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Matthew Jeffery is one of Britain’s most experienced global talent and recruitment leaders, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.

As Conservatives, we are instinctively and unapologetically on the side of law and order.

We believe in strong policing, strong courts, and meaningful punishment. We believe that when terrible crimes are committed, justice must be firm, visible, and proportionate. Public safety comes first. Victims come first.

But Conservatism is also about fairness, equality before the law, and the integrity of justice itself. The strength of our system is not only that it punishes the guilty, but that it protects the innocent. Authority must be matched by accountability. Strength must be matched by restraint.

Law and order without fairness is not justice. It is simply power.

A core principle of British justice is that doubt should always be examined seriously, because the presumption of innocence is not a slogan but a safeguard.

That principle is why the case of Lucy Letby should give many Conservatives pause for reflection.

This is not an argument that she is innocent. I am not a lawyer. I am not privy to all the evidence. Nor is this an attempt to retry the case in the court of public opinion. She was convicted by a jury after a long and complex trial. That matters. Jury verdicts matter. The rule of law matters.

None of this should ever obscure the human reality at the centre of this case. Families lost children. Lives were devastated. Nothing written here diminishes that suffering. A commitment to careful review is not in tension with compassion for victims. It is part of respecting the seriousness of what happened.

However, a growing unease has emerged. More qualified voices are now raising technical questions about aspects of the evidence, the expert testimony, and the statistical interpretation presented at trial. This unease is no longer limited to social media speculation or fringe commentary. It is increasingly being voiced by clinicians, statisticians, and legal commentators who are asking whether every element of the prosecution case was as robust as first presented.

Several technical aspects of the case are now being actively debated in professional circles. This includes named clinical experts who have publicly challenged how specific medical research findings were applied in the courtroom context.

Questions about the evidential interpretation in the case have also been raised by senior Conservative MP David Davis, who has called for additional independent scrutiny. His intervention reflects a view that where serious expert disagreement emerges, review through established legal mechanisms strengthens rather than weakens confidence in justice.

First, the role of expert medical evidence. Complex neonatal cases involve extremely fragile patients, multiple variables, and sometimes tragic outcomes even under proper care. Some experts have questioned whether alternative medical explanations were sufficiently explored or presented with enough weight. Others warn that hindsight bias can shape interpretation once suspicion has formed.

One example often cited in this debate is Dr Shoo Lee, a senior neonatologist and researcher, who has publicly questioned aspects of how certain medical indicators were interpreted in relation to air embolism and related mechanisms. He has stated that research he was associated with has been interpreted more definitively in court than he believes the underlying science supports. Other experts disagree with his assessment. That disagreement does not determine guilt or innocence, but it does illustrate that elements of the medical interpretation remain professionally contested and therefore open to structured review.

Prosecution experts, including Dr Dewi Evans, continue to defend the medical indicators and patterns as consistent with deliberate harm, views that were tested in court. More broadly, the prosecution case and supporting expert evidence continue to be defended by official authorities and were accepted by the trial court and jury after detailed adversarial testing.

Second, the use of statistical patterns. Cases that rely in part on clustering can appear compelling, but they are also controversial. Statistical reasoning in criminal trials is difficult and has contributed to past miscarriages of justice. There are ongoing questions about how such patterns should be interpreted and how confidently they can support criminal conclusions without distortion.

Third, disclosure and process questions. As with several historic wrongful convictions, debate has emerged around whether all relevant material, alternative theories, and internal hospital factors were fully examined and tested in court. That does not prove error, but it does justify scrutiny.

None of this proves innocence. It does not overturn a verdict. But it does justify careful examination of how the verdict was reached. That examination belongs properly in appellate courts, independent review bodies, and formal inquiries, not social media campaigns.

Many experienced prosecutors and clinicians remain fully confident in the convictions and the evidence presented at trial. Their confidence should also be part of any serious review conversation.

The recent Netflix documentary has brought these technical debates into the mainstream and renewed public discussion.

The debate has become increasingly polarised. Some statisticians, clinicians, and academic commentators have questioned the evidential safety of aspects of the conviction, while others, including official voices and some affected families, strongly reject miscarriage of justice claims as unfounded and distressing. That divide is precisely why a careful, evidence based, institution led review process matters.

