It is the gratuitous shoehorning of “confirmed to be Muslim” and “alleged to be a Muslim immigrant” in both tweets which makes anyone angrily reacting to the post liable to be accused of “racial hatred”. It is the syntax, which does not ring true and bears the Nudge Unit’s fingerprints. It is the dry, flipchart-derived name of the account - “European Invasion” - which conforms to a style used by a number of state-conceived entities that have materialised out of thin air in recent years, all with no apparent provenance. Above all, though, it is the uniformity of the media coverage that immediately follows. This involves pummelling you with the term “disinformation” or “misinformation” over and over and over, à la Operation Mockingbird, with Europe Invasion’s post serving as the all-needed citation.

Nothing is more revealing of a psy-op than the legislative subtext found in the media coverage after the fact; and so this makes for a general rule: wait to see what they want out of an event. The problem-reaction-solution formula invariably becomes readily apparent. On prior occasions, it was the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Then, the Public Order Bill. In this case, calls for beefing up the Online Safety Act 2023 were being made before Lucy had even set foot in a police interview room. Keep in mind, they will always overshoot when it comes to introducing totalitarian laws by asking for more than they want. That way, when a provision of a particular bill is subsequently amended or removed, it will made to feel like a climbdown, all thanks to the hard work of your favourite civil liberties campaigners, “Big Brother Watch” (who are in on the whole charade). Of course, it’s an entirely Pyrrhic victory that will have been secured and what you consider a climbdown will have in fact been war-gamed in from the beginning. If you’re really lucky, they may even let one of your silly, little petitions reach a 100,000 signatures, earning you a precious “debate”. All the while, the veneer of democracy is sustained.

Back to the matter in hand, the tone of the coverage was clear: the scourge of “disinformation” needed to be addressed, pronto. So we mete out a string of custodial sentences for “hate speech” in quick succession, Lucy’s among them, before ushering in the new OFCOM regulations on so-called “illegal content”, effective March 2025. Note, the regulations are lucrative business. Breaches come with very heavy fines, up to 10% of the offending platform’s global turnover. That’s turnover, not profit. For a platform like X, we are talking up to £400 billion, none of which, by the way, is earmarked for so-called “online safety”. It goes straight to the treasury. I would tentatively surmise, in fact, installing the regulations was much more to do with taxation through the back door by means of hefty fines than actual censorship. After all, they need “illegal content” to persist in order to levy the fines, all the while paying lip service to protecting you from ‘online harms’.

As confident as I am that Lucy was set up by 77th Brigade, I concede I cannot prove it. I can only claim to have become a keen observer of how numerous psy-ops have have played out, in the last five years especially. With that, comes an acute familiarity for the various tell-tale signs discussed. Whether you are persuaded by these signs is a matter for you. Ultimately it will come down to whether you believe the state is sufficiently devious, capable and motivated to pull off a straightforward exercise of this kind. Means, motive and opportunity (MMO), in other words. For the purposes of this piece, however, it is not what I have to prove, but rather what the Crown has to prove that concerns us. This brings me to her legal defence, that of which she was ultimately deprived.

Before one gets to the question of what she posted, Lucy’s prospects of receiving a fair trial were shot. There was a deluge of reporting all aimed at drumming up support for regulating social media platforms, all of which had the so-called “far right” in its crosshairs. Several pieces were juxtaposing the Southport riots with Lucy’s post or similar rhetoric as to link A and B. Needless to say, an aggressive censorship initiative was underway and, in line with that, it was clear those who had transgressed accepted norms of online chatter needed to be made examples of. More than that, several accounts were seen discussing her tweet whilst she was still on remand, mischaracterising her words and omitting to mention that the tweet had been deleted. The deletion is crucial to any eventual defence Lucy might hope to enter as it goes it to intent. There is a world of difference between someone who posts something intemperately, then thinks better of it and hastily deletes it, versus a legitimate attempt to foment unrest. It corrupts the perception of any reader to suggest Lucy was in anything other than the first category. The example below, dated 7th August (with 2.1 million views) is particularly egregious in that he states in the present tense that the Lucy “wants to see migrants burnt alive”. These are all grounds for her legal team, such as it is, to put in a stay of proceedings application yet none is made.

I now turn to defending the charge proper. Under section 19(1)(a) of the Public Order Act 1986, the prosecution is required to prove beyond reasonable doubt that: (i) the Defendant published or distributed written material; (ii) the material was threatening, abusive or insulting; and (iii) the Defendant thereby intended to stir up racial hatred.

1. No “racial hatred”

• The deleted post contains no discernible target group by reference to “colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or other national origins” as exhaustively defined under s.17 of the Act. Race simply does not feature in the defendant’s post, not even incidentally. There are no racist slurs or racist tropes. The post is not a racist diatribe. There is no racist innuendo. There is no dog-whistle reference to any race, no nod and a wink. On the contrary, the defendant is in no mood to be mealy-mouthed. She is unapologetic, defiant and saying it as she sees it but not even a hint at race is to be found. Indeed there are no abusive words full stop, much less racially abusive words. There is a singular insult in the form of “bastards” but it is non-specific and not connected to any protected group

• At least one target race is essential for the offence to be made out; as established as in R v Norwood [2003] EWCA Crim 1983 where a conviction was upheld because the language was unambiguously aimed at a protected class

• The occupants of hotels do not constitute a defined racial or ethnic group as set out by Lord Fraser in Mandla v Dowell-Lee [1983] 2 AC 548 in finding that Sikhs constituted an ethnic group based on various shared characteristics. The hotel occupants may and do in fact come from various racial and national backgrounds, no less than five continents, and they speak a plethora of languages. In R v Sheppard and Whittle [2010] EWCA Crim 65, the written material clearly and explicitly targeted racial groups.

