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September 2026: Thirlwall Inquiry final report published (15 September) — a complete failure to protect babies, 17 recommendations, and no finding on the guilt of Lucy Letby or her convictions · CCRC review continues · inquests relisted to 2027 · Shoo Lee Panel: no medical evidence of deliberate harm.

Lucy Letby Facts

Investigative journalism

Private Eye and Lucy Letby: the M.D. column

Private Eye’s long-running medical column, M.D., is written by Dr Phil Hammond. He has been writing regularly about the Lucy Letby case since 2023, and was among the first UK journalists to raise systematic questions about the medical evidence. Private Eye also hosts his multi-part special report on the case, The Lessons of the Lucy Letby Case, on its website (see below).

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Why Private Eye’s coverage matters: M.D. is one of the few UK mainstream outlets that raised sustained, substantive medical-evidence concerns in print during the period when much of the press had moved on. The column is cited throughout the post-conviction review material and in academic commentary.

Private Eye is a paid magazine and the M.D. column appears in its issues; Private Eye also publishes Dr Hammond’s special report free to download (see below). This page summarises the column’s coverage in our own words; back-issue summaries (not full-text) are maintained by lucyletbyinnocence.com.

Private Eye’s special report: The Lessons of the Lucy Letby Case

Private Eye’s own website carries The Lessons of the Lucy Letby Case, described there as a Private Eye special report by Dr Phil Hammond (MD), published in numbered parts. Private Eye’s introduction says that after Lucy Letby was convicted in August 2023, a number of experts contacted Hammond because they believed the science and statistics presented at the trial were incomplete and flawed, and that in the report he sets out why he thinks she should be allowed to appeal. That is Private Eye’s account of its own series; it is an argument, not a finding, and the convictions stand.

In July 2026 Private Eye reported that Letby’s legal team had sent the CCRC a 100-page analysis by Dr Neil Aiton and Dr Hilde Wilkinson-Herbots, which challenges the trial evidence of the prosecution’s insulin expert; see the 9 July 2026 entry in latest developments and the state of the evidence.

Column coverage, in rough chronological order

Who is Dr Phil Hammond?

Dr Phil Hammond is a GP, NHS-safety campaigner and long-standing writer. He has written the M.D. column in Private Eye for more than twenty years. He first came to wider public attention for his reporting on the Bristol heart-surgery scandal in the 1990s — another NHS case in which clinicians repeatedly raised safety concerns that management was slow to escalate.

Read on

The M.D. column as institutional medical-affairs voice

Dr Phil Hammond’s M.D. column has been the principal mainstream UK institutional medical-journalism voice on the Letby case from late 2023 onwards. The column’s long track record on UK healthcare-institutional questions — including the Bristol heart babies inquiry, Mid Staffordshire, Morecambe Bay, and the Shipman inquiry — gives the Letby coverage particular institutional weight within the medical-journalism tradition.

The column’s fortnightly cadence has provided sustained issue-by-issue tracking of the unfolding evidential picture in a way that daily-broadsheet coverage cannot. M.D. column issues across 2023-2026 have covered the air-embolism evidential architecture, the insulin-immunoassay forensic-laboratory question, the shift-rota statistical problems, the Cannings-principle application, the Trust’s institutional response, and the post-conviction expert-evidence accumulation.

Why Private Eye’s coverage matters institutionally

Private Eye’s editorial structure as an independent satirical and investigative magazine, with no corporate-media-group dependencies, gives the M.D. column institutional independence that broadsheet medical-affairs columns historically have not had. The Letby coverage sits in a tradition of M.D.-column investigative work that includes the Bristol cardiac-surgery scandal, the Mid Staffordshire pre-Francis-Inquiry coverage, the Morecambe Bay pre-Kirkup-Inquiry coverage, and the mesh-implant-scandal coverage. Each of these subsequently became a mainstream-broadsheet and parliamentary-inquiry topic; the M.D. column was the early-engagement voice in each case.

The cross-spectrum journalism layer

The post-conviction journalism layer on the Letby case spans Private Eye M.D. (Hammond, centrist medical-affairs); Mail on Sunday (Hitchens, right-of-centre sustained columnist); the Guardian (institutional follow-up from the September 2024 investigation); The New European and Tortoise (d’Ancona, cross-spectrum long-form); the Times, Telegraph and Spectator (commentary across the political spectrum); and The New Yorker (Aviv, May 2024 international long-form). The cross-spectrum coverage establishes the conviction-safety question as a legitimate area of mainstream-UK-journalism inquiry. The M.D. column’s sustained engagement is one of the load-bearing data points in that institutional cross-spectrum establishment.