It is also important to state the current legal position clearly. The convictions remain fully in force and whole life sentences are being served. Appeals to date have been unsuccessful, and the Crown Prosecution Service recently confirmed that no further charges will be brought after reviewing additional evidence. An application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission is ongoing and includes extensive new expert material, but the review process is complex and no referral back to the Court of Appeal has been made at this stage. The Thirlwall Inquiry report is expected after Easter 2026, and several inquests have opened and been adjourned pending its findings. None of these developments overturn the verdicts, but they do explain why continued professional scrutiny is taking place.

If confidence in a verdict is to remain strong, the evidential and procedural foundations should be able to withstand structured, transparent questioning. The following are not accusations. They are review questions. They are the kinds of questions a robust justice system should be able to answer clearly and calmly.

A large number of technical review questions have now emerged from clinicians, statisticians, and legal commentators. These cover incident selection, medical interpretation, insulin assay reliability, statistical clustering, expert methodology, disclosure, and governance.

To illustrate the nature of these concerns, a brief sample includes:
• How were charged incidents selected from the wider pool of deaths and collapses?
• How were statistical clustering risks explained to the jury?
• Were key medical interpretations independently verifiable through laboratory results, imaging, or post mortem findings?

I have put together a full structured list of over 50 review questions. These are not accusations, but the kind of evidential clarity questions a robust justice system should be able to answer calmly and transparently.

Conservatives should not be afraid of this kind of questioning. Our justice system is adversarial by design. It is meant to be tested, challenged, and reviewed. Appeals, independent reviews, and forensic re analysis are not weaknesses. They are safeguards built into the system.

Even if every conviction stands exactly as decided, institutional learning still matters. Hospitals, regulators, prosecutors, and courts should examine how evidence is gathered, interpreted, and presented in complex medical cases. Justice is strengthened when systems learn, not when they become defensive.

Questioning evidential process is not the same as disputing verdicts. It is how strong justice systems maintain legitimacy.

This is not only about one case. It connects to a wider Conservative debate about punishment, certainty, and irreversibility.

I have long believed that in the most extreme and certain cases, the death penalty can be morally justified, not as vengeance, but as ultimate justice for the most horrific crimes. But cases like this introduce a sobering counterweight. When convictions depend heavily on expert interpretation and pattern evidence, the margin for error can be difficult to measure. If even a small risk of wrongful conviction exists, the case for irreversible punishment becomes far more fragile. A system that cannot guarantee perfection must confront the consequences of finality.

The wheels of justice must move slowly and carefully. If, and it is a very big if, there has been a miscarriage of justice here, delay compounds harm. Reviews must be thorough, independent, and timely. Confidence in verdicts depends not on refusing questions, but on answering them transparently.

There is also a human dimension that should not be ignored. If someone is guilty, humane treatment remains a moral obligation of the state. If someone is innocent, the suffering imposed by wrongful conviction is almost beyond comprehension. Either way, our standards must remain civilised.

For Conservatives, supporting law and order should also mean supporting rigorous review, evidential integrity, and procedural fairness. Strength and humility can coexist. Authority and accountability must coexist. That means supporting independent expert review where appropriate, full disclosure standards, and transparent responses to credible technical criticism. Not to weaken justice, but to reinforce it.

Continued professional scrutiny does not imply error, only that in cases of exceptional complexity, justice is strengthened by openness rather than silence.

Serious questions are now being asked. Serious people are asking them. The justice system should not fear that. It should welcome the chance to answer.

I hope that the Conservative leadership, including the Shadow Justice Secretary, Nick Timothy, and the party leader, Kemi Badenoch, will review and clearly restate the party’s position on justice safeguards in complex cases.

Conservatism should stand for a justice system that is firm, accountable, open to challenge, and capable of correcting mistakes through proper legal channels, calmly, lawfully, and with dignity.

Dr Robert Seely MBE is author of ‘The New Total War’, ConservativeHome foreign affairs columnist and a former Conservative MP. 

What makes a man want to assassinate an enemy with the poison from an obscure, jungle frog – especially when your target is already rotting in one of your country’s most brutal penal colonies?

