The Lucy Letby Case and the Scourge of Experts

Human beings crave certainty but there are very few certainties available. One of them is that the sun will rise tomorrow. Another is the solar eclipse which can be predicted with forensic certainty to an exact second decades, centuries – even millennia – ahead.

Almost everything else is uncertain, from the weather to our own individual lifespans as we negotiate the precarious experience of existence and watch around us as others die from disease, accidents or other events, until it is our own turn.

The ability to predict eclipses, which evolved during the historical era of the last 5,000 years as mathematics was developed, has given human beings the conceit that we can predict other phenomena. But in the absence of certainty, we have had to substitute all sorts of other techniques which can now be grouped under the umbrella of modelling.

Modelling was never more evident than during Covid when an unholy competition emerged among those labelled scientists and experts by the Government and the media to predict the most apocalyptic prospect, and thereby legitimate unprecedented controls and mechanisms to assuage the forces of fate. In the absence of any absolute and unequivocal certainty, factionalism emerged. 

It doesn’t matter what your position is on any of this; we could all see how different associations of ‘experts’ emerged, each subscribing to a variant interpretation of the disease and variant depictions of where it would lead us. Some presented their predictions as certainties, others were more circumspect. Plenty of people in government and among the wider public were prone to selecting one vision over another and treating it as a certainty set in stone and then taking up opposed stances. Often it seemed that imposing one view over another for the sake of it was the main priority.

The modelling created alternate realities, ones that only existed in the minds of the modellers. In an age of the cult of the expert, these predictions were treated as if they were certainties of the same calibre as the prospect of a solar eclipse, even though they had not happened and indeed never did. The predictions varied wildly and changed over time. 

Since the forecasts were not all the same, it was obvious that either most or all would turn out to be wrong. It was as if there were factions of would-be eclipse predictors with no command of astronomical maths, all floundering around and guessing because it was impossible for them to have access to all the factors that would determine the actual outcome.

Who now gives a moment’s thought to Covid modelling? Like gossamer caught in a hurricane, it was all dispersed and destroyed by the forces of what actually happened.

That’s a good metaphor, because climate change is another topic area where the total uncertainty of tomorrow’s weather, let alone the next century’s, is being bombarded by apocalyptic climate modelling predictions, usually predicated on the ‘data’ of only a few decades. We are being subjected to epoch-changing decisions based on that modelling.

This craving for certainty pervades every other part of our lives and societies. One of them is when cases come before a court of law where the evidence is not unequivocal. The outcome depends on whether the case for the prosecution or the defence can convince a jury that their version of the ‘truth’ is a ‘certainty’ and beyond reasonable doubt.

You might consider the events of the late 18^th Dynasty in Egypt to be impossibly remote and irrelevant. But they exhibit perfectly why the Lucy Letby case has become such a bone of contention.

The key figure is the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1352–1336 BC) who relocated the court to a new city at Amarna as the centrepiece of his new solar religion, now used as the name for the period of his rule. He then disappeared, along with other key members of his family, who included his queen Nefertiti. He was eventually succeeded by Tutankhamun (c. 1336–1327 BC), who may or may not have been his son and who initiated the restoration of the old gods.

Given how long ago that all was, it is unsurprising that almost everything about the period is uncertain – whether dates, relationships, whether people died natural deaths or were murdered and the identity of some of the royal mummies attributed to a few short turbulent years. 

The evidence, such as it is – ranging from a collection of unnamed mummies to graffiti and inscriptions – has been subjected to a litany of interpretations by well over a century’s worth of Egyptologists. The arguments go round in circles. They come and go and come again. They contradict each other. There is nothing definitive or conclusive.

There is an addiction among the experts involved to adopting a position, each founded on the nebulous qualifications of ‘expertise’ and wheeled out as the only basis of substantiating any version of events, however outlandish. Any reconstructions have been dependent on the limited and ambiguous evidence available. Even the DNA evidence from the mummies has been interpreted in wildly contradictory ways.

No wonder then that an Australian historian, Ronald Ridley, was able to write in his book Akhenaten: A Historian’s View (2019), “There is no statement in Amarnan studies which cannot be contradicted.”

