PETER HITCHENS: Cheshire police once boasted how it caught Lucy Letby - but now its chief has quit, with no mention of the controversial case. This is why I think it's all starting to crumble at the force...

What is going on in Cheshire’s police force. This bold body once made a boastful film about how they caught Lucy Letby. Now they have rather suddenly got rid of their Chief Constable, two years early.Almost at the top of his recent retirement statement, Chief Constable Mark Roberts made it clear he wasn’t going because he wanted to, or when he wanted to. He said: ‘I had hoped to take the force through to 2028, but the decision has been made to take the force in a different direction.’ Why? We are not told.I have used up millions of electrons trying to find out. Cheshire police would say only: ‘The Chief’s contract is a matter for the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC)’. I have sought a response from the office of the Cheshire PCC, but have received none. The Home Office in London say it is nothing to do with them.What would Sherlock Holmes, the great detective, do? I think he would look at the timing, and also at the things which remain unsaid, or that people have stopped saying.Do you remember when Ms Letby was still supposed to be a monster of cruelty, the undoubted murderer of many babies? Cheshire’s finest were so proud of feeling her collar. A senior investigating officer, Paul Hughes, said the police investigation ran for six years and was ‘like no other in scope, complexity and magnitude’. He said: ‘It was a detailed and painstaking process by a team of almost 70 police officers, and no stone was left unturned.’Well, we shall see about that. They even called their performance ‘Operation Hummingbird’, as if it was an invasion of somewhere.I am told they handed out hummingbird badges, desk ornaments and trinkets to each other to celebrate their supposed triumph. This went on for years. Mark Roberts, the former Chief Constable of the Cheshire Constabulary who has suddenly left his position Cheshire Police still believe they are right over the Lucy Letby case, writes Peter HitchensBut now their boss has revealed that he has been forced out, well before he wanted to go. Despite the fact that police forces are publicly financed bodies responsible to the voters, nobody has said why.Mr Roberts turns 59 on Tuesday and has held his post since 2021. If all is well with the Letby case, surely he should be able to have a couple of golden years before retiring? It seems not. His farewell statement, quite naturally, dwells on the many achievements of his force during his time in charge. But, oddly, he does not mention the investigation of Ms Letby – the most famous thing they have ever done. Why is that? His force still officially believes the case was one of its successes and that she deserves to die in jail.As recently as last January they exploded in noisy public displeasure when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refused to begin new prosecutions of the imprisoned nurse. The CPS said, devastatingly: ‘We concluded that the evidential test was not met in any of those cases.’The proper thing for the police might have been to maintain a dignified silence after this smack in the face from some of the country’s most skilled and senior prosecution lawyers. But they still insisted they were right.They said sulkily: ‘This is not the outcome that we had anticipated throughout our investigation; we were confident that we held enough evidence to take to the CPS… We believed the evidence submitted met the CPS charging standard. The CPS did not agree.’Absurdly, they asserted that the CPS announcement did ‘not affect or undermine the convictions of Lucy Letby’. But of course it does.The original prosecution should have been referred to the top of the CPS, to a national body called the Special Crime Division (SCD). There is no doubt that this is the rule in cases of alleged multiple murder, especially in hospitals. But for some reason that did not happen. What if it had? Would this lame, evidence-free prosecution ever have got to court in the first place?Interestingly, the argument about those new charges went on right up to Wednesday, August 5 this year. Some of the parents of the babies who had allegedly been harmed in these cases appealed to the CPS. They sought a ‘Victims’ Right of Review’. They asked, as was their right, for the CPS to reconsider its rejection of the new cases. But three weeks ago, the CPS announced the result of what it called ‘an extensive review of the case by a prosecutor independent of the original decisions, involving a re-examination of substantial evidence and material’ The review ‘upheld the original decision not to bring any further criminal charges’ against Lucy Letby.The CPS told media: ‘This represents a final decision by the CPS.’ And five days later, on Monday, August 10, Chief Constable Roberts announced his early departure. Is it all starting to crumble?I cannot say for sure because the people involved will not talk to me. But I think these events are hugely significant. The Soviet Army invades Czechoslovakia in 1968 following the Prague Spring demonstrationsWhy do Reds get away with repression?What a strange time of year this is – the very Dead of Summer, when nothing is supposed to happen. Yet major events often take place, and one burned on my memory is the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968.The Kremlin had previously crushed protest in Berlin in 1953 and Budapest in 1956. The West did nothing. And in 1968 we did nothing again. Isn’t that interesting? It’s what we had agreed in 1945 at Yalta, when we handed over eastern Europe to Stalin.In my view, if Moscow’s Communists had behaved like the Chinese and violently crushed democratic protest in 1989, they would still be in charge of Europe and half of Berlin, and Western politicians would be travelling to the Kremlin to suck up to the Politburo. Why, they might even make us call Moscow ‘Moskva’, as the Chinese Communist Party has browbeaten us into calling Peking ‘Beijing’. The contrast between then and now is really very odd.