• The contention may be that racism was the undercurrent or subtext or motivating factor for the defendant’s words but such inference is insufficient and in any event denied. At the material time, the defendant saw the housed migrants as being collectively responsible for the Southport stabbing incident earlier that day - mistakenly, yes - unreasonably, yes - but not on account of race insofar as they belong to an agreed upon race or set of races which they do not. Lord Reid in Lewis v Daily Telegraph Ltd [1964] AC 234 (HL), “What the ordinary man would infer without special knowledge has always been the test. He is not naïve; he can read between the lines... But he must base his inference on what the defendant has actually said”

• The defendant includes the phrase “if that makes me racist, so be it” which is to say “if the consequence of what I have just said is to be labelled a ‘racist’, then I accept that consequence”. In other words, at the material time, the defendant was not willing to censor herself in order to avoid being called a ‘racist’. There is no admission of racist intent, quite the contrary, she is pre-empting being called a “racist”, conscious of how liberally and often unreasonably the accusation is levelled. Either way, though, the preceding parts of the post do not contain language directed at a race.

• The prosecution seeks to rely on adjacent communications, such as other posts she made, in an effort to establish racist intent. This is to concede, of course, whether they like it or not, that the racial element of the alleged offence is lacking. The Court is reminded of the wording of the offence under s.19 (a): he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, as to say, by effect of the material itself. The Crown must show the words in and of themselves reflect an intention to stir up. General characterisations of the defendant as someone who, say, harbours racist views are not good enough under the test. The court is obliged to assess the allegedly offending words in their own terms without cross-reference to the defendant's speculated opinions on race. In DPP v Collins [2006] UKHL 40, the House of Lords emphasised that the court must assess whether the words used in the charged communication are, in and of themselves, threatening, abusive or insulting, without importing general character assessments. Similarly, in Chabloz v CPS [2019] EWHC 3094 (Admin), it was affirmed that while prior conduct might inform context, the focus must remain on the specific material charged.

• Absent at least one discernible target racial group, the offence of stirring up “racial hatred” is not made out. The only coherent charge would have been one of “encouraging or assisting a crime” pursuant to the Serious Crime Act 2007 which it is submitted the Crown knew it could not sustain and so strategically opted for a Public Order offence being the softer test insofar as it does not require proving an intention to cause violence per se. The charge is thus an abuse of process and the court is asked to stay proceedings permanently.

2. No Call to Arms

• The key clause is “Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards, for all I care [my emphasis]”

• The insertion of “for all I care” crucially shifts the grammatical mood from the imperative mood (an order or command) to the subjunctive mood. It is no longer a call for arson but an expression of indifference to arson occurring.

  

• “for all I care” is not mere linguistic style. Indignant as the defendant feels at the time of her post, she is evidently unwilling to go as far as issuing a command of violence and so stops short of doing so (and follows this up with a later tweet denouncing violence as being not the answer)

• The court is bound by the literal meaning rule. The prosecution is not entitled to rely on paraphrased or isolated parts of the post or to reinterpret words beyond their linguistic boundaries. Charleston v News Group Newspapers Ltd [1995] 2 AC

3. An ephemeral post does not amount to a “publication”

• Consider a company bound by the Companies Act 2006 to publish its annual accounts. It does so by posting a link to a PDF on its website but then 3.5 hours later deletes it and attempts to argue that it has complied with the requirement. This would not wash with any court or regulator in the Land. “Publication” is not satisfied by the mere technical act of making something visible for a short time. Jameel v Dow Jones & Co Inc [2005] EWCA Civ 75: the mere technical accessibility is not sufficient for liability.

• In criminal law where freedom of expression (Article 10 ECHR) is engaged, the definition of ‘publication’ must be narrower, not broader, than in a civil context

• It is submitted that ‘publication’ requires a defendant’s intention to disseminate the offending words - whatever they may be - to be realised or made effective through continuity of access. Thus an essential property of a ‘publication’ is durability. It’s submitted 3.5 hours is so short a period as for a reasonable person not to accept any publication materialised

• Publishing something is not an irrevocable act. It is the prerogative of a publisher to retract or withdraw that which he has published. This is well established convention. Academic journals often issue retractions. The right to revoke a publication is a necessary extension of the GDPR’s Right of Erasure a.k.a. the Right to be Forgotten which would not be satisfied if the ordinary person were prevented from taking back the words he or she has used

• The deletion of the post by the defendant is incompatible with the intent required to be proven under s.19 (a) (1) and was also so swift as to disqualify the post from amounting to a “publication”

4. Views do not equate to “distribution”

• ‘Distribution’ within in the meaning of Act entails an offender actively and effectively disseminating the offending material or words. This could be handing out flyers as in R v. Bird (1988) or, sending e-mails or text messages, or perhaps recruiting others by word of mouth to attack someone: “tonight, when he gets off work, let’s fuck up John”; but in any event doing something

• The prosecution would have the court imagine that 300k views is tantamount to the defendant having handed out 300,000 printed copies of her post which, it is submitted, is a nonsense. After the defendant clicks “Post”, she is but a passive observer. She has no influence whatsoever over the alleged (and unverified) number of “views” and instead is entirely at the mercy of X’s algorithm and the inclination of others to repost as to how much visibility the post eventually gets. In DPP v Collins, the court distinguished between a person's original communication and how widely it spread once in the public domain with the original speaker not being accountable for the latter

• In a private message, the defendant talks of the post having “bit [her] on the arse” which refers to the unforeseen negative fallout of one’s actions. The defendant realises she has posted something heedlessly and is expressing consternation at the blowback she is receiving from that action. This is not compatible with an intention to distribute and, by extension, an intention ‘to stir up’. The necessary mental element of the charge is lacking.

