Live! Sold out! Unimaginable misery!

The tyranny of live blogging turns even stories of unimaginable suffering and horror into an exercise in entertainment.

Previously: The Greatest Trick
Reporters convinced they know what evil looks like have failed to report properly on the Lucy Letby case and many others.

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The most harrowing two hours I’ve ever spent in a courtroom. I spent some of it writing through tears… 

That’s a reflection from a newspaper reporter who was sent to live blog the Lucy Letby sentencing hearing yesterday, having covered the whole trial.

I’ve spent time in the various dusty, cold, and depressing courtrooms of London covering cases that were far less harrowing than the Letby proceedings so I absolutely understand how that journalist feels. I also don’t believe that reporters should pretend to be totally objective robotic observers but — and it’s a Hollywood sign-sized BUT — the British press and wider media have indulged in an orgy of self-obsession, pop psychology, pulp mag bloodlust, and Hallmark Channel emotionalism over this story.

England’s last public execution took place over 155 years ago when Michael Barrett, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, was found guilty of involvement in the Clerkenwell Prison explosion (a plot to free another member of the IRB imprisoned there) despite producing witnesses who testified he had been in Scotland at the time. The main witness against him, Patrick Mullany, had given false testimony before and received free passage to Australia for his ‘evidence’ in the Barrett case.

Before the sentence was passed, Barrett delivered a speech from the dock:

I am far from denying, nor will the force of circumstances compel me to deny my love of my native land. I love my country and if it is murderous to love Ireland dearer than I love my life, then it is true, I am a murderer. If my life were ten times dearer than it is and if I could by any means redress the wrongs of that persecuted land by the sacrifice of my life, I would willingly and gladly do so. 

The Daily Telegraph reported the next day that Barrett…

… delivered a most remarkable speech, criticising with great acuteness the evidence against him, protesting that he had been condemned on insufficient grounds, and eloquently asserting his innocence. 

On the day after his execution, Michael Barrett’s death merited just one paragraph in The Glasgow Herald:

The execution of Michael Barrett for the Clerkenwell outrage, took place in London yesterday. The wretched criminal maintained his coolness to the last, and seemed to die easily. A great crowd assembled on the occasion, but there were no disturbances.

The Guardian’s report was more extensive (and in a tradition still upheld today, lifted much of its insight from the rival Express):

The execution of Michael Barrett, alias Jackson, who was convicted, at the April session of the Central Criminal Court, of the crime of murder, arising out of the fearful explosion at Clerkenwell Prison, took place yesterday morning, in front of the gaol at Newgate. The Express says:— “His demeanour was unaltered to the last, and those who heard his speech from the dock saw another striking illustration of the coolness, resolution, and fortitude he then displayed. Now was there ought of bravado in Barrett’s manner. Dressed in worn claret-coloured short coat and the shabby iron-grey trousers he wore during the trial, from the time he appeared on the drop — preceded by the old hangman Calcraft, and accompanied by a Roman Catholic priest — to the final moment, he was self-contained, calm, and (if the phrase may be applied to a condemned murderer) dignified… after a hasty glance towards Giltspur-street, where, from the position of the converging thoroughfares, the largest mass of people was assembled, he deliberately turned his back as if to shut out the sea of hungry eager faces before him. 

The courtroom live blog is modern journalism’s cheap concession for that “sea of hungry eager faces” who do not even have to leave their desks or the comfort of their sofas to feel the queasy, dirty thrill of punishment being delivered.

The Letby story, in all its horror and coldness, is a boon to newspaper websites and broadcast reporters who revel in shifting into their most dramatic and severe tone. That’s why repositories of ghouls like the Mail and Telegraph are working so hard to keep the bandwagon moving, even as Letby begins her sentence. It’s why there are so many words dedicated to how ‘cushy’ her prison will be and how the inquiry into her crimes should be constituted. But it goes far beyond that.

In the Telegraph yesterday, Tim Stanley — with his demeanour like a dodgy vicar in a Dickens sub-plot — raised the question of the death penalty (the referendum that much of the Right have been craving since capital punishment was abolished as a sentence for murder in 1969¹). Beneath the headline Death penalty for Lucy Letby? Let’s debate it properly, Stanley writes:

What makes Lucy Letby different from other killers is that her motive remains unclear and she doesn’t look the part. When I heard about the verdict and saw her photograph for the first time, I couldn’t believe she was guilty. She seemed so ordinary; so caring. It was only when I read into the strange pattern of deaths on her ward, how it had to be Nurse Lucy, and how this sweet girl did it, that I thought: “Hang her, shoot her or fry her. Just get her off my planet.” 

That is a grotesque sentiment and doubly so from someone who postures, through frequent appearances on Radio 4’s vestigial religious slot Thought For The Day, as a highly-committed Christian. It seems Stanley is more of an Old Testament fan and turns to Jesus only when the sentiments suit him and the blood-thirsty tendencies of The Daily Telegraph.

What’s striking though is that the Telegraph of 1868 was capable of expressing more humanity than the paper that bears that name in 2023. It wrote:

With Michael Barrett has expired, never to be resuscitated in these realms, the institution of the gallows as a branch of national education. He was the last man to be led out before the dismal scum of the city’s vilest rabble, to undergo as hideous and revolution a process of extinction as the most grotesque ingenuity could devise, or the most callous indifferentism tolerate. 

That the crowd assembled to view the very last ‘public exhibition’ of a kind which has proved vastly attractive in its day should have been a comparatively small one, notwithstanding the more than ordinary interest that has grown up round the criminal and his crime, is indeed so very remarkable as to set one casting about for a cause. Is it to risk a charge of egregious optimism to assert that the cause lies mainly, if not altogether, in the growth of self-respect, of decent thoughtfulness, decent feelings, true manly refinement, nay, even in real love of law and justice — which would not brook the spectacle of either being made a mockery — among the English people? 

I wish I could feel as optimistic as that writer 155 years. The British media has gone backwards from the Victorian desire for progress. The heart of the Letby coverage is the same bared fangs and cries for revenge that rippled through the crowd who came to watch Michael Barrett hang.

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1. The death penalty remained a potential sentence for causing a fire or explosion at a naval dockyard/ship/warehouse (until 1971); for spying on Royal Navy ships or establishments abroad (until 1981); for violent piracy (until 1998); for treason (until 1998); and for military offences (until 1998)