PETER HITCHENS: I struggle to see how Lucy Letby could possibly have had a fair trial

Lucy Letby was sentenced to death in prison 370 days ago. Should we really be happy with such a cruel sentence based on such questionable evidence?

Last week, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) admitted that information about the case had been given inaccurately during Ms Letby’s first marathon trial. It involved swipe-through data, which was very useful in knowing who was where at crucial events.

The CPS said: ‘We are confident [it] had no significant impact on the prosecution, which consisted of several pieces of evidence.’ But I was not reassured.

The CPS is one party in a fiercely adversarial battle. How can they be the best judges of how much their own mistakes matter? This was a case that had been carefully prepared over many months. If mislabelled information could be given to the jury once, how could we be sure of the quality of the rest? One bit of sloppiness is bad in itself. It also makes you wonder about the prosecution as a whole.

And above all, if the jury was misled in any significant way in the first trial, how safe was the verdict? I can’t possibly say. I wasn’t at the trial and I was told informally this week that a transcript of the whole thing would probably cost as much as £8,000. The second trial would of course cost extra. So others will have to sort it out.

Anyway, on Tuesday I asked the CPS a series of questions. I will publish them all on the Peter Hitchens blog next week. But I believe the police discovered the error. They then informed the CPS. A week later the CPS told Ms Letby’s legal team. This was in early March. That is about six weeks before the Court of Appeal heard and dismissed Ms Letby’s application for leave to appeal in late April.

It was decided, I don’t know by whom, that the error had “only” a “material impact” on charge 14, the attempted murder of Baby K. Only? This was the charge on which the jury could not reach a verdict in the first trial. This was the charge that the prosecution saw as so important that it initiated a review.

This was despite Mrs Letby already being sentenced to death in prison. This was the charge in which it was alleged in court on 11 June (during the second trial) that a doctor had caught Mrs Letby ‘almost red-handed’.

This was one of the most reported moments in the entire second trial.

In that second trial, the prosecution alleged that Mrs. Letby “intentionally moved” the newborn’s breathing tube when Baby K’s designated nurse (not Mrs. Letby) had momentarily left her. No one actually saw Mrs. Letby do this. How was the timing of this alleged event established? Could it have happened from door-swipe data?

It is very unusual for the same crime to be tried twice. It would be interesting to compare the accounts of this event given in each court, before and after the mislabeling of door-snatching was discovered.

Mrs Letby was found guilty of the murder of seven very young babies and the attempted murder of seven others

Mrs Letby was rightly convicted of the attempted murder of Baby K in the second trial. But then everyone in the kingdom knew that she had recently been sent to prison to die as a mass murderer of babies. So I find it hard to imagine how she could ever have gotten a fair trial.

I’m also still not sure whether the Court of Appeal was aware of the door-to-door issue before they decided to deny her leave to appeal.

How can a small business thrive?

Not so long ago, a cheerful little coffee stall, a little blue van, on the square in front of Oxford station, in my home town, started selling some pretty good coffee.

Last week I asked the barista how his business was going. He said it was pretty good, but it would be a lot better if he didn’t have to pay the council almost £9,000 a year for the freedom to practice his trade. Without the tax, he thought, he might be able to set up another stall and employ more staff.

Stunned by the council’s greed, I checked the figure. Eventually they admitted that they did indeed charge him £8,715 a year to park his van. Seeking a silver lining, I asked if they had also milked the locally-approved e-scooter hire company for the three hideous orange hire stations they are allowed to maintain on the same windy square.

The e-scooter outfit is a Swedish multinational that makes hundreds of millions a year. But no, they don’t need a ‘street trading permit’.

I don’t understand why not, and I don’t really care.

How can a small business thrive under such circumstances? What went wrong with our local government?

The owner of the Little Blue Van in Oxford, where Peter likes to buy coffee in his home town, has to pay £8,715 a year to park outside the train station

Soon it will be harder to leave this country than it is to enter. As criminal fleets of dinghies ferry thousands of illegal migrants to our southern shores, His Majesty’s law-abiding subjects will have to queue for hours to get through the other way.

Unlike the lawless migrants, we will probably have to submit to intrusive fingerprinting and facial scanning. In some parts of Kent, we will pass each other in opposite directions. It is impossible to know exactly when the EU’s catastrophic new border control system will come into effect. But it is coming. You will hate it.

The only way to lose weight is to eat less

Most of us, when given a weight in foreign kilograms, can’t work out whether the thing or person in question weighs as much as a baby elephant or as little as a large tomato. This country doesn’t need to use these nasty, cold, bureaucratic measures any more. So I was annoyed when Davina McCall announced last week that “I am a 5’6″ woman who weighs 130 pounds.”

I think she means 45 kilos.

And it irritated me even more when she then claimed that she achieved her thinness through exercise, not diet. I find it hard to believe her. I have never lost an ounce through exercise (and I do, biking dozens of miles a week). The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to eat less. I tried that. It wasn’t fun. That’s why I weigh so much.

But I won’t tell you how much, and certainly not in kilos.

Come on, Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, agree to debate me on the war in Ukraine. The country needs to hear both sides, clearly stated, before things get worse.