• The defendant does nothing herself to enhance the visibility of the post. She does not use hashtags. She does not tag anybody. She does not request for it be shared or reposted. Indeed the only positive action she does take is to delete it.

5. Timing as a mitigating, not aggravating, factor

• The prosecution seek to the argue that the prevailing political climate aggravates the offence

• This is purely speculative as there is no objective standard as to what constitutes a time of heightened political sensitivity or any way of determining to what extent the social atmosphere is supposedly fraught. There is no barometer to which one can refer. There is no control environment as to be able to say that, had the defendant made her post at a time of relative calm (to the extent such a time even exists), that it would have been less disruptive. Indeed there is no way to say the post had any effect whatsoever much less a measurably worse effect because of its timing.

• The argument also works both ways. If a speaker is addressing a gathering which is tense and on edge and which subsequently turns disorderly, you can say, on one hand, the timing of speech made matters worse but equally that tensions were already very high before the speaker arrived on the scene and so the speech is unlikely to have made any difference. In other words, that disorder would have followed regardless.

• Consider a road rage incident where a driver is stuck in gridlocked traffic and becoming increasingly frustrated. At a certain point, he loses his temper, gets out of his car and has an angry outburst in the middle of the carriageway which is said to cause alarm and distress to surrounding motorists, giving rise to a Public Order offence. The prosecution argue the large number of motorists on the road at the time aggravates the offence. This results in an absurdity whereby the very thing that has precipitated the offending conduct is also said to have aggravated it, violating the Golden Rule, Adler v George [1964] 2 QB 7.

• In the defendant’s case, it is the timing - being the Southport stabbings - that is itself the triggering factor for her post. Unless it is suggested the defendant had a draft of her post saved and that she chose to deploy it at a time when she believed it cause maximum disruption, then she is a victim of said timing, and insofar as she is guilty of the alleged offence (which is denied), the timing is a mitigating, not an aggravating, factor. To seek to hold the timing of the post against the defendant would be perverse and amounts to a cynical attempt to fashion a more serious offence than exists.

• The offence is not made out

I do not claim this defence would have succeeded necessarily because, when facing a pre-determined outcome, it does not matter what you say. What I do say, though, is that it could not elude even the most junior barrister of questionable competence that a post that makes nil reference to race is liable to amount to a flagrant abuse of process by the Crown.

It gets worse, though. Instead Lucy is advised to put in a “plea in mitigation”, something intended to excuse the offending conduct and lessen the offence which was not merely unhelpful but positively damaging to her cause. This is not to diminish Lucy’s personal trauma as regards the loss of her child 14 years prior, only to say legally it had next to no chance of succeeding. The event had no proximity to the alleged offence and the judge ultimately had none of it (pa. 21, Sentencing Remarks). I’m not privy to what was in Lucy’s mind at the time and so cannot say to what extent it contributed to her reaction that evening but the perception from a court and the public was guaranteed to be that she was seeking to leverage a personal tragedy to excuse “hate speech”. Apart from anything else, it had emerged that she had said something to the effect of intending to play the mental health card which would have been pretty much fatal to any chance of her getting any mileage out of such a plea. That a barrister would even suggest pursuing this course, one that was sure to seal her fate, is highly suspect.

In closing, I come to some of the commentary in the aftermath of Lucy’s sentence, most of which has not done her any favours in my estimation, and that includes Allisson Pearson’s piece in The Telegraph. I’ve no objection to the title vis-à-vis Britain bearing shame for her injustice, that much is true. It’s when we get into the substance, or the lack thereof more accurately, that problems emerge. I had expected, naively, to find a spirited defence of Lucy on grounds of free speech. I thought I might hear of how Milton, Blackstone, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine et al. would all be turning in their respective graves to hear of her plight, but nothing of the sort. Five paragraphs in, Ms. Pearson completely bails on her: “It was without doubt a horrible, hateful and deeply offensive tweet”. We are to take it from that she agrees Lucy committed the offence, only that her sentence was unduly harsh.

How craven. What does it matter whether it was “deeply offensive”? Perhaps a brief refresher on our tradition of free speech is due. We do not criminalise impassioned speech. We do not imprison those who indulge in hyperbole or take liberties with language in the heat of the moment. We do not lock people up for having an intemperate outburst. It’s incumbent upon a journalist to say as much and, if you’re not willing to stick your neck out for fear of being seen to condone an “offensive” tweet, then maybe it’s time to reconsider your chosen profession.

