NADINE DORRIES: Here’s why I’ve grave doubts about Letby’s guilt…

There can be no grief more harrowing than that of a parent who has lost a child. In that moment, light turns to dark; life will never be the same again.

We were all reminded just how vulnerable premature babies are during the trials of neonatal nurse Lucy Letby, known as ‘the angel of death’.

She has been convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more while working at the Countess of Chester Hospital.

After two emotionally charged trials, Letby is due to spend the rest of her life in prison — and rightly so, if she is guilty and if the evidence against her is robust.

But is it?

In recent weeks, a number of distinguished commentators and experts — including clinicians, academics, statisticians, nurses and even a former (unnamed) Cabinet minister ‘with a legal background’ — have begun to raise concerns that it might not be.

As has been pointed out by many, including my colleague Peter Hitchens in these pages on Saturday, no one saw Letby kill, or attempt to kill, a baby. There is no forensic evidence to prove her guilt.

Central to the prosecution’s case is the suggestion that Letby murdered seven babies by air embolism — injecting them with air through their feeding tubes.

Two witnesses for the Crown, basing their views on a 30-year-old research paper, suggested that this could have been her method.

However, the Canadian academic who wrote the original paper was not called as a prosecution witness and has since cast doubt on his work being used in the trial.

As for the idea that Letby injected air into the newborns’ stomachs via their tiny naso-gastric feeding tubes, this might have involved repeatedly extracting the syringe, refilling it with air and then re-inserting it.

Is that really likely to be the preferred technique of a serial killer, when anyone could have walked in on her doing so at any time?

a diagram that places Letby on duty at the deaths of those seven babies is the second most substantial piece of ‘evidence’ against her.

However, prominent statisticians have described this approach as fallacious. It appears to me a pattern that might arise in any hospital ward that experienced a cluster of deaths.

For example, a report last year found that 201 newborns may have died at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust due to a lack of appropriate care.

If a similar graph were drawn there, might it show that one nurse was consistently present at several of the deaths? And would that necessarily be enough to put this nurse in prison for the rest of her life?

John O’Quigley, a professor of statistics in the department of statistical science at University College London, has stated that the only conclusion to be drawn from the ‘Letby diagram’ is that when Letby was on duty, Letby was on duty. Nothing more.

Clusters of baby deaths are sadly not uncommon in the NHS. However, they do not necessarily point to child murderers — but rather to deep systemic failures that let parents down time and time again.

But I don’t want to get drawn too deeply into the evidential weeds of this case. The fact is that, from the start, it made me deeply uncomfortable for a number of reasons.

I gave birth to two of my three daughters at the Countess of Chester Hospital where Letby later worked. The care I received with my firstborn was cruel, devoid of compassion and unprofessional. A traumatic rather than joyful experience.

As a former nurse myself and, until recently, the minister directly responsible for maternity neonatal services and overall patient safety, I have spoken to many parents who had once held their longed-for but lifeless baby in their arms.

I have never forgotten those conversations.

The infant mortality rate in the UK is 30 per cent higher than the median across EU countries — and many babies have died due to catastrophic failings in the NHS services that were supposed to protect them.

During the trial, Lucy Letby’s own counsel reassured the jury: ‘It’s important I make plain that in no way is this case about the NHS in general.’

Given that there have been four recent independent inquiries into the disturbing rise in infant mortality on maternity and neonatal units across the country, maybe it should have been.

Maternity care — and women’s healthcare in general — has always been the poor relation in the Health Service.

That’s why, as a minister, I launched the Women’s Health Strategy so that women might receive better treatment in a sector that is predominantly managed by men. In the face of resistance from the NHS, I took to the dispatch box and ordered that an independent inquiry be launched into East Kent Hospitals University NHS Trust after a number of babies had died and the bereaved families had raised concerns.

In 2022, that inquiry found that up to 45 babies who had died at the neonatal unit in an 11-year period could have survived if they had been given the appropriate level of care.

Yet such problems continue: Only this week, a survey by the Birth Trauma Association found that two out of five women giving birth are subjected to surgical interventions, such as incisions using scissors, without being informed, even though it is a legal requirement that they should be.

And staffing in some hospitals still remains dangerously low.

Letby herself worked as one of just two fully qualified neonatal nurses at the Countess of Chester, in a unit repeatedly described as understaffed and chaotically run.

At the culmination of Letby’s first trial last summer, I happened to be in hospital for surgery. The nurses caring for me talked of little other than her case.

The unit was quiet, and during one sleepless night, chatting to the nurses, I learnt two things: almost every one of them was waiting with bated breath for the latest edition of the Daily Mail podcast on the Letby saga — and not one of the nurses on that unit believed that she was guilty.

They whispered it, they were nervous of admitting it, but they were sure of it. Something about it just didn’t feel right to them.

‘She was the most qualified nurse on the unit, so of course she was the one they turned to for the most seriously ill babies — the very ones most likely to die,’ said one nurse.

The jury heard that once Letby had been moved off the unit, the number of deaths there dropped.

Yet, at the same time, the decision was also taken to downgrade the unit into one that would no longer admit high-risk babies. So what looks like compelling evidence against Letby could have a far more innocent explanation.

Conversations with the nurses looking after me also touched on the notes that Letby had written to herself and that were found in her house.

One note in her diary read ‘I don’t deserve to live’ and included the phrases ‘I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them’, ‘I am a horrible evil person’ and, in capital letters, ‘I am evil, I did this’.

Looked at from the perspective of a conscientious nurse who took her vocation seriously, they read like the ramblings of someone who felt tortured by the situation she found herself in and in despair at being unable to save the patients in her care.

She was overworked and over-relied-upon.

Nor was there anything in Letby’s background that profiled her as a serial killer.

She seemed to be well-brought-up, highly experienced and mentally sound: a woman who had wanted to train as a nurse since she was a teenager, who had good friends and was respected by her colleagues.

She appeared to come from a diminishing cohort who enter nursing as a vocation, not as a job. Even the judge described her as a ‘conscientious, hard-working, knowledgeable, confident and professional nurse’, before he passed sentence.

Has the British justice system thrown a young woman into jail for life in order to save the tarnished reputation of the National Health Service? Was the instinct of the nurses caring for me last year the right one? Why has Lucy Letby been refused the right to appeal?

These are questions I would like to see answered. Justice may depend on it.