Last weekend, Britain, with four others, announced that deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had been murdered with a unique poison, extracted from the dart frog, found only in the South American jungle. Tribes from that continent use the poison in their darts to kill prey, hence the name. Only one man would have ordered this execution, Russian president Vladimir Putin, for whom Alexei Navalny had become a fixation.

State-sponsored assassination, especially from Russia and especially with poisoning, is making a comeback. What’s behind it?

First, assassination fits into Russia’s highly flexible theory of warfare, where all the tools of state power can and are used against an adversary. Putin believes he and his nation have been in conflict with Ukraine since 2005 and the West since 2007. As a former KGB – Russian secret service – operative, he was trained in political warfare: not only assassination but disinformation, subversion, blackmail, as well as terrorism, to name but a few. He knows these tools and appreciates them.

Second, if you are a dictator who cannot stand opposition and is not constrained by traditional morality, killing your enemies is, at least in the short term, an effective way of silencing them. He’s not the first, and he won’t be the last dictator to do so. The Iranian regime, for example, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, murdered many Iranian dissidents across Europe. Putin, since the early 2000s, has used assassination liberally, aided by the Russian state. In 2006, Russia’s Parliament passed Federal Law No. 35-FZ “On Counteraction Against Terrorism” legalising foreign assassination. The same year saw the dramatic killing in London of Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with a radioactive substance, polonium-210 (the 210 refers to the specific isotope).

However, there are other forms of assassination used by Russia apart from poison.

Shooting is an obvious choice. However, it is not subtle, you generally have to get close to the target to conduct the assassination, and given that CCTV is now commonplace throughout Western cities, getting away can be complex even if you can jam some cameras.

Shooting has its use. Russia’s ability to conduct complex overseas operations was thought to have suffered badly after the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats from Europe and the US after the poisoning of Russian defector Sergei Skripal in 2017. Now, Russia’s alphabet soup of secret agencies; internal spies the FSB, external spies the SVR and general dirty work providers, Russia’s GRU Military Intelligence, sometimes work through organised crime or petty criminals located through the dark web. Shooting is a relatively easy alternative for such ‘hire and burn’ assassins, a recent example being the assassination of the former speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament a few months ago. The alleged killer, whose son had died in the war, had been recruited and then cruelly blackmailed by the Russians; kill the politician and we will tell you where your deceased son’s body is.

There are other forms of murder used reasonably frequently. Death by ‘suicide’ by jumping – being thrown – from high buildings has become almost commonplace, especially amongst senior people in the Russian oil and gas industry. However, many of these deaths may be score-settling amongst the highly criminalised elites rather than state killing, a throwback to the ‘wild west’ capitalism of the 1990s. ‘Suicide by window’ has risks akin to shooting; you need to be on familiar ground, know where CCTV is, etc.

Other forms of assassination are more subtle. Since the 1960s, the KGB—now the FSB – worked on staged car crashes as forms of assassination, and rumours persist to this day that a leading Ukrainian opposition leader was killed in March 1999 in such an ‘accident’. If done well, it is almost impossible to prove. The inventor of this technique was KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who also allegedly invented aeroplane hijacking as a political weapon in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East.

But poisoning has emerged as the favoured assassination tool for Putin. Here are some possible reasons to explain the thinking.

First, poison is versatile. It can be very high profile or very low profile. It can leave no trace. There is a poison for every circumstance. Of the several dozen unexplained deaths in the UK and Europe of Putin opponents, how many were natural? We will probably never know. Sophisticated poisons are difficult to identify.

Poison can also take time to kick in. You do not need to be at the scene when it kicks in.

Poisoning can also be public and send a dramatic message, a theatrical act that grabs the imagination of the world, such as Litvinenko’s, whose body collapsed slowly and painfully over several weeks as Britain and much of the world watched.

So poison – and assassination more broadly – induces not only death but also fear and a message. It is a psychological tool aimed not only at Russian targets but also others too. Belgium’s prime minister was recently threatened with consequences that would last “for eternity” if he touched Russian state assets held in the Euroclear financial depository in Brussels. If that is not a threat to kill, I don’t know what is.