The entire piece is predicated on Lucy’s guilt and amounts to a futile plea for leniency on the grounds she is not a bad person. We know this because, among other things, the dog, Harley, misses her terribly, also, Ray found her crying when he got in, plus, she used to look after some black kids. Apparently this flaccid waffling passes for journalism. I don’t care whether Lucy is a good person nor do I know it be so, frankly. I care only that state-sanctioned entrapment was used to pin a bogus charge of ‘stirring up racial hatred’ on her; and that she was railroaded through the charade that is our judicial system, treated as an expendable nobody, all so the credulous, docile masses would hail the arrival of online censorship. By pleading her good character, the implication is that she might otherwise have deserved such treatment. There are some redeeming parts to Ms. Pearson’s article, notably, references to “informal pressure” from above and the judges needing to “crack down hard” but it’s largely a masterclass in controlled opposition writing. Lucy’s supporters learn almost nothing of value and her detractors come away thinking it’s a whinge-fest.

Prevailing opinion is something along the lines of “what she tweeted was appalling but the sentence was an outrage”. There is rather more to it than that, though. In three parts, I examine how I believe she fell prey to state manipulation. I then look at the legal defence of which she was deprived as to make her imprisonment little more than a rubber-stamping exercise; and, finally, how your perennial fixation with a variety of culture wars, especially one with Muslims, proved to be Lucy’s undoing whilst paving the way for more of the same. (Hereafter, ‘X’ and ‘Twitter’ are interchangeable, as are ‘(re)post’ and ‘(re)tweet’).

At the outset, a popular misunderstanding needs clearing up, one which Piers Morgan has unhelpfully perpetuated in a recent post. Lucy was not charged with “incitement” - what is now known as “encouraging or assisting a crime” - as many a commenter seem to think, but instead with a Public Order offence of “stirring up racial hatred”. The legal test for the latter offence is completely different as I will come to in Part II.

Lucy would have been one of those accounts in my outer orbit, popping up in my feed more and more in recent years. I can’t claim to have paid close attention to her tweets but my approximation of her was, in the mold of many others well promoted X, banter-loving; bawdy humour aplenty; lots of swearing; generous use of emojis; occasional purveyor of bare legs pics who likes a tipple and staunchly on, what would be termed, the ‘right’, often seen giving Labour a good kicking.

I can only recall one interaction with her. She’d tweeted that she was in favour of indiscriminate stop & search of teenagers which I assume raised my hackles a bit. I replied accordingly. It’s fair to say, we’d have been politically far removed from one another but, such is the anarchist in me, that this is almost always the case. It just so happened that, during that whole surreal episode that was lockdown, we tended to form loose associations with one another in way we might not otherwise have done. Some materialised into enduring friendships. For others, it proved to be but a temporary coalition that has long since dissolved, often not on the best of terms. On one hand, you have your born-again truthers and on the other, those that have largely repatriated to Normieland. I find myself negotiating between the two camps depending on the subject; and so it proves in the case of Lucy where there is a small contingent of observers adamant she’s not really in prison and that it’s all been one big pro-censorship psy-op.

That there has been a psy-op, we can be in no doubt. What matters is whether those featuring therein are accomplices or pawns which is to say, unwitting participants. As for Lucy, I am satisfied it’s the latter, that she is very much real and in prison and not in any sense a crisis actor. Moreover, that she is known personally to several accounts on X, that they have met her and are pictured with her in some cases. What I did find admittedly odd, at the time, was the husband’s brief comments to reporters outside the court building which I can only describe as limp and unconvincing. It was as if he was talking about someone he didn’t really know but it was pointed out to me that this may just be indicative of a disconnected marriage or that he was still in shock, which is reasonable. Much of what we are shown is theatre, no argument there, but within lie strands of truth an fiction that need to be disentangled. The risk of wrongly discarding this woman out of hand, on the strength of nothing but conjecture, is not something I can countenance, personally - and so I proceed on that basis.

Beginning in late 2022, following Musk’s takeover of the platform, I noticed my X feed being populated more and more, indeed flooded at times, with what is popularly known as race-bating content - incendiary, algorithm-driven clips depicting asylum seekers, or just minorities generally, engaged in violence or otherwise offensive behaviour, all unsolicited. RadioGenoa in particular was (and still is) pumping out a slew of videos of this kind: violent assaults, sexual assaults of young women, theft, obscene or lewd acts and so on, invariably undated and seemingly recycled in some cases from years prior. Concerned Citizen was another and various others have since spawned. In the name of cheap clicks, reposting these videos, with provocative captions, were the likes of Ian Miles Cheong, David Vance, David Atherton, Leilani Dowding and a number of smaller accounts. To some of us, it was obvious this was to be a precursor to an eventual “far-right” crackdown, a convenient pretext for ushering in “anti-radicalisation” measures - censorship, in other words; all with the generous assistance of the named accounts, knowingly or otherwise.

Atherton’s timeline caters really only to those with a bona fide fetish for the impending Islamification of the whole world. Leilani’s makes for an eclectic mix. A large amount of culture wars grift i.e. aforesaid repostings, plus poking fun at burqas, rainbow flags, fat people and so on, much of it very ragey too; but interspersed with perfectly inoffensive stuff, be it yoga poses, farming content, mucking out the stables, or reliving her Nuts magazine days. It’s quite the niche she’s carved out for herself. Countryside milf with trans-bashing thrown in, all for the same unbeatable price - a winning formula, from what I’ve seen.

