After hearing submissions from the defence, Mr Justice Garland said the charge against Celia Beckett, 34, of murdering Tracey Butler, four, and of causing grievous bodily harm to five-month-old Clare should be dropped. Mrs Beckett, of New-ark, Nottinghamshire, is still charged with manslaughter of Tracey, who was allegedly given 23 anti-depressant tablets, and with child cruelty and administering a noxious substance to a third daughter, Debbie, seven The case continues today.. . Three albums of more than 800 photographs of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition, which ended in death in 1912, were sold for pounds 38,250 at a Christie’s auction.

STEPHEN GOODWIN

For all Michael Howard’s storming performance in yesterday’s prisons crisis debate, it was a humble backbencher, Chris Mullin, who pointed up the change in political ethics the affair seems to illustrate.
During a testy Prime Minister’s Question Time preceding the debate, Mr Mullin asked if John Major recalled the occasion on which a man was found in the Queen’s bedroom.Whether or not MPs recalled Michael Fagan’s Buckingham Palace intrusion on July 1982 most of them roared with laughter and there were mumblings of “Prince Philip?”. But Mr Mullin, justice campaigner and Labour MP for Sunderland South, was on to a serious point.”Does the Prime Minister recall that the then Home Secretary, Lord Whitelaw, who I think we can call a gentleman of the old school, immediately offered his resignation?”Was Lord Whitelaw wrong? Could he have said it was an operational matter and none of his business?”Mr Major did not tell the House whether he recalled the man in the Queen’s bedroom, but all of his replies and Mr Howard’s blistering arguments were to the effect that Lord Whitelaw was indeed wrong.The Home Secretary dismissed Labour’s charge that he had pressurised Derek Lewis, the former director-general of the Prison Service, over the removal of the governor of Parkhurst as a “cheap and tawdry attempt to make petty party political capital” out of the difficulties of the service.And he accused Tony Blair, who had again tackled Mr Major on the affair, of “allowing himself to be used as the vehicle for the spleen of a bitter man”.With help of Tory backbenchers and a poor performance by Jack Straw, his Labour opposite number, Mr Howard won the day. In his own self-confessed cri de coeur, Lord Taylor told the court that he expected “that if we all came back here in a few years, there would doubtless be even more new material”.On Monday, Anthony Scrivener QC is expected to conclude his summary of the arguments on behalf of Jack Lyons. But in addition to longing for thin files, the Lord Chief Justice seemed hardly surprised that new material was still being presented to the judges. Some of their former life is preserved at the Centura Spa hotel in Miami where there is still the Sir Jack Lyons Suite.. JAMES CUSICK

It could have been mistaken as a passing reference to the skeletal models working at Paris fashion week when the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, addressing counsel on the first day of the Guinness appeal this week, pronounced “Thin is beautiful”.
However, the shape and content of files rather than figures was occupying Lord Taylor’s thoughts as he and two Court of Appeal judges faced a month of new argument in the latest chapter of the continuing Guinness saga.It is now five years since Ernest Saunders, the former chairman of Guinness, Gerald Ronson, the property tycoon, and the stockbroker Anthony Parnes all received jail sentences for operating a share-support scheme that boosted Guinness’s share price in the crucial run-up to the company’s successful pounds 2.7bn takeover of Distillers.A fourth man, the consultant Sir Jack Lyons, was fined pounds 3m and stripped of his knighthood.Claims of Star Chamber conspiracies, confessions extracted with legal rights being prejudiced, crucial evidence withheld by the prosecution, new documents becoming available, new details emerging on a crucial witness and claims that the guilty parties were simply doing what was “all the rage in the City” have been advanced by lawyers for the appellants.Nearly 10 years have passed since the 1986 takeover battle.

Lyons’ family is still active in business, but reputation rather than wealth is said to concern Mr and Mrs Lyons. His most famous asset, Monet’s painting Cornstack, was sold for pounds 9m to help pay a pounds 3m fine and legal costs of pounds 2m. Parnes’s former pounds 3.3m house in Hampstead has long since been sold He now lives in a modest flat in central London. In spite of incurring legal costs of pounds 2m, he can still afford what he calls his “only luxury”, a 15-year-old Aston Martin Volante car.Jack Lyons: Plain Jack, as he has been since being stripped of his knighthood after being found guilty, has left England for the relative obscurity and warmth of Florida and the sun. In court he is constantly accompanied by his new partner, originally from the Middle East and said to be very wealthy. A pounds 5m fine, pounds 3m legal costs and the falling worth of Heron has meant Ronson’s personal wealth has shrunk But he still owns a pounds 10m yacht and a private jet.