THIRWALL THEATRE - PART 1

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED

Riddle: Why was Roald Dahl called Roald Dahl?

Answer: Coz his dad couldn’t spell Ronald.

Looking through some of the evidence that has been brought to the Thirwall enquiry, I was reminded of a Roald Dahl classic due to one word the enquiry have stuck on action replay. That word is ‘unexpected’.

Of course I am thinking of ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ , a seriously neat little series which absolutely everybody who was anybody and their mates was glued to the screen watching on a Sunday night. It had this hypnotic theme tune with these naked dancers who resembled Diana Spencer. You can see some episodes here .

The point was, you knew what to expect. And that was the unexpected.

.It turns out there is an underlying theme which runs through the whole Letby saga, which theme has allowed a spike in collapses and deaths to morph miraculously from natural causes to murderous intent. This theme involves the use of the word ‘unexpected’ to describe the spike in baby deaths. Consultant Stephen Brearey is adamant that

unexpected = evil

He has this mantra stuck on perpetual loop, that the deaths were unexpected and therefore by definition must be sinister.

The proverbial dog has its teeth well stuck into the bone and he’s not giving it up.

The fact is, this theme of unexpected is the undercurrent which runs below the whole argument as to why these deaths are retrospectively being called murders.

This is not rational. The reaper is not Father Christmas. He does not show himself regularly and predictably on the same day once a year. He visits randomly, sometimes even taking people who aren’t very old. The Cheshire coroner, Nicholas Rheinberg has stated that he had not the slightest suspicion that the any of the babies had been deliberately harmed. He had not even been informed that anyone had been blamed for the deaths or of the suspicions of the consultants. The police enquiry therefore had to go back and alter the facts to suit the narrative.

This is where their chosen name Operation Hummingbird comes in. Hummingbirds are the only birds that can effectively fly backwards. They have a ball and socket shoulder joint allowing them to rotate their wings on a horizontal axis around 180 degrees, which movement allows that hovering they get up to. Their wings actually loop in a figure eight- like pattern (as the sun does over a year). I covered the sacrificial symbolism of the hummingbird and more on why the police used that name for their investigation just after Lucy’s conviction, here Operation Hummingbird

There was no need to go back and reframe the cause of death of these babies. The truth is there were many factors on the neonatal ward that might have contributed to the ‘unexpected’ spike in deaths. These ranged from incompetent or poorly trained doctors/staff, staff shortages, a lack of incident reporting by doctors/consultants and an influx of high dependence babies for which the ward was not equipped, to sewage leaks and problems with infection control. All these issues the consultants were aware of, and though your average schoolchild might see a few dangers lurking for babies there, the consultants apparently were ‘surprised’ at the spike in collapses and deaths and could foresee nothing. What they were able to foresee very clearly though, was the danger of fingers pointing in their direction.

It seems though, that the consultants change how they describe the cluster of baby death according to who is listening. At the time that the babies died they did not think the deaths were unexpected because if they had done they would have escalated to the Child Death Over-view Panel which is protocol in that kind of situation. There is a police officer on that panel who could have looked at the issues. Their first point of call according to the RCPCH should have been to contact the senior investigating officer on site. Because they did not escalate we can only assume that the consultants were not surprised by these incidents and they could have/should have anticipated them. They appear to have fallen asleep at the wheel and as Peter Elston very aptly puts it on his podcast with Michael McConville We Need to Talk About Lucy

‘if you’re driving along talking on your phone and you run over somebody, that is unexpected’.

What the consultants have done is later cry to the court that they did not expect the deaths and collapses, without informing the jury that they failed to keep their eyes on the road.

This is key. This allows the whole fable to take wing. Tales of the Unexpected. In truth anyone and his dog who had eyes to see and ears to hear could have anticipated a tragedy in the making.

In any case, not everything in life is predictable, despite the rhetoric of the covid/climate alarmists with their flawed computer models, what they fail to see is there are always variables in the future which man cannot account for. Even if we give Brearey and colleagues the benefit of the doubt, at the very least, they have fallen into the trap of believing as the gods on the ward, that they are privy to the mind of the reaper. They represent the light, illuminating the path. Anything outside of that sphere is thus the work of the witch . She dunnit . Witch.

The dangers of this black and white thinking are not difficult to see. It leads to ‘othering’.

Not wearing a mask? Granny killer

Single mother? Can’t keep your knickers on

Elderly? Burden.

