Latest news with #Dispatches
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Automotive
- Daily Mail
Gone in 20 seconds: Moment thieves steal a car in less than half a minute for £5,000 fee before mocking victims with 'go and buy another one' rant
Two thieves revealed how they can steal a keyless car in less than 20 seconds for a £5,000 fee, before mocking victims in a shameless rant and telling them to 'buy another one'. The two men used just one device to unlock the vehicle and drive away in the clip filmed for Channel 4 's latest Dispatches programme, Britain's Car Theft Gangs Exposed. Thief 'T' and an accomplice demonstrated how they use an amplifier, which looks similar to a radio or walkie-talkie, to pick up the signal from the 'key' inside a home and use it to unlock a car parked outside. The device works by scrambling the signal from a remote key fob, and was used in nearly 60 percent of car thefts in the UK last year. The two men, dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, demonstrated the technique on a car they claimed to have already stolen after placing the key fob in the living room of a property. After just a few seconds of holding the amplifier outside the window, the car door unlocked, allowing T to simply open the door and start up the engine. Once the engine had started, the accomplice could take the amplifier, jump in the car and they drove off - with the entire theft taking less than 20 seconds. The men then boasted of taking up to 20 vehicles a month for as much as £5,000 per car, depending on its value, and said up to 90 percent of them are stolen for parts. Asked whether they ever feel bad about their actions T said: 'These cars are insured, that's like, that's a first world problem. 'There's bigger s*** going on out there, that's, like... Your f***ing Range Rover's gone, boo-hoo, go and buy another one, man.' He added: 'A lot of these cars are getting broken for parts. A lot of them are getting shipped out, Albania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece.' The clip features as part of the Dispatches programme which reveals how organised gangs of criminals are stealing thousands of cars each year to then ship abroad, either for sale or, more commonly, to be 'chopped' - dismantled for parts. After the vehicles are stolen, many are transported in shipping containers as national and international agencies battle to prevent as many as possible reaching their intended destinations. NaVCIS agent Adam Gibson is seen discovering a container with three stolen cars - all with fake paperwork and crammed together with no concern for the vehicles' condition. A white pick-up truck from the bust bore a 2022 number plate - but Mr Gibson was able to determine it was actually made in 2023 and had been reported stolen from Kent in January. He said: 'This box is headed to Africa, which the roads out in Africa are obviously suited to this kind of thing.' During a short timeframe Mr Gibson tracked down three containers, totalling 12 stolen vehicles - some of which had even been cut in half to make space for more cars. He told how the value of vehicles stolen seems to be dropping while the volume is increasing: 'Whereas we were finding Range Rover's worth £150,000, we're getting pickup trucks and SUVs worth £40,000 now. 'We are seeing brands like Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Lexus. So the quality has dropped off, I suppose, but the volume has gone up. 'Some gangs will literally gut the car of any personal effects. Others will just leave everything. 'There's kids seats, toys, all sorts of them… I'm constantly told by people that vehicle crime, where it's victimless, it's just the insurance companies. 'Yes, the insurance company pay out, but we all get our premiums go up because the insurance aren't going to absorb it. So it has a knock-on effect on everyone else.' Data shows that a vehicle is currently stolen every four minutes, but crime agencies say they are taking stronger action to deter would-be thieves and reunite owners with their vehicles. In 2021, NaVCIS, the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service, recovered just 76 stolen cars - last year the figure had increased almost eight-fold to 589. Some 130,000 car thefts were reported to the police in 2023/24, around two thirds of which were keyless. After the vehicles are stolen, many are transported in shipping containers as national and international agencies battle to prevent as many as possible reaching their intended destinations Only three out of ten victims are ever reunited with their cars, while stolen vehicles go unsolved 90 percent of the time in London, Met figures show. For many cars though, by the time police catch up to the gangs it is just too late. The programme reveals how a blue Audi A4, fitted with a hidden tracker, was stolen from a woman's driveway in north London on March 15. The car's GPS signal showed the Audi moving east towards the borough of Enfield and then switching off. Days later the covert tracker wakes up and transmits the car's coordinates, the Audi has travelled 30 miles east from North London to a location in the Essex countryside, just inside the M25, a place called Baldwins Farm. Neil Thomas, a former police officer who works for a private track and recovery service for stolen vehicles, explained how Baldwins Farm is an excellent spot for the transit of cars. 