PETER HITCHENS: Did police help Letby witness revise key evidence - when new facts wrecked his story?

By PETER HITCHENS, COLUMNIST AND COMMENTATOR Published: 01:00, 2 August 2026 | Updated: 01:00, 2 August 2026 It's like a scene from one of those hard-bitten American crime movies of the 1930s. The police and a key prosecution witness are discussing problems with their evidence in a fast-approaching trial. It turns out that the facts in the case have changed, rather awkwardly. It is a glum scene. And the cops say to the witness: ‘Yeah, we can’t change the data.’ And then they say: ‘But we can change the interpretation of it.’ It’s easy to imagine, isn’t it, in some smoky interrogation cellar in a dingy precinct of Los Angeles or Chicago? But in fact it happened in the pretty English city of Chester, in April 2024. The witness was Dr Ravi Jayaram, once a rising star of TV, now the only person who has ever come close to seeing the nurse Lucy Letby doing anything wrong.  Amazingly, Letby is now in prison till she dies, for seven murders and seven attempted killings. This is despite there being no hard evidence that she harmed anybody. So this is quite important. But is it what it seems? Dr Jayaram gave evidence to both of Ms Letby’s trials on the same event. His evidence to her second trial in 2024 led to headlines that he had caught her ‘virtually red-handed’ standing by a seriously ill baby. Dr Ravi Jayaram says he caught Lucy Letby ‘virtually red-handed’ standing by a seriously ill baby but, Peter Hitchens asks, 'Is it what it seems?'  Though he did not witness her actively harming the tiny child, he said she was failing to help when the infant was clearly in difficulties. As the years have gone by, many have begun to wonder if it was more virtual than red-handed. My colleague Glen Owen wrote in The Mail on Sunday in 2025 about an explosive email, written by Dr Jayaram in 2017, which appears to go against his later evidence that he found her up to no good. In that email, Dr Jayaram wrote that he went to investigate Baby K because Letby herself had raised the alarm and asked him for help – not because he had suspicions about the nurse. Now comes this conversation between Dr Jayaram and the police. The full transcript of this exchange was obtained last week by the distinguished investigative journalist Cleuci de Oliveira. In the transcript, Dr Jayaram struggles to cope with the fact that swipe records for one crucial door were back to front. They appeared to show a key nurse leaving the Neonatal Unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital when she was in fact entering it. This is important because Dr Jayaram’s account involved Ms Letby being alone while the other nurse on the ward was absent. His account, in Letby’s first trial, depended partly on those records. Shortly before the second trial, Dr Jayaram met Cheshire Police. During a half-hour conversation with Darren Riley (a civilian investigator) and Detective Constable Kate Millins, this key exchange takes place. Dr Jayaram’s account involved Letby being alone while the other nurse on the ward was absent Dr Jayaram: I’m just looking at the swipe data now, to look at the timings… So, it was this, where it says that Jo Williams [another nurse] left the unit at 3:47? CI Riley: That actually means coming back. Dr Jayaram: Oh, is that when she comes back? CI Riley: Yeah, we can’t change the data. CI Riley: But we can change the interpretation of it. The three carry on for some minutes discussing this confusing mess in what was once key evidence. They also discuss various other aspects of Dr Jayaram’s testimony. When I asked Cheshire Police about it, they said they would not be commenting. Dr Jayaram has yet to answer an email I sent him, asking for his response. Former Tory Cabinet minister, Sir David Davis, said: ‘It is deeply troubling to see what appears to be the police and a key witness reshaping the interpretation of the evidence to Lucy Letby’s disadvantage in advance of her retrial.’ He called for another force to review Cheshire Police’s handling of the case. The late John Prescott still fills us all with mixed feelings. Many of us enjoyed the day he punched a man who threw an egg at him, and I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d sloshed the fat, plummy Tory MP who used to jeer snobbishly at him about his old trade as a waiter.  The late John Prescott lost the keys to his ministerial red boxes so frequently that he was given a total of 16 spare keys Now it emerges that he kept losing the keys to his ministerial red boxes, so often that he was issued with 16 spare keys between 1997 and 2007. Alas, he would sometimes try to smash his way back into the box with a cold chisel and a lump hammer, a scene all too easy to imagine.  But the boxes are tougher than they look. The old-established firm of Barrow, Hepburn and Gale, which has been making and restoring the boxes for decades, tells me he still failed to get them open. The mangled cases were classed as ‘compromised’ and had to be replaced.  Nigel Farage seems to be carving out a new life for himself as a victim. It’s sad to watch. Imagine the old Nigel demanding that the police arrest someone for posting a picture of a T-shirt.  In my view he is quite wrong about Green Supremo Zack Polanski’s Instagram, or whatever it was. A guillotine is not a murder weapon. Imagine attacking someone with this unwieldy machine in the street.  In Peter Hitchens' home town, Oxford, he often sees people wearing T-shirts similar to this one that Zack Polanski shared on Instagram Polanski’s action is actually worse than Farage thinks, but in a deeper way. Left wingers claim to be furiously opposed to all executions, but they aren’t really. As experience shows, they’re actually quite keen on killing people for having the wrong opinions. And you can buy, for about £20 on the internet, a popular T-shirt bearing a picture of a guillotine and the words ‘a platform for fascists’.  I see people wearing them in Oxford, my home town. By ‘fascist’ they mean people like me. They’ll say it’s a joke. But is it?  As recently as 1959, similar Western fun revolutionaries were cheering on the Cuban firing squads run by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Havana. The moat of the La Cabana fortress was disgustingly wet with their opponents’ blood. And plenty of respectable anti-death penalty Leftists in 1930s Britain excused Stalin’s murderous purges.