Which brings me to the Lucy Letby case. I must make it clear that I have no position on whether she is guilty or not of what she was accused. I am not in any position to do so, and there is nothing about the case that has taken me any further towards that. What is clear to me is that, like the obscure events that surrounded the fate of the Egyptian royal family over 3,000 years ago, what happened at the Countess of Chester hospital a decade ago is no more or less obscure.

No-one ever wrote down what happened to Akhenaten at the time. No Egyptian ever researched or wrote an authoritative and definitive history afterwards, though even that would have been bound to be filled with debatable claims. Precisely what happened is lost.

It took the clearance of bodies from the crypt at Christ Church, Spitalfields, some decades back to demonstrate in a blind study that the techniques used by physical anthropologists to estimate age at death from skeletons were hopelessly unreliable. The coffin plates gave the true age at death. Those under 40 were over-aged, those over 70 under-aged, by the anthropologists. Fewer than 30% were correctly aged, but some were out by 20 or even 30 years. Yet the experts involved had made careers out of their now demonstrably flawed techniques.

Imagine a large and complex Lego model. Then dismantle it and lose half or more of the parts – perhaps nearly all of them. Suppose a new model is built from the remaining parts to restore the original. It looks coherent, even convincing, but unless the new builder had seen the original, then there is no possibility of proving that the replica remotely resembles what had existed before.

Nevertheless, the new model now subsists as an alternate reality, a new form of certainty. Except of course that the remaining bricks could have been built into all sorts of variations. Imagine how groups of Lego builders could then become wedded to their individual versions.

This seems to be a peculiar attraction for human beings, especially those labelled as ‘experts’. Most of us have absolutely no means of assessing the validity of their expertise. It was one thing to be a Babylonian mathematician-astronomer who could predict eclipses. Even the most ordinary person would be able to see that that was a reliable form of expertise. I saw it for myself by a track in western Nebraska on August 21st 2017 when the solar eclipse I had gone to see began at the appointed second.

But ‘experts’ crave to be proved right. They also want to adopt a position. Their position allows them to present their opinions as a form of certainty, even if only implicitly. It validates them. In other contexts, it gives them a place at the table, an invitation to conferences, book commissions and funding. Standing up and saying, “The truth is, it’s impossible to say” gets them nowhere and frustrates both the public and the ‘system’ that crave certainty.

The BBC journalist Jonathan Coffey wrote a very interesting article about the Lucy Letby case the other day and asked who can we believe? If you read his piece you’ll see how, just as with Egypt’s later 18th Dynasty, there isn’t a single statement by any of the experts that cannot be contradicted – and has been. There is no certainty, because no-one saw what happened, not even a camera. Every version of events is a reconstruction, and it’s hugely complicated not only by individuals adopting positions but also by their digging in, and the efforts made to discredit others or being discredited themselves.

When that affects Egyptian history, it couldn’t matter less. Arguments among Egyptologists keep them off the streets and give them something to do that has no impact on other people’s lives, whether individually or collectively. When such disagreements do affect people’s lives, relying on fabricated and disputed certainties has potentially devastating implications.

We have all seen time and again how in court, prosecution cases have been constructed that have sent innocent people to prison, sometimes for decades. However many miscarriages of justice have occurred, it is surely the case that there are more, as yet undiscovered. So great is the reluctance for the system to admit mistakes that it can take, and has taken, decades to reverse verdicts. It is apparent in many such cases that flawed ‘expert’ opinion, or contradictory expert opinion, was to blame, along with the credulity of jurors who are simply not able – as would apply to most of us – to critically evaluate such evidence.

The question then for us is how we should react when presented with uncertainty masquerading as certainty, and where every statement or piece of evidence can be contradicted, when it involves a human life or human societies. Can we even assess who is an expert and who is not?

Is it better for society to pretend to have certainties, to have a culprit and thereby to have satisfied ourselves that something which seemed aberrant has been explained and propitiated? Or do we have to resign ourselves – if the aberration cannot be conclusively explained and pinned on someone or something – to accepting that it cannot be resolved and that until it can, no-one can or should be obliged to take the rap?

It’s either that or accepting that we are prepared to leave some people in prison who should not be there, because pretending that the system is reliable is better than admitting it’s flawed.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get into the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man, who knows where it hurts, is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialist.

Sir Winston Churchill

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025). He has also written Pharaohs of the Sun: How Despots and Dreamers Drove the Rise and Fall of Tutankhamun’s Dynasty (Little, Brown 2022).