A belated update about Friday:
Ian Harvey faced much, much tougher questioning on Friday - so much so that the lady who knows and has suffered under him asked the tribunal clerk to pass on a message of appreciation to Rachel Langdale KC.
The longer time went on, the less able he was to keep his mask of humility on. He is, indeed, a total cunt. He basically went full Letby - not recalling anything, disputing and twisting the meanings of ordinary words, pretending to not understand questions, petulantly refusing to speak, and most of all, getting shitty when he thought he was being asked something he'd already answered. He was constantly saying "as I agreed yesterday, blah blah". It was similar energy to Letby's "we're going round in circles".
Also he stopped the effort at actually answering questions, and the KCs would have to keep going and going and going at different angles to get him to accept anything. When he did accept something, it would be with a caveat, instead of what the KC was actually asking him to agree to.
The KC for the hospital got very frustrated with Harvey's time wasting by the end. I also found it extremely tiring listening to him. At first, after the unabashed horror that was Tony Chambers, it was a relief to listen to IH - but that's because he was clearly putting in the effort in. In the end, I found IH almost as exhausting to endure, and actually kept having microsleeps and needing to fidget to stay awake (though this was also partially due to recovering from endo pain).
The twisting of words was like when he was arguing the toss that the sentence "reputation of the hospital" actually, to Harvey's mind, encompassed the care and safety of patients. Therefore, the safety of babies actually
was considered a risk.
His petulant refusals to speak will be visible in the transcripts from when the KCs ask a long question or make a long statement, followed by another question, without another Q: being written.
He was massively stubborn and would not accept that the RCPCH's and Dr Jane Hawdon's reviews were not sufficient nor intended to discover criminal harm. He just kept saying that the prosecution experts found harm from looking as case notes, therefore these reviews ought to have, too (completely minimizing the level of investigation that was undertaken by the police). Nevermind that RCPCH outright told him they wouldn't be doing that, and Dr Hawdon told him she didn't have the time and would only give a superficial review. According to IH, case note reviews are case note reviews, and that's that. Also, Dr Hawdon, from her three-day study, did actually find four babies that needed further investigation - and IH still ignored it and continued to say no evidence of harm was found.
At the end, I was staring at IH (because he is a specimen in a zoo), and he stared at me right back. Unfortunately I broke my gaze first
I should have kept staring and found a way to insult him, but I wasn't really thinking.
There was actually hardly anyone there in the public gallery on Friday. The ushers asked me to sit right in the corner to allow the rows to be filled up as it would get busy, but only a handful turned up.
Usually you have to book in and be approved at least two weeks in advance to be in the gallery, but Friday was an unplanned day due to Tony Chambers having wasted so much time monologuing. I had emailed a request to attend a few days before, on the off chance they would let me, which was when they told me it was actually first-come, first serve. I don't think many people actually knew they could go.
There were a couple of NGs there - Pat Chanse, the older lady who goes to Letby protests, and Carl Perkins, who has been mentioned previously. He has exactly the same personality as Damien Harry. There was an older man who recognised me from the retrial, but I didn't recognise him. I didn't ask, but assume he's NG on the basis that he is an older male.
Sorry this was a bit disjointed!
