PETER HITCHENS: I can't imagine how Lucy Letby could have gotten a fair trial

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

Last week, prosecutors admitted that false information about the case had been passed around during Ms Letby's first marathon trial. It involved door-swipe records, which are very useful for knowing who was where at important events.

The CPS said: “We are confident [it] had no significant impact on the prosecution, which involved several strands of evidence.' But I was not reassured.

The prosecution is one side in an uphill battle. How can it best judge how much its own mistakes matter? This case was carefully prepared over many months. If the jury could be given mischaracterized information once, how can we be sure of the quality of the rest of the information? One instance of sloppiness is bad in itself. It also gives cause to think about the entire prosecution case.

In particular, if the jury in the first trial had been misled in any significant way, how certain was the verdict? I cannot possibly say. I was not at the trial and I was told informally this week that a transcript of the whole thing would probably cost a whopping £8,000. The second trial would of course cost extra. So others will have to find out.

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

It was decided, I don't know by whom, that the error “only” had “a substantial effect” on count 14, the attempted murder of Baby K. Only? This was the count on which the jury could not reach a verdict in the first trial. This was the count which the prosecution considered so important that it requested a retrial.

This was despite the fact that Ms Letby had already been sentenced to die in prison. This was the charge under which it was alleged in court on 11 June (during the second trial) that a doctor had caught Ms Letby “virtually red-handed”.

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

In this second trial, the prosecution alleged that Ms. Letby “intentionally dislodged” the newborn's breathing tube when the nurse in charge of Baby K (not Ms. Letby) briefly left her side. No one saw Ms. Letby do this. How was the timing of this alleged event determined? Could it have happened through door card recordings?

It is highly unusual for the same crime to be tried twice. It would be interesting to compare the reports of this incident before and after the discovery of the false door label.

Mrs Letby was found guilty of murdering seven very young babies and attempting to murder seven more

Mrs Letby was duly convicted of the attempted murder of Baby K at the second trial, but by that time everyone in the Kingdom already knew that she had recently been sent to prison to die as a mass murderer of babies, so I cannot imagine how she could have had a fair trial at all.

I am also still not sure whether the Court of Appeal knew about the door swipe issue before deciding to deny her leave to appeal.

How can a small business thrive?

Not long ago, a nice little coffee stand, a little blue van, started selling pretty good coffee in the square outside Oxford station in my hometown.

Last week I asked the barista how his business was going. He said it was pretty good, but he would be doing a lot better if he didn't have to pay the council nearly £9,000 a year for the freedom to do his job. Without the fee, he said, he might be able to open another stall and employ more staff.

I was speechless at the greed of the town hall and checked the figures. They finally admitted that they do indeed charge him £8,715 a year to park his van. Looking for a silver lining, I asked if they also exempted the locally licensed e-scooter rental company for the three hideous orange rental stations they are allowed to operate in the same windswept square.

The e-scooter company in question is a Swedish multinational giant that makes hundreds of millions a year. But no, they do not require a “street trading permit.”

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

How can a small business thrive under such conditions? What has gone wrong with our local government?

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

Soon it will be more difficult to leave the country than to get in. While criminal-run dinghies ferry thousands of illegal immigrants to our south coast, His Majesty's law-abiding subjects will have to queue for hours to cross in the other direction.

Unlike the lawless migrants, we will probably have to submit to intrusive fingerprinting and facial scanning. In some parts of Kent, we will meet each other going in the opposite direction. It is impossible to know exactly when the EU's disastrous new border control system will come into force. But it will come. You will hate it.

The only way to lose weight is to eat less

Most of us cannot work out, when given a weight in foreign kilograms, whether the thing or person in question weighs as much as a baby elephant or as little as a large tomato. This country no longer needs these long, cold, bureaucratic processes. That is why it annoyed me when Davina McCall announced last week: “I am a 5'6″ woman who weighs 130 pounds.”

I think she means 57 kg.

And it annoyed me even more when she then claimed that she had achieved her slim figure through exercise and not through diet. I can hardly believe her. I have never lost a single gram through exercise (and I do a lot, dozens of kilometers on my bike every week). The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to eat less. I tried. It was no fun. That's why I weigh so much.

But I won't tell you how much, and certainly not in kilograms.

Come on, Al “Boris” Johnson, agree to debate me on the Ukraine war. The country needs to hear both sides loud and clear before things get worse.