The common thread among all of these accounts, and the majority of their followers, is their apparent fondness for self-styled political activist, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, stage name: “Tommy Robinson”. This is more than a side note. It’s a hallmark of gullibility. By that, I mean a fixation with a manufactured culture war against Muslims that played right into the hands of those who were able to bait Lucy into reacting as she did with consummate ease. I’ll come back to ‘Tommeh’ in Part III though. I can already hear the cacophony of voices rushing to his defence. For now, all I wish to illustrate is, a roughly two-year long trajectory of progressively stoking tensions against asylum seekers, and inter-ethnic tensions generally, building to a crescendo following the Southport stabbings and culminating in a simple, low-budget but very effective false-flag event - a single post which lit the touchpaper for the ensuing riots.

Let me be clear, they knew what Lucy going to post before she’d conceived of it in her own mind; not that it would come from her account specifically but that a post very much like the one she made would come from a subset of X accounts of which she likely would have been one. All you have to do is prod - provide the necessary emotional stimulus and wait - and so they prodded. What chance do you think your average overexcitable mummy with an iPhone, stands against devious state-sanctioned manipulation?

Consider, I’m sitting at 77th Brigade HQ at Dennison Barracks, Thatcham, Berks., working in conjunction with the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) a.k.a. The Nudge Unit and either running or directing an account on X called “Europe Invasion”. Using custom-built behavioural modelling software (which are they using), I run a simulation, putting out a post “confirming” that the person responsible for this thoroughly barbaric act of slaying three small girls only hours earlier, is a Muslim boat arrival. Let’s call him Mohammed bin Lyin Al-Fakeeh. Out of 24 million UK users on X, I can predict with impressive accuracy the type of enraged rhetoric that will appear in short order and, with the benefit of prior analytics, that it will originate from a watchlist of, say a few thousand accounts, and how much traction individual posts are likely to get depending on the source account. I’ll then select one from an account with a suitably large following, tag it as “racial hatred” and send it viral with aggressive reposting from an army of sock accounts. All done as part a specific exercise to generate online “hate speech”.

Note how they always use these very sterile names for their various impersonator entities which don’t ring true in the slightest: “Europe Invasion”, “Just Stop Oil”, “Insulate Britain”, “Extinction Rebellion”. Keep in mind, it needs to be unmistakeable what the organisation stands represents because mainstream media consumers are infantilised - spoon-fed “bitesized” chunks of information, more or less on the level of “look, bad person”.

There are other giveaways of 77’s handywork - the way it opens with “…confirmed to be Muslim”, as if this fictional attacker, having been apprehended, whipped out his religious identity card. No legitimate report would read that way. It was worded as such for only one purpose which is to support a charge of Islamophobia (“racial hatred”) against any arrested person cites the post as provocation. It sets a trap for a Public Order offence, and this becomes relevant in Lucy’s case because since she made no reference to race or religion in her deleted post.

Lucy reacted on that Monday evening last July, exactly as she (and tens of thousands of others) had been primed, covertly and over an extended period, to a point of compulsion. Some of you might struggle with this idea, labouring under the illusion that we enjoy free will. After all, being the master of your own destiny and similar platitudes are comforting. The reality is, our behaviour, on social media particularly, is at the behest of dopamine (reward) and cortisol (stress) driven impulses which manifest as chasing likes and validation or, as the case was, reacting with anger, aggression and distress. Anything relating to children being harmed provokes an especially visceral response with women tending to exhibit greater activation in regions of brain associated with empathy and emotional regulation such as the amygdala. All social media, reduced to its essence, is about hijacking cortisol and dopamine production to the nth degree. Part of ancient, primal pathways of the human brain that have been conserved over millions of years of evolution, these neurochemicals are deeply rooted in survival, reward and adaptation.

Without veering off into complex neuroscience, what’s fundamentally relevant here is how a platform like X promotes impulsive rather than considered behaviour through reduced engagement of the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) - the most evolved region of the brain associated with planning, higher order reasoning and critical thinking, in favour of the reward centres: the striatum and the nucleus accumbens; and these effects are substantiated by neuroimaging (fMRI) studies. The same pattern is seen in substance abuse and gambling addiction. The result is social media bringing out often the very worst that our temperaments have to offer under conditions of stress. Very quickly you can see how this would be, is being, and has been, used to sinister effect through bot networks, fake accounts, algorithm manipulation, covert state actors, front organisations and cooperation with, or even coercion of, platform operators.

Having elicited precisely the reaction they wanted from their unsuspecting subject, Lucy was arrested and shoved into the next phase, public shaming - parading the poor woman across media outlets, juxtaposing the riots with screenshots of her deleted post (whilst of course omitting to mention she’d subsequently posted that violence is not the answer). The backlash on X was nothing if not predictable. Take David here, he of the FBPE clan, himself ideal fodder for behavioural programming. Do you think he has a considered and impartial perspective on the limits of free speech and, after careful deliberation, concluded that Lucy had strayed across the legal boundary? Not in this lifetime. It’s a tribal reflex. He hates what she represents politically and betrays his spite by wanting her life ruined.