Until now, Russian poisoners – there is one FSB unit and one GRU unit that do this work – have deployed three main types: opioids, used for example in the October 2002 Dubrovka Theatre siege in Moscow where some 130 hostages died along with the hostage-takers. Second, radioactive poisons, of which Litvinenko’s murder was the most infamous, although the poison may have been tested on a live subject, imprisoned Chechen separatist leader Lecha Islamov, in 2004. Third, dioxins: for example, Viktor Yushchenko, the anti-Moscow Ukrainian presidential candidate, was poisoned using a dioxin in late 2004. He survived, but his face bears the pockmarked scars to this day.

Turning back to Navalny’s murder, it was, for Putin, highly personal. Navalny was not just a regime critic, whose corruption investigations embarrassed Putin’s inner circle. He was an emblem of a different future for Russia, more Western, more law-governed compared with Putin’s regime combining an all-powerful secret police and highly violent and ruthless organised crime. In murdering Navaly, Putin killed a man and an alternative future for Russia.

Like Ivan the Terrible or Vlad the Impaler, Putin sometimes kills his enemies in very memorable ways: a comment on his state of mind and his way of governing; murder and fear, and Navalny’s murder was an event which Putin wanted to mark.

Did Putin want the means of death advertised? Perhaps he wanted Navalny’s dart frog death to be for his private enjoyment? But if he did expect that the truth would emerge from the depths of the Polar Wolf Penal Colony, the message was similar to that sent with the killing of Litvinenko; if you oppose the Putin regime, think about every door handle you touch, every letter you pick up, and every drink you accept.

And by murdering someone already in prison, Putin added an extra twist, summed up in a Russian proverb; beat your own, so that others fear you. His message: if this is how I treat my own, just think how I will treat you.

Cllr Seb James is a councillor for Bowbrook Ward on Worcestershire County Council.

When I was elected to Worcestershire County Council in May 2025, I arrived hopeful that good-faith scrutiny, honest numbers, and pragmatic compromise would carry the day. Worcestershire had just undergone a political earthquake: after two decades of Conservative control, the council fell to no overall control, with Reform UK becoming the largest group (27 of 57 seats), two short of a majority.

That political shift came amid a worsening financial outlook. In early 2025, Cabinet papers set a net budget requirement of £495.6m for 2025/26 and proposed a 4.99 per cent council tax rise—the legal maximum without special permission—split between general services (2.99 per cent) and the adult social care precept (two per cent). At the time, the council warned that exceptional financial support (central government permission to borrow or sell capital assets to fund day‑to‑day costs) would be necessary to avoid issuing a Section 114 “bankruptcy” report.

By late 2025, with Reform leading a minority administration, the council’s fiscal position had deteriorated further, and the gap between campaign rhetoric and governing reality became impossible to ignore.

During the campaign, Reform UK repeatedly styled itself as the party that would “cut waste and taxes.” But in December 2025, Worcestershire’s Reform‑led cabinet applied to the government for permission to raise council tax above five per cent, including an option up to ten per cent, the largest contemplated rise in the county’s modern history.

The council’s deputy leader and finance lead, Cllr Rob Wharton, publicly framed the application as seeking “tools in the box” in case the government settlement was worse than expected: “At the moment, just to be clear, five per cent is what is factored into our plans, but it does depend on that settlement.”

For residents, the numbers matter most: Worcestershire’s Band D county‑precept (excluding police, fire, and district precepts) stood at around £1,615 in 2025/26. An eight per cent county‑level rise would add about £129; a ten per cent rise could add ~£162 per year for a Band D household.

The council’s own budget booklets and cabinet papers lay out the pressures starkly. For 2025/26, Worcestershire’s net budget was £495.6m, with £359.5m expected from council tax and £87.5m from business rates; the budget also drew £33.6m in exceptional financial support and £15m from reserves to balance. The expenditure side shows Adults’ Social Care and Health at £375.3m gross, Children & Education at £168.0m, and Home‑to‑School Transport at £45.8m, underscoring the scale and rigidity of statutory service pressures.