Young? Snowflake

Muslim? Terrorist.

And so on.

This of course is the age old tool of the ruling cult control system . Divide and rule.

Why the king? Dear God No! Look at that filthy slave shackled next to you …

The interview with Karen Rees at the Thirwall Enquiry was revealing. She took up her post as Head of Nursing for Urgent Care and line manager for Eiren Powell who ran the neonatal unit in August 2015. This was after the first four (apparently suspicious) deaths. No one told Rees about the spike in unexpected deaths, until Eirian Powell informed her four months later. Powell told her the deaths were down to natural causes anyway and cited congenital disformity and sepsis. She told Karen Rees that there were infection control issues and consistently defended Lucy against accusations. Rees mentioned secretive stuff going on between doctors/consultants/ managers which she was not privy to. She refers to meetings which the consultants claimed they had had with the executive team as ‘alleged meetings’. It sounds to me like she’s hinting at a lack of belief they had those meetings otherwise she would have known about it at the time. She said there was a breakdown in trust between doctors and nurses.

She did not find out about the specific suspicions around Lucy until 2016 , where she read about them in the addendum to a secret report done by a neonatologist from Liverpool Women’s Hospital. She approached Ravi Jayaram who refused to elaborate other than having concerns about a nurse. She next approached Brearey:

‘I need you to tell me why and how you believe Lucy is harming babies’

Pointing to a drawer in his desk, he responded with:

‘I have a gut feeling and a drawer of doom’.

Rees stated that she felt bullied and intimidated by Brearey. He would not reveal what was in his ‘drawer of doom’. She was concerned at the time that Brearey and Jayaram had a personal issue with Lucy since she consulted other staff and no one else appeared to have concerns about the nurse. On suggestions from a lawyer to the enquiry that she should have removed Letby from the ward, she pointed out that if Ravi and Brearey were so concerned and keen to remove Letby from access to babies, why had they not brought in the safeguarding team ?

This to me is a fundamental question which needs asking, yet as far as I know we have no suitable answer from the consultants about this. Until they do answer it, I am going to assume that they didn’t really believe that Lucy was deliberately harming or killing babies, hence no need for safeguarding.

On June 24^th 2016, the day Baby P collapsed, Rees got a call in the evening from Brearey at home. He demanded she took Lucy off the unit. She told him she had discussed this with the director of nursing, Alison Kelly and she was not removing Lucy. Brearey accused her of lying. She felt bullied and intimidated in her own home, and told him if he did not believe her to contact Kelly directly.

One of the lawyers to the enquiry accused Karen Rees of being at fault for not removing Letby and thus allowing her to ‘attack baby Q’ . However the jury never reached a verdict on baby Q and thus the enquiry is claiming that Lucy has committed crimes that have not been proven and blaming Rees for those so called ‘crimes’. Dame Thirwall does nothing to correct this lawyer. It seems that the puppeteer pulling the Thirwall strings only wants to go along with the outcome of the trial when that outcome is that Lucy is guilty. For those accusations in which there was no guilty verdict, at the enquiry, Lucy is apparently to be assumed guilty.

Midwife Anne Marie Lawrence also gave evidence to the enquiry. Her role was Lead Risk Midwife on the Patient Safety Team. When she took up her post it was the case that there had been no one doing that job for much of 2016. She said the Patient Safety team was dangerously under resourced at COCH and was the worst she had ever known in her career. She mentioned the short staff issue. Interestingly, she cited Jayaram and Brearey as having a basic lack of respect for others compared to other consultants on the ward. She said in 2016 doctors and consultants were not open and transparent about reporting clinical incidents and some made deliberate and sinister decisions not to do so without conferring with their colleagues first. She said the consultants all stuck together and viewed incident reporting as somehow punitive.

Let’s just think about this for a minute. We have a situation in 2016 where consultants are claiming that there is a baby murderer working on the ward. At the same time these consultants are actively covering up or avoiding reporting incidents . Not sure how they are ever going to anticipate spikes in death when they are covering up those problems and failures which might cause such a disaster.

Remember people, these are the doctors you are supposed to trust with your new born babies. It stinks.

