This article is taken from the August-September 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
An element of doubt
Christopher Snowdon builds a compelling case for the prosecution, reassessing the evidence that convicted the nurse Lucy Letby of the murder of babies in her care at the Countess of Chester Hospital [VICTIM OR COLD, HEARTLESS MURDERER? JULY].
I am not one of those who believes there has necessarily been a miscarriage of justice through the misapplication of statistical likelihood, let alone a conspiracy to implicate the former nurse in order to save the reputation of others. But, in the interests of fairness, I think there is one part of the evidence to which Snowdon refers but from which important wider context has been omitted. This omission is important because it relates to evidence upon which those seeking to demonstrate Letby’s guilt placed significant weight.
Snowdon states that, when the police searched the nurse’s house “they found notes in which she wrote ‘I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them’ and ‘I AM EVIL I DID THIS’.”
We are left to assume this is, intentionally or not, a confession. But the circumstances in which Letby wrote these appalling words need to be appreciated. According to sources “close to the case” that briefed the Guardian, Letby unsurprisingly suffered great stress once she came under suspicion.
As a coping mechanism, she was advised by both her GP and by the Countess of Chester hospital head of occupational health and wellbeing to write down the feelings and worries she was experiencing, and the result was a series of rambling and scarcely coherent words crammed onto Post-it notes.
For instance, on the same Post-it note as the damning words Snowdon quotes she also wrote: “I haven’t done anything wrong”, “Police investigation Slander Discrimination Victimisation” and “I feel very alone and scared”.
Seen in the round, this seems less like a confession and more like the ramblings of someone having a nervous breakdown. None of which necessarily suggests she is innocent. But evidence should be presented fairly and in context.
Jennifer Ryan
Liverpool
In defence of Burke
Patrick West describes Anthony T. Kronman’s new book, True Conservatism, as “an impressive achievement and a timely book” [BOOKS, JULY]. But the content of his review suggests the book is just more superfluous output from academia.
Apparently, Kronman claims “Burke’s defence of religion is that it is useful, not that it is true” and that those who believe in God share the metaphysical perspective from which the leaders of the French Revolution judged the politics of France.
As one who has studied and published an edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, I am astonished at such patent denial and reversal of what Edmund Burke actually wrote in Reflections. As a champion of the truth of traditional Christian religion, Burke attacked the mentality and metaphysical perspective of the revolution.
That was the point of his book: to explain that philosophical clash and its real world consequences.
In fact, Burke was the first person to elaborate a systematic defence of tradition in the face of radical change in the wake of the French Revolution. That is why Burke is the father of modern Conservatism, not Spinoza or anyone else.
The paradigm of modern politics was established by the French Revolution — note the origins of the terms left- and right-wing. Thomas Paine was the first person in the anglosphere after the French Revolution to assert that paradigm so eloquently in his Rights of Man, explicitly written in hostile riposte to Burke’s Reflections. Those two books remain the strategic, historical explanation of our Western politics today.
If anyone wants to know more about the history of ideas favouring tradition over change, I suggest they read Roger Scruton’s 2017 book Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition and Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery, published in 2022.
Graham R. Catlin
Kergrist-Moëlou, France
Imposter Syndrome?
I was sorry to read about Henry Jeffreys’ experience with his former publisher, Unbound [BALANCING THE BOOKS, JULY]. I am proud to have funded his book Empire of Booze through Unbound and have recommended it to many friends, none of whom have been able to purchase it.
The hardback is a prized possession for another reason and an unexpected upside of the Unbound model: my name appears in the list of funders just below a certain Jeremy Corbyn.
However, I do have reason to suspect that the presence of the former Labour leader’s name in the list may not be entirely echt.
C.J. Corn
Hook, Hampshire