'The access in and out is quite restricted, it's quite close to London, quite close the docks, so if you are exporting vehicles geographically it's a really good location,' he said. The tracker appeared to show the Audi in a wooded area at the northern end of the site, near to what looks like shipping containers. The site was surrounded by copious amounts of CCTV cameras and Dispatches soon discover that the tracker isn't transmitting, possibly due to GPS jamming or blocking equipment. Five weeks later, the tracker suddenly reappeared in Kaunas, Lithuania, and was tracked to a business in the outskirts of the city called Baltic Car Trade. Dispatches filmed the police raid on the property, but instead of finding a blue Audi A4, all they found that was left of the vehicle was a bunch of wires. The car, like many stolen off British streets, had been torn apart. A National Police Chiefs' Council spokesperson said: 'Vehicle crime is ever-evolving with increased technology advancements in vehicles and continues to be a challenge for policing which we cannot tackle alone. 'The National Vehicle Crime Working Group has brought together manufacturers, government and policing for a number of years now and the introduction of the National Vehicle Crime Reduction Partnership (NVCRP), is another positive step forward in our fight against criminals. 'Op Alliances was an intensification week which ran late last year between a number of law enforcement bodies and partner organisations which resulted in 180 arrests and the recovery of 316 stolen vehicles. 'It was a great example of the impact of focused partnership working and it is so valuable we can continue this through the NVCRP. 'Our fight has been strengthened with the latest Government legislation to stop the sale of devices like keyless repeaters and signal jammers which make life far too easy for criminals. Many of these devices serve no legitimate purpose, and we believe that they are involved in a large proportion of UK vehicle thefts, certainly in recent years. 'Removing access to such devices is of course just one element of tackling vehicle theft, but one that we predict could have a significant impact. Disposal routes for stolen vehicles are also a key focus and we work closely with the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service (NAVCIS) to target ports which we know stolen vehicles have been moved through, as well as with police forces and colleagues in the NPCC metal theft portfolio to tackle so-called 'chop shops' . 'We know that organised crime groups are responsible for a significant proportion of vehicle thefts and we are building on existing capability working with NaVCIS and Opal (National Intelligence Unit for Serious Organised Acquisitive Crime) so we can best use our resources to disrupt and target OCGs who profit from vehicle crime whilst causing misery for victims. 'We continue to work with our stakeholders in government, enforcement agencies and industry to build our effectiveness.' Britain's Car Theft Gangs Exposed: Dispatches will air on Channel 4 at 8pm on June 19.
Telegraph
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Labour threatens to ban Serco over blunders
Labour has threatened to ban Serco from any new Government contracts after its blunders led to criminals going untagged for months. Lord Timpson, the prisons minister, said the global contracting giant could be blocked from future public contracts if there was 'another episode of similar poor performance'. It follows an undercover investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches, which found that criminals including a murderer had gone untagged for months under the £51 million-a-year contract Serco had with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). An undercover reporter hired to fit and monitor electronic ankle tags on newly released prisoners was repeatedly sent to the wrong addresses for criminals including a murderer and paedophile. The reporter also discovered that a murderer had gone without a tag for at least two months after claiming that his legs were too swollen for an ankle monitor. Another criminal was accused of taking off her tag to go on holiday and boasting about it to almost 200,000 TikTok followers. Another was overheard claiming that he had ripped his tag off and could do what he wanted. 'Serco could be excluded from bidding' At present, a total of 20,000 people are tagged, and the technology – which allows a freed offender to be tracked via GPS – is central to the Government's plans to expand the use of community punishments as an alternative to jail. The plans could see the number of people tagged more than double as thousands more prisoners are released early from jail. Up to 40,000 criminals convicted of lower-level crimes could also be spared prison in favour of community orders. In a letter to the Commons justice committee, Lord Timpson said new legislation – which came into force in February – would enable ministers to bar companies from being awarded contracts or securing procurements for up to five years. It also enabled public authorities to exclude contractors from bidding for contracts if they were judged to be unreliable in delivering work or where public confidence could be undermined by the 'honesty, integrity and probity' of suppliers. Lord Timpson said: 'In the event of another episode of similar poor performance [as defined in the Act] by Serco after the Act came into force, or a new occurrence of poor performance by Serco after the Act came into force, then Serco could be excluded from bidding or being awarded a future public contract through either the debarment or exclusion regimes.' In a statement to Channel 4, Antony King, the managing director of Citizen Services at Serco, said: 'We are proud of the challenging work our people do, working with multiple partners across the criminal justice system in delivering an essential and critical public safety service, often with complex and ever-increasing requirements. 'Our performance continues to improve, which the MoJ recognise, and we continue to monitor record numbers of people in the community supporting our colleagues in probation and the Home Office.'
