If you think Lucy Letby is innocent, consider this ...Middle East

Ten years is a long time in the life of a parent. Ten years ago I was helping my youngest son turn the sounds C, A and T into “cat” and holding his hand on the way to reception class. Ten years ago I was brushing my daughter’s hair into lop-sided bunches and helping feed her teddies their tea.

Now my son towers above me and my daughter is preparing to leave home. It’s all so fast. And so precious.

So let’s begin by thinking of those parents who have been deprived of the joy and pride of seeing their children change from tiny babies into little individuals with their own passions and personalities over the past decade. Let’s think of the children who began dying in 2015 at the Countess of Chester Hospital while Nurse Lucy Letby was on duty.

For in the clatter around the conviction of Letby, and the increasingly hysterical outpourings of support for her by those convinced she is a victim in a miscarriage of justice, there seems no consideration of the actual victims. The seven tiny babies she was convicted of killing and the seven more she was convicted of attempting to kill.

When the criminal case began, those traumatised parents chose anonymity to avoid the attention they feared would come with their children being victims of Britain’s worst child serial killer. And the children who survived needed to get on with their lives.

But I cannot help but think that if the public had ever seen a single baby photo or shaky phone video of one of those tiny tots, still living, in the arms of a besotted mother, the Letby campaigners might be less absolute in their beliefs.

If they’d ever looked into the eyes of the grief-stricken parents they might think twice before they marched up and down a Liverpool street with placards demanding Letby be released.

They might realise that this is a case about a trusted medical professional and what she did to sick babies in her care, and not about a powerful state and what it has done to a young nurse.

But in a world where rational argument and facts have been replaced with emotional responses, these poor children and their parents have lost out by being unable to make their emotional case. They have been airbrushed from their own lives – and deaths.

Of course if Letby had been seen attacking one of those babies we wouldn’t be here. But her convictions were based on circumstantial and medical evidence. And while that was sufficient to convince two separate juries (one charge went to a retrial) beyond all reasonable doubt, it seems no longer sufficient for a growing swathe of the public, mistrustful of science, the justice system, and the media that reports upon it.

Campaigners for Letby have been successful in picking holes in some of the evidence presented in court. Questions have been asked about a spreadsheet that showed her on duty on the nights when many of the babies suffered sudden attacks – they claim the sheet was selective and didn’t show all the cases.

They have also attempted to undermine aspects of medical evidence. And much has been made of the performance of Letby’s original defence team.

Now she has a new high-profile defence lawyer, Mark McDonald, who has also worked on Michael Stone’s attempts to get his conviction overturned for the murders of Lin and Megan Russell and the attempted murder of Josie Russell in 1996. Macdonald is a media player and has proved adept at fanning public anger about the Letby case.

In an attention-grabbing spectacle, McDonald threw a press conference to announce the findings of 14 international experts who concluded the baby deaths were due to natural causes from bad medical care – entirely at odds with conclusions of the trial’s prosecution experts.

And so, bearing testament to Michael Gove’s theory that the people have “had enough of experts”, dozens of ordinary people went about “doing their own research” into the case. Which of course bore no relation to the kind of research a police investigation might do, but instead hurtled down rabbit holes on YouTube and TikTok, where conspiracy theories burrowed deep.

square MARK WALLACE

Our culture punishes people who speak out

Reputable figures including Dr Phil Hammond in Private Eye – with its long history of investigating miscarriages of justice – and Davd Davis MP joined those calling into question whether Letby had had a fair trial.

And so now, the public inquiry, which will soon conclude into failings at the Countess of Chester Hospital, has become overshadowed by those demanding “justice” for Letby. A case has been submitted to the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

I could go through the arguments that led the court to convict Letby: to how the killings stopped when she came off night duty; to the notes she wrote admitting guilt; to the social media searches of grieving families she made, which she later claimed to have forgotten doing; to the fact she rejected the chance to defend herself in the box.

But to all those points, Letby supporters would have an alternative view. They have made their decision, armed with the meandering theories of untrained and uninformed internet sleuths.

The algorithm has become judge and jury in this case, pushing viewers towards content that reinforces their view that Letby is a victim of “the system”. She is now a cause célèbre for so many feeling angry and disillusioned by that system (or more simply, by life). To them, she is a tragic illustration of the oppressed worker.

This week, Letby protesters sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, the Liverpool anthem often sang in solidarity with families searching for justice against the state following the Hillsborough tragedy and cover-up.

That feels a gross insult to the 97. Those were real victims of an establishment conspiracy of silence. The evidence was there to prove it. Now the evidence is there to prove Letby was guilty.

But facts have been traded for feelings – or alternative facts which suit feelings of mistrust and disillusionment. And yet I do wonder how strong those feelings would be if a freed Letby volunteered to look after one of her supporters’ newborn babies.

Alison Phillips was editor of the Daily Mirror from 2018-24; she won Columnist of the Year at the 2018 National Press Awards

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