Peter Hitchens

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.

I confess I never expected to see myself going to the lavatory on prime-time national TV. In fact, the expedition was a failure. Sharing a cell, especially with a young man with a record for GBH, is a very constipating experience. But when I accepted Shine TV’s proposal that I should submit to living alongside a large number of former prisoners, in a real but decommissioned jail, I had agreed to almost anything that might happen. Including that. Dozens of cameras covered us the whole time from every angle. We wore microphones around our necks. It is impossible to guard your tongue the whole time, and so my exclamation of ‘at last!’ slipped out. And I can see why they used it.

An impossible 45 years ago, I decided the moment had come to get back on my pushbike. I had long hated the way the motor car was taking over the world and wanted to play my part in changing this. I also had a more selfish reason. After two years on the Fleet Street diet of lunchtime excess, I could already see my first heart attack was not far off. I was in my late twenties and getting almost no exercise. I knew of people in the newspaper business who did so little walking that the uppers of their shoes wore out before the soles did. Something had to be done. In those days, bikes had not moved on since my childhood days, pedalling my heavy green Hercules over the Sussex Downs on summer afternoons. The brakes were as feeble, especially in the wet.

Since I took the Golden Arrow to Paris and back in 1965, I have always thought of that train journey as one of the great joys of life. I cannot remember how many pre--tunnel trips to the City of Light I made, via Dover and Calais, Folkestone and Boulogne or (best of all) Newhaven and Dieppe. My great regret is that I never took the old Night Ferry, a special set of blue and gold sleeping cars designed to run on both French and British railways, on which you could (in theory at least) slumber your way between the two capitals – though perhaps not while it was actually being shunted on and off the boat.

BBC Four announced this morning that 'The Roads to Freedom' will play on the BBC for the first time since the 1970s on Wednesday 27 July. In May, Peter Hitchens asked why the BBC had kept it in the archive...  If someone had managed to bottle the essence of the 1960s – the exciting, adventurous bits – wouldn’t you want to take at least one deep draught? I certainly would. I sometimes long for the power to recreate that odd, dangerous, thrilling time, if only to see if I have got it right in my memory. In fact, they did bottle it. But nobody is allowed to taste the vintage. Well, almost nobody, as we shall see. The BBC possesses, beyond doubt, a full recording of its 13-part 1970 dramatisation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Roads to Freedom trilogy.

Only a dictator can save Oxford now. Local government simply cannot grasp how precious this marvellous, unrivalled city is, and how easy it will be to erode it into bare, dispiriting bleakness and ugliness. Any fool can see that the ancient colleges of the university must be preserved, but the setting in which they stand has no reliable defenders. It is true that a plan to put a bypass through the ancient pastures of Christ Church meadow was defeated in 1968. But that was after 27 years of wrangling, during which this hideous megalo-maniac scheme was actually described as ‘indispensable’. In the half century during which I have lived in Oxford, with a few breaks, the nibbling of developers and expanders has continued without cease.

Rod Liddle once actually said to me the immortal words ‘You were right and I was wrong’ at a Spectator summer party. This is a moment I shall treasure till the hour of my death. But even so, I was disappointed. For the subject was only Theresa May. I had predicted she would be a terrible premier. Rod had believed she would be good at the job. A year later, it was obvious who was correct. For one brief shining moment I had hoped that Rod had changed his mind about something much more important. I wish he and a lot of conservatives would shift their opinions about the role of mental illness in rampage killing all over the world. And, once they have done that, I wish they would be willing to examine the role of certain illegal and legal drugs in creating such mental illness.