With the baying mob frothing at the mouth, all clamouring for her punishment and branding her a “danger to society”, came the next act in this whole farce, fast-tracking Lucy into prison. Essentially, extracting a guilty plea out of her, complete with a grovelling mea culpa, all whilst she’s shaken, disoriented and, importantly, isolated. So we’re clear, ‘extracting’ does not mean overt duress but rather giving her the impression the alternative of defending the charge was a hopeless prospect, in spite of a coherent legal defence being available to her, the terms of which I will set out in Part II.

When you so desperately want something to be true, you’ll let nothing interfere with that belief. So it seems in the case of Lucy Letby’s supporters, thoroughly convinced as many are, that the whole thing is a fit up; that she’s been scapegoated for a deficient NHS, or some variation thereof. The more militant among her advocates are not merely saying her convictions – 7 counts each of murder and attempted murder - are unsafe but in fact calling for her summary release. Others are rather more restrained, however, and remain troubled by (= in denial about) the two counts of attempted murder by means of insulin poisoning: Baby F and Baby L. As well they might be. They form the lynchpin of the case against her forensically. Once you have her on those two, the house of cards comes crashing down and the likelihood that she then did not have a hand in the 12 other instances becomes vanishingly small. Indeed there’s an argument the CPS should have pursued only these two counts in the first instance and, contingent on the verdict, gone for some or all of the others. This would have allowed for a much more focussed trial instead of the 10-month epic it turned out to be - an unfair burden on jurors, in my opinion, whilst also risking much evidence getting lost in a haze.

Legal hobbyists and internet sleuths alike are found on Reddit and elsewhere poring over the intricacies of the insulin test results, straining every sinew to reconcile their desire for this woman to be innocent with what the tests show; that these babies had extraordinarily high levels of insulin in their blood. Not double, or treble, or quadruple, or quintuple; but anywhere between 60-460x the normal level for a preterm neonate (depending on feeding status). Some choice examples of the mental gymnastics I describe (from Reddit) follow:

• “I have tbh, the child F result is very unusual and kind of worrying, that I understand why it looks the way it does. It’s very easy to see it as it is”;

• “I still believe Letby is a victim of a miscarriage of justice but I can’t deny that’s a hard thing to explain, although not that she’s even done it, but just that the baby has been poisoned by insulin”;

• “Whilst I do lean heavily towards this all being a massive miscarriage of justice, I have to be honest, the insulin cases are still very hard to dismiss”

• “even if there is categorical evidence of insulin poisoning, given that there is still absolutely no concrete evidence related to Letby, it's not satisfactory for me to bang fifteen life sentences on her head”;

• "Again, to be clear, I am personally very invested in Letby being innocent…And like I said, being unable to explain the insulin results doesn’t imply Letby is guilty. But we still lack a robust alternative explanation, other than ‘these tests aren’t entirely reliable’”

It’s very easy to “see it as it is”, he says, as opposed to not how it is? Who are these people? As for being “very invested” in her innocence, if you’re very invested in anything other than the truth, perhaps it’s time to politely and quietly relieve yourself of further participation in the discussion and take up a new pastime, if only out of respect for the parents of those infants who either perished or nearly died under Letby’s care. Your judgement is coloured by a personal agenda. If, on the other hand, you regard yourself a neutral observer who maintains the insulin tests are inconclusive, it’s likely you lack a basic grasp of the relevant biology, specifically the relationship between insulin and c-peptide – one you probably ought to have if you fancy yourself as an armchair expert on this case.

Insulin, as you all know, is a powerful life-critical hormone (protein) secreted by your pancreas which regulates your blood sugar, one of the mostly tightly controlled parameters in the human body, honed to precision through millions of years of evolution. The insulin molecule consists of two chains of amino acids: A and B. It starts out in its inactive, precursor form – proinsulin – where A and B are bound together by a scaffolding molecule namely c-peptide (connecting peptide).

Upon conversion into insulin, c-peptide, shown here in green, is cleaved off (removed) enzymatically and left behind where it remains in the blood and for much longer than its insulin counterpart. It has a longer half-life in pharmacological terms. Synthetic insulin undergoes no such conversion. It’s ready to go.

Just as walking in the snow leaves a trail of footprints, one for each step, so each secreted molecule of insulin leaves behind another of c-peptide. Thus, they jointly increase in the blood in a perfectly linear 1-to-1 fashion. This is an immutable feature of our biochemistry. The process cannot be cheated. There isn’t some backdoor method for your body to make insulin that doesn’t leave behind a c-peptide trail. It is this same feature that makes c-peptide an extremely robust, virtually infallible, biomarker for endogenous (natural) insulin and so by looking at the ratio of one to the other we can reliably deduce whether the insulin present in someone’s blood is natural or not, with caveats to be discussed. Owing to the longer half-life of c-peptide, this ratio will always be >1 under normal conditions, around 1.5-2 in newborns and typically 5-10 in adults (as the half-life becomes longer still). In Baby F, it was <0.036. In Baby L, the values were beyond the respective lower and upper detection limits meaning the baby’s insulin exceeded ~5,000-6000 pmol/L whilst c-peptide was <169 pmol/L, so a ratio <0.034.

Now the crucial part: the interpretation. There are a few rare - very rare - situations in which the ratio of c-peptide to insulin will invert i.e. fall below 1. We will come back to those, don’t worry. The only scenario, however, in which the ratio will violently plummet to near zero is where exogenous (synthetic) insulin has been administered. This is because the standard test (immunoassay) does not distinguish between endogenous and exogenous insulin. At the same time, the pancreas detects blood sugar is low. Natural insulin production is suppressed accordingly. The readings are sent in opposite directions: insulin soars and c-peptide crashes giving the wildly out-of-kilter ratio observed in both cases.

