Lucy letby

Home MPs voted against the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill that offered assisted suicide, by 286 to 270; in June 2025, an identical Bill was given a Third Reading by 314 to 291. Ben Delo, a British cryptocurrency billionaire, donated £36 million to Reform. The next day, the cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne (who had given Nigel Farage £5 million in 2024) gave Reform another £36 million. The government plotted retrospective legislation to stop such donations. Dan Thomas resigned as Reform’s Welsh leader, after his arrest on suspicion of assault. Piddington, an Oxfordshire village of 350, voted in a referendum by 285 to 26 to cede from the UK in protest at an asylum camp for 1,250 men coming there.

Even Horace Rumpole could not have secured an acquittal for Lucy Letby. The more I look at this case, the more I suspect that there could never have been any other outcome than a conviction. I think a great cloud of emotion hung over that courtroom during the whole trial. I think that cloud spread outwards into the public mind before and during the long months of the trial. In my view, the actual prosecution of Ms Letby began on Thursday 5 July 2018, two days after she was arrested for the first time, and more than four years before she finally sat in the dock. The prosecution knew throughout that they had no objective proof of their case, large or small On that day, police officers dug up her tiny garden in a Chester suburb.

Pensioners at risk Sir: Douglas Murray wonders what would have happened if a Conservative chancellor had announced the removal of the winter fuel payment (‘Labour’s age of miracles’, 31 August) and speculates about the reaction. No such speculation is needed: the Conservative manifesto of 2017 stated that it would means test this benefit, as Labour is now doing. The Labour party’s reaction was to publish research stating that up to 4,000 pensioners’ lives would be at risk and add that ‘pensioners in our country will struggle to heat their homes’ (the then shadow chancellor John McDonnell, as widely quoted in the press). No journalist has yet put this to the government. Does the government agree with its party’s research then, and if not, how is it different now?

First Fred West, now Lucy Letby. At this rate, it won’t be long before Herefordshire has produced more serial killers than it has miles of dual carriageway. You might assume growing up in one of England’s loveliest counties would make people placid, but then you haven’t spent half your life stuck behind a caravan on the A465. They may not all kill people, but Herefordshire people overtake like psychopaths. It only takes one dodgy assumption to reach a conclusion that is diametrically wrong But I’m going to park my Monmouthshire prejudice here and suggest that something about the Lucy Letby conviction seems off to me. I’m not going to talk about the medical aspects, because I’m not qualified to comment.

Whatever happened to the likes of the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and Error? Why did human rights organisations such as Liberty and Justice stop campaigning on behalf of UK prisoners wrongfully jailed? Why are there fewer MPs plugging away on behalf of constituents they believe to have been victims of miscarriages of justice? All this activity seemed to be wound down after the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) began its work in 1997. Outsiders were no longer needed to look into the criminal justice system, many believed, now that we had a one-stop shop for prisoners protesting against their convictions for crimes they insist they did not commit.

Murder mystery Sir: I once made a diagnosis of a very rare condition too late to cure the patient. She was nevertheless grateful and thanked me, though my conceit evaporated when she asked: ‘What took you so long?’ I suspect the managers at the Countess of Chester Hospital must feel as I did (‘Hospital pass’, 26 August). Murder was not on the top of their differential diagnoses. Many senior clinicians who have had leadership roles in NHS hospitals bear the scars of conflicts with management, though perhaps not as deep as those of the Chester paediatricians.  We would nevertheless acknowledge that most managers are dedicated, conscientious professionals committed to the success of their hospitals.

Another week, another whitewash. The latest chunk of culture to be painted out of existence is ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’, Queen’s 1978 hit. Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve never liked the song. I think it’s crude, patronising and misogynistic. It was pretty dated even on the day Queen recorded it. But that’s my problem. Millions loved it. That’s why it was track four on the band’s 1981 Greatest Hits album. But as Universal Records re-release Queen’s classic collection, FBG is track nothing. Track gone. Track ghosted. We’ve got to stop doing this neopuritanical cultural censorship, whether it be with songs, books (Enid Blyton’s PC-filtered Famous Five or P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves), fairy stories (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), or films (Gone with the Wind).

Will the fallout from the Lucy Letby case really lead to lasting change in the NHS? The most prolific killer of babies was able to continue even as doctors raised concerns about her – to the extent that the consultants themselves were forced to apologise to her face for a ‘campaign’ of bullying, rather than their concerns being taken seriously about her presence at the deaths or collapse of all the babies at the Countess of Chester hospital. Now, doctors’ union the British Medical Association has turned on NHS managers, saying the time has come for a reckoning for the ‘unaccountable’ bosses.