FORMER Blackburn MP Jack Straw has spoken of key moments surrounding his ordering of the ground-breaking probe into the 1993 death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

Mr Straw said last night that the Macpherson Inquiry, which accused the Metropolitan Police of ‘institutional racism’ over the flawed investigation, was ‘the most important single thing I did in government’.

He added: “Implementing its recommendations made a real difference’.

In a three-part documentary which concluded last night, Mr Straw told how as Home Secretary he overcame concerns from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon and Prime Minister Tony Blair to launch the probe.

He pays tribute to the Daily Mail for giving him the political space to set up the inquiry with its front-page headline naming the alleged ‘Murderers’ of the teenager stabbed at a bus stop.

Mr Straw featured in the second episode of the documentary Stephen: The Murder that Changed a Nation, aired on Wednesday night.

In it, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre reveals how knowing Stephen’s father Neville (who had done plastering at his home) had influenced the paper’s story naming five young men, two of whom have since been convicted.

Mr Straw told the BBC that in the 1990s the police had become ‘unaccountable judge and jury in their own cause’.

He said: “You had the famous headline in the Daily Mail and that helped to change the politics of this quite dramatically because, by virtue of the fact it was the Mail and not a leftish paper, it made the space for me to then push for an inquiry.”

Then Mr Straw revealed that Mr Blair became interested and was ‘rather anxious that if I was going to set up the inquiry there was good reason for doing so’.

He said the Metropolitan Police and its Commissioner Sir Paul were nervous, suspicious and reserved about the probe.

Mr Straw then recalled film footage and photographs showing the five leaving the inquest into Stephen’s death with one, David Norris, since jailed for the killing, lashing out.

He said: “That picture fixed in the public mind the fact that there was something really, really badly wrong about this investigation.”

Stephen’s mother Doreen said the inquiry Mr Straw set up was ‘just amazing’ and ‘vindicated’ the family.