Downing Street must give the nod to a full statutory public inquiry into Lucy Letby scandal
Justice in full
IF ever a scandal demanded a full statutory public inquiry it’s the murder of seven babies by a serial killer nurse and her managers’ failure to stop her.
Too often such probes are a PR exercise, a bonanza for lawyers, absurdly expensive, protracted and invariably concluding with insincere platitudes about “lessons being learned”.
The Lucy Letby case is different.
This inquiry would not need to bog itself down in the performance of the wider NHS’s bloated clipboard class.
Another time, maybe. It can instead focus solely on that one hospital unit in the short period between 2015 and mid-2017 when police were finally called in.
We know the main players. Most are sitting pretty now outside the NHS on generous pensions.
It is vital they are not allowed to slink away, shamed only by their silence. They must be compelled to testify under oath and, if blameworthy, held to account.
That is not just what the victims deserve. Anything less tells every other NHS manager that almost any level of ineptitude or negligence is survivable.
Downing Street must give it the nod.
Cost of disgrace
FEW royals can ever have been as detached from reality as Prince Andrew.
Either he hasn’t a clue what ordinary people think of him — or he is so arrogant he couldn’t care less.
The idea he should have his £3million-a-year armed guards reinstated is as offensive as it is laughable.
Also ill-advised is ex-Home Secretary Priti Patel’s email on his behalf.
Andrew disgraced the nation via his paedo friend Jeffrey Epstein and the sex assault settlement with Virginia Giuffre.
He should count his lucky stars he is still living in splendour at the Royal Lodge in the private grounds of Windsor Great Park, a perfectly secure place to while away his enforced retirement.
He no longer has royal duties. So there is no case for publicly funded gun cops joining him whenever he ventures out.
Only a man of deranged self-importance and entitlement would imagine there is.
Plain sailing
SOME will continue to insist Afghan illegal migrant Rahat Popal is a “refugee”.
But his TikTok videos provide a valuable insight into his supposedly desperate escape to Britain.
A leisurely train ride to Paris. On to the French coast before a trouble-free dinghy crossing (thumbs-up and smiles all round). Finally, feet up at a hotel generously funded by UK taxpayers.
Job done. Easy as pie. No resistance in France nor the UK. And now, months of free bed and board as the asylum claim he could and should have made in the EU is laboriously assessed here.
Is it any wonder 18,618 illegal migrants have done the same this year alone?
With no deterrent, what’s stopping them?