Investigative journalism
Private Eye — 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.
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 print magazine and does not publish its columns free online. This page summarises the column’s published coverage in our own words. Readers wanting the full text should buy the magazine; back-issue summaries (not full-text) are maintained by lucyletbyinnocence.com.
Column coverage, in rough chronological order
Oct 2023
M.D. raises the air-embolism question
The M.D. column's earliest published piece foregrounding the air-embolism diagnostic problem — that the skin signs described at trial did not match the Lee & Tanswell criteria the Crown relied on.
Nov 2023
The insulin test and the forensic-use gap
M.D. sets out why a Roche immunoassay screening result, uncorroborated by confirmatory testing, is not normally treated as forensic proof of exogenous insulin.
Early 2024
Dr Dewi Evans and the courts
M.D. reports the 2023 family-court characterisation of a separate Evans report as 'worthless', and the chronology of Dr Evans's own approach to Cheshire Police before formal instruction.
Mid-2024
Statistics and the Lucia de Berk parallel
M.D. walks readers through Prof. Richard Gill's de Berk-parallel argument and the selection-bias problem with the shift-rota chart.
Late 2024 – 2025
Unit conditions: the other story
A sustained M.D. sequence on understaffing, the pharmacy and plumbing incidents, and what Datix records showed about the Countess of Chester neonatal unit in 2015–16.
Feb 2025
The Shoo Lee Panel press conference — M.D. reports
Contemporaneous M.D. coverage of the 14-member international panel press conference and its unanimous case-by-case finding of no medical evidence of deliberate harm.
2025 ongoing
The CCRC application and the Thirlwall Inquiry
Rolling coverage of the CCRC application and the 2024–2026 Thirlwall hearings.
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.