Still not satisfied, Letby’s defenders seek out every esoteric theory in town in an effort to discredit or explain away the tests. The problem is none of them stack up:

1. “The test doesn’t tell us whether it was natural or synthetic insulin”. Answer: correct, it does not. That’s why it’s paired with the c-peptide as to tell you whether the measured insulin represents naturally produced insulin. It categorically did not in either case.

2. “It could be hyperinsulinism caused by a tumour (insulinoma) or genetic mutation”. Answer: Hyperinsulinism doesn’t invert the ratio. There’s more insulin but also more c-peptide. In any case, these babies did not have diagnoses of hyperinsulinism. They would otherwise have had, not acute, but chronic hypoglycaemia and we would not have seen blood glucose normalise after disconnection from the IV.

3. “What about Hirata’s Disease a.k.a. Insulin Autoimmune Syndrome (IAS)?”. Answer: This is an autoimmune condition where antibodies bind to free insulin preventing its clearance potentially leading to a distorted ratio. IAS is virtually unheard of outside of Japan and is not congenital. These babies did not have diagnoses of IAS nor would IAS result in the near-zero ratio observed.

4. “Kidney failure causing impaired insulin clearance” Answer: Neither baby had diagnosed kidney failure and it would not cause a ratio anywhere near as low. Insulin would have been chronically high without subsequent normalisation of blood glucose after disconnection from IV.

5. “Paraneoplastic or ectopic insulin-like factor production” Answer: These types of tumours are not seen in infants and insulin would still be accompanied by c-peptide if it’s true insulin.

6. “Heterophile Antibody Interference” Answer: This is where the patient’s specific antibodies cross react with the reagents in the test producing a falsely elevated insulin reading. Roche incorporates proprietary blocking agents into its assay to neutralise heterophiles antibodies. Nevertheless, no test is perfect and they are not immune from interference. In <1 in 2000 tests interference happens (Sapin et al., 2003). However, the false elevation due to interference is nowhere near the order seen. We’d expect insulin readings in the hundreds of picomoles, low thousands at the most; and it would not affect the c-peptide value. Therefore, a ratio in the order 0.2-0.5, way above what we actually saw. For antibody interference to account for the results in these two babies, you’d need to claim there was a uniquely extreme pattern of false elevation in these two infants, not seen in other babies. This is biologically implausible. It can also be verified retrospectively such interference did not occur by retesting the surviving children’s blood, given that antibodies will generally persist for life.

7. “They didn’t do liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) testing” Answer: LC-MS requires deep freezing of samples and rapid processing by an equipped forensic lab. It can’t be done in a standard hospital lab. By the time the insulin/c-peptide results had been returned and interpreted, the blood samples would likely no longer have been viable and the insulin in the baby’s system long gone. Therefore, the neonatal team would have had to anticipate the poisoning. Clearly, it’s unreasonable to expect that. In any case, the absence of LC-MS does not detract from what is known which is sufficient to conclude the presence of exogenous insulin.

8. “The test is not validated for use in (preterm) neonates” Answer: This is proving to be one of the most frequent criticisms demanding rebuttal. It is true, neonates are not merely small adults but a population in their own right with a distinct physiology. Neonatal plasma can differ by protein composition, bilirubin levels and haematocrit. These differences can cause matrix interference (skewed results) in a way that is not the case or at least far less likely in an adult. Certain neonatal phenomena mean reference ranges can radically deviate from those applicable for adults. For instance, there’s a surge in Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) in the first 48hrs of life. Maternal antibodies that have crossed the placenta (which clear after a few months) can also cross-react with the same TSH immunoassay causing false highs. Validating assays for neonates is undeniably relevant and in a clinical setting non-validated tests require cautious interpretation. All of this true; and should Letby ever get her retrial, the prosecution would do well to readily concede as much.

   So do we just bin the result, then? No. The question becomes: does neonatal physiology have any material bearing on the interpretation in the context of insulin poisoning? No, it does not. First of all, the target molecule, insulin, is structurally identical in neonates and adults - the same 51-amino acid peptide. The Roche Elecsys® Insulin assay uses monoclonal antibodies that target specific epitopes and those do not change in neonatal plasma making it highly specific and not susceptible to cross-reaction with insulin analogues. It’s designed to work in EDTA plasma or serum which are the same matrices used in neonates and indeed it forms part of routine endocrinology and hypoglycaemia workups in many UK hospitals including for neonates (something those seeking to rubbish the test omit to mention). The fact that no validated assay exists is testament to the fact that there has not been a clinical necessity for one. The test result is not corrupted by using neonatal plasma and is not being used to assert a precise reading. We are not splitting hairs here over, say 50-100, picomoles of insulin, rather using it (in combination with c-peptide) to determine the presence of massive, supraphysiological levels of insulin in two infants. You could grant a 30%, even 50%, upward bias in the reading due to matrix interference. The conclusion would remain because the readings were beyond any conceivable margin of error. Just as if someone were caught speeding, doing in 95mph in 40 zone, doubling the usual allowance of 10% + 2mph, to 20% + 4mph does not change anything.

