’s home and moved into a hostel.
“I got fed up of washing dishes,” he says bluntly.
Surely there was more to it than that?
“Nope. I got fed up of washing dishes.” His mother had a rule that he did all the washing-up, even if he hadn’t made the mess. The way he tells it, one day he decided he’d had enough and just left. “When I look back, it’s one of the greatest decisions that I made in life. Living in hostels, you have to gain certain skills: how you speak to people, how to build relationships, because everyone’s different. You had to be able to manage your money. You had to fill out forms, you had to be able to read effectively.”
He didn’t drop out of school or turn to crime or anything like that, he says. He had a desire to learn and to succeed. He started an engineering course. Lawrence would visit him in his hostel regularly – to escape from his disciplinarian parents, Brooks claims. They’d been playing video games there together on the night of the attack, and lost track of the time. Rushing to get Stephen home, the two 18-year-olds took a quicker bus route via Eltham, despite knowing it was a racist area. Had they not done so, Lawrence might still be alive. And Brooks would not be sitting here proposing that London should elect him its next mayor.
“It’s all led up to the position I’m in now,” he says. “I know what injustice is. Rather than being political, I’m going to be specific about the changes I want to make. And people can look and say: ‘Well, this is the life that he’s had, because it’s public, there’s nothing hidden. And I am just hoping that that gives people the trust and confidence that enables me to become the candidate.”
It sounds like he’s in campaigning mode already, I tell him. “No, I’m in Duwayne Brooks mode. There’s no campaigning mode. This is how I always speak. People say sometimes that I’m too determined. And I always have to remind them, this is London. They call America the land of opportunity, so what have we got here in London? Do we not have the same?”
As well as determination and optimism, Brooks seems possessed of a remarkable fearlessness – from leaving home to standing up to everything the police threw at him to putting himself in the political firing line. Where does that come from? “It comes from experience,” he replies. “Because when shitty things happen to you, you don’t want them to happen to anyone else.”