In late 2025, cabinet papers and trade press coverage detailed a 2026/27 funding gap in the region of £73–74m, with multi‑year projections of cumulative shortfalls exceeding £270m by 2028/29—numbers that dwarf any savings available from trimming overheads. This is the lived arithmetic of local government: every one per cent rise in council tax yields roughly £4m for Worcestershire, meaning even a ten per cent increase would leave tens of millions still to find through cuts, borrowing, asset sales, or further support.

The defining lesson of my first months is simple: don’t over‑promise. Reform’s pitch to voters—lower taxes through cutting “waste”—was always going to be tested by Worcestershire’s hard numbers. By October, the council’s own consultation documents acknowledged that previously keeping council tax “as low as possible” was “no longer sustainable” given the pressures in adults’ and children’s social care.

When the Reform‑led cabinet then sought permission to exceed the cap—up to ten per cent—it crystallised the contradiction. National and local outlets reported the move as potentially “the biggest council tax rise the county has ever seen,” and noted that the administration also sought exceptional financial support of around £43.6m.

To be fair, Reform’s finance leadership has consistently said the planning assumption is five per cent, and that the ten per cent option exists for flexibility pending the Local Government Finance Settlement. That nuance matters; it’s on the record. But for residents, the overarching impression is stark: a party that promised tax restraint now contemplates higher bills—because the spreadsheets leave them little choice.

Another striking reality is the gap between public performance and private pragmatism. In live‑streamed meetings, party lines harden. The posture is often ideological, nodding to national branding—what many observers would recognise as the “Team Farage” mood music. Yet off‑camera, in corridor conversations and cross‑party briefings, Reform councillors are more vulnerable, more open to cooperation, and more candid about the arithmetic. That contrast isn’t unique to any one group; political theatre is universal. But here, the delta between broadcast certainty and backstage compromise feels unusually wide.

One of the hardest realities I’ve faced as a new councillor is watching hard‑working, well‑intentioned colleagues stumble—not because they lack commitment or intelligence, but because they are shackled to a national tagline that doesn’t fit local life.

In Worcestershire—a landlocked county with no coastline, no ports, and no migrant boats—Reform UK campaigned under the banner of “Stop the Boats.” It was a slogan designed for national headlines, not for the granular realities of county governance. Yet here, it became part of the pitch, printed on leaflets and echoed in hustings. Residents asked, sometimes wryly, what boats we were stopping on the River Severn. The answer, of course, was none.

This disconnect matters. When a party’s identity is built on national culture‑war soundbites, local councillors inherit promises they cannot possibly deliver. And when those promises collide with the unforgiving arithmetic of adult social care budgets and statutory transport duties, the fallout is brutal: credibility erodes, trust fractures, and councillors—many of whom genuinely want to serve their communities—are left defending positions they never wrote and cannot reconcile with reality.

While this drama has unfolded, I’ve focused on what matters most: delivering for residents.

Since May, I’ve:

• Secured urgent repairs for dangerous potholes in rural lanes after months of complaints.
• Worked with local schools to improve home-to-school transport reliability for SEND pupils.
• Helped families access social care support by cutting through red tape and escalating cases.
• Championed community engagement, hosting open surgeries and Q&A sessions so residents can understand the council’s financial challenges and have their say.
• Pushed for transparency, calling for clearer budget communications and ward-level impact summaries so people know where their money goes.

These aren’t headline-grabbing moves—but they make a real difference. And they reflect what local government should be: service first, slogans never.

Watching this unfold has been sobering. I’ve seen hard‑working councillors fall under the weight of national slogans that don’t fit local realities. In a landlocked county, Reform promised to “Stop the Boats”—a tagline that might win airtime on national TV but means nothing to families worried about potholes, care packages, and school transport. When politics becomes theatre, communities pay the price.

And this is where I believe the Conservative comeback begins. Because while others chase headlines, we never stopped working after defeat. We stayed embedded in our communities—answering casework, fixing problems, listening to residents. We know that real leadership isn’t about slogans; it’s about service, substance, and solutions.

That’s why I’m confident: when the dust settles, voters will remember who stood by them, who told the truth about tough choices, and who kept delivering even when the cameras weren’t rolling. That’s the Conservative way—and it’s why we will win again.

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