   The test was not abused at trial to say more than it could say and needed to say. Now, if critics were arguing that the prosecution had a duty to declare the immunoassay lacks validation for neonates, that would be one thing. Then both sides can argue the relevance thereof. What they want instead is the test rendered inadmissible and thrown out altogether which betrays their intention. It’s a cynical attempt to deprive a hypothetical future jury of knowledge of the result because they know what it shows and how fatal it would be to Letby’s defence.

By now, a clear theme should have emerged: other causes for abnormal results are possible - that is not denied - but it is the extreme nature of the values observed in Babies F and L, combined with the clinical picture, that allows for said possibilities to be definitively crossed out. We have four boxes ticked: (i) super high insulin; (ii) very low or undetectable c-peptide; (iii) acute hypoglycaemia; (iv) normalised blood glucose after the babies came off the IV.

These two babies were being infused with lethal quantities of synthetic insulin, completely consistent with their clinical notes and were spared only by timely interruptions. You can debate how it got into their systems as a secondary discussion if you want, but that it was there - and for no plausible reason other than to poison them is beyond reasonable doubt, the standard of proof in a criminal trial.

At the Alternative Lucy Letby Trial hosted by UnHerd, Investigative Editor, David Rose, says (19:05) “nobody has satisfactorily explained how on Earth Lucy Letby could have introduced synthetic insulin into feed bags that these babies were receiving through IV lines”. as if this were a logistical feat beyond Letby’s means. I am going to charitably assume ignorance here rather than wilfully trying to mislead the audience. A neonatal IV bag (as for standard adult IV bag) has both a spike or tubing port and an additive port - a rubber self-sealing stopper for injecting medications or other constituents. This is true also for neonatal Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN) bags too such as the Numeta® G13E triple-chamber bag from Baxter which I believe will have been the type in use at the Countess of Chester.

These are not the only entry points. There’s also the Y-port proximal to the baby or the cannula hub but those points bypass the feed bag so you would not have a gradual infusion and instead an IV bolus where the medication is administered all in one go. Lastly, a syringe driver if one were in use which was the case in one of the babies, as I understand it.

Bolus administration does not fit the clinical picture. Giving that much insulin in one go would have caused rapid collapse, almost certainly death, within minutes, attracting considerable suspicion. Infusion allows for the appearance of deterioration overnight. The babies had persistent hypoglycaemia over a period of many hours which crucially resolved after discontinuing the infusion. Insulin has very short half life of only a few minutes, indicating the poisoned infusion was either ongoing when the respective blood specimens were collected or had just been stopped.

How much insulin would she have needed to introduce to the feed bag? Keep in mind the tiny and fragile nature of preterm neonate weighing 2-2.5kg with less 1/2 pint of blood. Insulin comes in U-100 form: 100 units/ml, 6,000 pmol per unit. To cause a steady-state plasma concentration of ~5000 pmol/L there are various pharmacokinetic variables to account for: dilution ratio of the TPN bag, volume distribution (Vd) for insulin in neonates (~0.15) which means how extensively a drug spreads beyond plasma, insulin half life, the infusion rate (typically 3-8ml/hr). The mathematical formula is beyond the scope of this piece but anywhere between 30-60 units of synthetic insulin or 0.3-0.6ml is a reasonable estimate of how much Letby would have had to have added.

Insulin tends to stick (adsorb) to plastic surfaces and so ideally will be well mixed and the tubing flushed (primed) as to saturate the inner surfaces with insulin first. This is not a small detail. Proper mixing and flushing makes a significant difference to the effectively infused dose. We can’t know whether Letby took these steps not least because she denies the crime. Let’s assume not and favour the upper end of our estimate. You can play around with the calculation. Whatever the figure, we’re talking about a very small amount of liquid, injectable in a matter of seconds into a feed bag.

Let’s be clear, poisoning a baby with insulin, late at night with only one other staff member on the ward, is not a crime requiring great ingenuity, planning or skill. Just intent, opportunity and a modicum of technical know-how, all of which Letby possessed in her capacity as a neonatal nurse. Christopher Snowdon (whilst I agree with many of his points) refers to her as a “very clever woman”, adept at lying and also “very good in the witness box”. No, this is someone of ordinary intelligence, a criminal mastermind she is not. Granted, she took some precautions to be avoid being caught in terms of falsifying records but not more than that. On the contrary, many of her actions are quite reckless. Using her phone to do Facebook searches of the parents on the anniversaries of the children’s deaths and stashing handover notes under her bed, come to mind. Her performance in the witness box is hardly impressive. When forced to account for the many irregularities that emerged, she can’t and reaches for her preferred stock answer: “No, I don’t agree”.

It was not a careful campaign of deception that allowed for Letby to evade capture for as long she did but a culture of complicity and timidity shielding her from direct accusation. Her fellow nurses and senior management had her back, fending off doctors’ concerns, principally Dr. Brearey’s, as to avoid making waves. Entirely self-serving, of course. The doctors relented albeit with misgivings, on my reading. (This internal friction between the professions was a significant feature and warrants inquiry in its own right).

In Letby, I ultimately recognise simply a deeply disturbed young woman who abused her position of trust in the most horrific way. Her handwritten confessions reflect a state of genuine mental turmoil, being wracked with guilt. I believe it’s possible to feel justified pity for her in spite of her appalling deeds. What is not an option, however, is to cling in vain to a notion that she’s innocent in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, therein lies my appeal to her more thoughtful supporters.