After death of babies P and Q (two of the triplets) Letby was moved off the neonatal ward and never allowed back. Anne Marie Lawrence said no one reported the deaths of baby P and Q as a clinical incident and thus she did not find out about them till she went onto the labour ward three days later and overheard midwives talking. Letby ended up in the Risk and Patient Safety Office where Ms. Lawrence was based. Clearly she was not thought to be a murderer, because if she was she would have been suspended, not left in the hospital where she could have murdered more patients or colleagues. Lawrence was aware that the deaths on the ward were down to negligence in clinical care or natural causes, not murder. One day she came in to find Lucy very distressed because she was aware that a baby had collapsed but it had not been reported on the system. Lucy must have known that they were trying to make it look like all was now fine with her off the ward.

Lawrence stated she heard various nursing managers talking to Lucy about how she was being made a scapegoat for poor medical care and a lack of team working. The reason that Lucy was the easiest person to scapegoat was not her presence at the babies deaths (we know, in any case, that the timetable shown in court left out deaths and collapses where she was not present). No, the main reason was her personality. It does appear that far from the bland and vanilla Lucy that the press have painted, she was felt by at least some people, to be odd and quirky. And perhaps too vocal. And we all know what category strange and vocal women are dumped in.

Cue flying broomstick.

To be fair and play devil’s advocate, I cannot be one hundred percent sure that Lucy is innocent . What I do know for certain is that she did not have a fair trial and that no way has she anywhere near been proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. And the reasonable doubt keeps on piling in

A fresh audit has now been done and just been made public which has found that for many of the most rapid collapses Lucy was not on duty. This looked at a wider spike in death for the period concerned, ie June 2015 to June 2016. This is new evidence, not so easy to dismiss. I fail to see how any appeal court could ignore that. But the wheels of the CCRB, that Lucy’s lawyer now has to deal with, turn achingly slowly.

So we have the ‘tale of the ‘unexpected’ for why these deaths have been framed as murders, but what about the identity of the culprit? Why Lucy Letby? Why was she the sole suspect? Is there a theme here too?

In high profile murder investigations, where police can’t identify a motive, they think weirdo. This is because the general public are only too happy to have the local weirdo locked up out of sight out of mind.

It’s like an Agatha Christie who dunnit? Always the ugly little hunchback.

So what is the issue with Lucy’s personality? Is she neurodivergent , whatever that means?

I don’t do back door diagnosing from a distance. I believe there is too much of that. For a start I do not accept the medical DSM (diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association nor the ICD (WHO) model of neuro-divergence and added to that, even if I did go along with the establishment diagnostic systems, I do not believe you can accurately diagnose someone that you do not know personally, let alone someone you have never met. I have seen online shrinks claim Lucy has this or that condition. I would urge caution here. But we don’t need a box to look at what people are claiming about her behaviour. This ranges to ‘aloof and cold’ to ‘over friendly and intrusive’, with ‘inappropriate reactions’. She was accused of getting over friendly with parents of babies at times.

In recent years it has become apparent that female children have been historically missed compared to male children with a certain type of neurodivergence. I do not know whether this was the case with Lucy, but I do know for certain, that ‘difficult’ women who may not blend well into the crowd are liable to be blamed for all kinds of ills. Some of these women are driven to use extensive masking in order to blend in, and this is often misinterpreted by others. I would be very interested to hear from any of Lucy’s school teachers and how they found her as a child. Her initial assessor at university, Nicola Lightfoot, failed Lucy in her final nursing exams, claiming that she lacked the ability to pick up on non verbal clues of stress and anxiety. Such a quality would make human relationships potentially problematic. One nurse has complained that Lucy ran in excitedly to report a baby’s death to her while she was getting ready for her shift. She felt it inappropriate that Lucy acted that way.

It may well be that there is something different about the way Lucy reacts in difficult or upsetting situations. I hardly see how this makes her look guilty otherwise we need the courts to come up with a clearly defined set of acceptable responses for people to give in the vicinity of crimes so anyone not giving the required script responses can be blamed and arrested. In any case someone who has just harmed or murdered a baby is more than likely going to be covering up by displaying over the top sadness at the death, perhaps even fake tears, not running in shouting it from the rooftops.

Dr. Shoham Das , criminal psychologist, has stated the following:

‘One thing that really strikes me about Lucy Letby’s case is that there is no known history of previous offending, specifically no known history of previous violence. Having assessed hundreds of mentally distressed offenders, I would say that’s exceptionally rare. It’s unlike anything I have ever seen in my career before’.

I will cover more on this theme, my FOI to Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and what is coming out at the Thirwall Enquiry in part 2 of ‘Thirwall Theatre - Tales of the Unexpected’ .