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With M.D.: "Lucy Letby has instructed a new barrister, Mark McDonald, to draft her application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). McDonald has told MD his first task will be to conduct a review of the scientific and clinical evidence using the best available named experts, and publish it. If it draws very different scientific conclusions from those of Dr Dewi Evans, the lead prosecution expert, the CCRC will be under pressure…"
With Dr B Ching: "A Labour-commissioned rail review has given outsourcers an opportunity to urge the party to rediscover its fondness for public private partnerships (PPPs). Last year Labour asked former Siemens UK CEO Jürgen Maier to lead a review of how it could deliver rail projects when in government. His team included Arup's 'global rail leader', a former Atkins chairman, the managing director of Story Plant ('a key supplier to the rail industry'), and Siemens Mobility and Bombardier Transportation ex-executives…"
With Remote Controller: "In Our Mutual Friend, Mrs Betty Higden reveals that she likes the foundling Sloppy to read the paper aloud because, presumably on the court report pages, 'he do the police in different voices'. Dickens gives a minor character a line so resonant that it was TS Eliot's first title for the poem we know as The Waste Land. And the commissioning strategy of UK terrestrial TV drama executives is also increasingly Sloppy – at 9pm, they do the police procedural in voices only slightly different…"
With Old Sparky: "For months now this column has been urging those politicians and green advocates who claim 'renewable energy is cheap' and will 'reduce all our bills' to watch carefully for this year's subsidies auction. As predicted in Eye 1631, the results out last week demonstrate the exact opposite of their claims. When will they accept the obvious – that cleaner electricity costs more?…"
With Lunchtime O'Boulez: "The Bath Festival Orchestra has rebranded itself as, er, Chromatica, which doesn't seem to mean much (unless it's a surprise reference to a 2020 Lady Gaga concept album of that name). But there's hidden purpose in the change. The BFO has history: it was founded in 1959 by Yehudi Menuhin when he ran the Bath Festival, and was a central part of its then illustrious programming. But the festival is a ghost of what it was…"
With Slicker: "Lord (Peter) Mandelson's prospects of becoming the next British ambassador in Washington will not have been assisted by the winding-up petition filed last Friday by HM Revenue & Customs against Bank of London Group Holdings, where he is deputy chairman and senior non-executive director of the parent company, but not the bank…"
Letter from Manila
From Our Own Correspondent: "For its apostles, emerging from the 2008 financial crash, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would prove the ultimate safe haven: a universal digital currency safe from failing banks and complicit regulators anywhere in the world. The Philippines' experience has been somewhat different. In the late 2010s/early 2020s, young Filipinos were being offered a new crypto currency called Smooth Love Potion…"