Channel 4
09-06-2025
- Channel 4
TAGGING JACKIE
As the government gets ready to roll out a massive expansion of the offender tagging programme in England and Wales, a whistleblower from inside Serco, the private company charged with running it, has told Channel 4 News the system is in 'chaos' and could be putting the public at risk. The Serco insider works at the company's monitoring centre. We've called him Aaron to protect his identity. He told us at one point the computer system was throwing out so much data, finding genuine breaches was 'like finding a needle in a haystack'. 'It was throwing out all these alerts that sometimes didn't mean anything but there'd be thousands and thousands. We didn't know how to identify the genuine breaches from all this traffic of data that was coming into the system.' He also claimed some offenders are going unmonitored and the company only realises it after being asked for information from police or probation looking for them. 'We've had somebody who they want to arrest for rape or potential assault, a serious assault of a victim, and you'd look up the records to identify the person that they're asking about. There's been instances where we haven't been able to give them that information because something has gone wrong when it's been installed, or something's happened in the system where the person has got a tag on, but we're not actively monitoring them. There's been instances where it's been weeks and weeks of where we think we're monitoring someone but they're not actively being monitored.' Aaron described staff at the centre being asked by police for GPS location details of a tagged domestic abuse offender after his ex partner was found dead and he became a potential suspect. Aaron claims staff found he hadn't been monitored effectively 'due to an error.' Serco won the 200 million pound government contract back in 2023 and it came into operation in May the following year, but it's had a troubled history . The company has been fined for poor performance on the contract every month since it started. In April, failures in the tagging system were exposed by Channel 4's Dispatches programme, including offenders going untagged for weeks. In response, Serco said it was tagging a record number of people and its performance would continue to improve 'at pace.' But Channel 4 News has uncovered potential flaws across the entire system – not just with Serco. 'If I was a victim of domestic abuse, I would be extremely scared having been told that tagging is the solution to my safety and then to find it's not.' Twenty one year old Samuel Mattocks was found by police with a knife in his bag. He was initially told to expect prison but, for his first offence, magistrates decided instead to give him a three month community sentence, a critical part of it being a tag to make sure he observed his curfew. He was told the tag would be fitted in two or three days. For weeks, Samuel says he waited for the tagging company to arrive, initially being told they went to the wrong address. He told us he tried to contact the company to make sure they had his new details but was left on hold for hours. Eventually, he says – a fortnight to go before his three month curfew ended – the tag was fitted. When we tried to find out why it had taken so long, there were problems identified throughout the process. Samuel was put on probation on March 14, but no specific instructions for the tag were sent from Probation to Serco for another two weeks. Serco told us after that it did attempt to fit the tag three times, going 'above the requirements' of its contract, but he wasn't at the address Serco had been given. Serco said he was in breach of his conditions and this was reported to Probation. Probation says from Serco's first visit on 11 April until 6 May, Samuel was deemed to have withdrawn his consent to be tagged, because he had been at the wrong address. They say he was told at a meeting on 15 April to return to his original address which he confirmed he had done at a meeting the following week. Samuel says he had already notified the authorities about his change of address and had tried to contact both Serco and the Probation Service to ensure they had the correct one. What is accepted is that Samuel remained untagged until May 23 – the vast majority of the time he was supposed to be being monitored. We put his story and the whistleblower's claims to the National Chair of the Magistrates Association, Mark Beattie. He said: 'We tell an offender that the tag will be fitted in the next two days and the expectation is it's fitted in the next two days. We're very concerned about what we're hearing if we're now being told it's not being fitted for weeks, then you question whether tagging is an effective solution.' Mr Beattie said tagging should be a useful tool to both punish the offender but also to protect the victims of crime. He said if they can't trust the process 'that's a disaster'. 'If I was a victim of domestic abuse, I would be extremely scared having been told that tagging is the solution to my safety and then to find it's not.' This is all a problem for the government itself. In an effort to relieve the prisons crisis , there will be more community sentences and a massive expansion of the tagging programme. It's expected tens of thousands more offenders will be tagged in the coming months. Mark Beattie says if magistrates can't trust the system they will just send offenders to prison instead, defeating the government's plans to send fewer offenders to jail. He says before they expand the tagging programme there should be a complete review of how it's working. 'I think we need to understand the scale of the problem. If they can't deliver now what we have been ordering through the courts, then we have to understand what the recovery plan is. So at the point that it ramps up, we have to have confidence that they're going to be ready to deliver it.' In a statement , Antony King, the Managing Director of Citizen Services at Serco, said: 'We are proud of the challenging work our people do, working with multiple partners across the criminal justice system in delivering an essential and critical public safety service, often with complex and ever increasing requirements. Our performance continues to improve, which the MoJ recognise, and we continue to monitor record numbers of people in the community supporting our colleagues in probation and the Home Office.' The Ministry of Justice told us: 'While we cannot comment on individual cases, we dispute many of the claims being made. Tagging is an important and effective way to monitor and punish offenders and any delays are totally unacceptable.' But it did add that while the backlog of tagging visits had been significantly reduced, Serco's overall performance 'remains below acceptable levels'. Serco to repay £68m for wrongly billed electronic tagging G4S and Serco face SFO 'criminal investigation' over tagging Is electronic tagging too costly and out of date?
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
ND Ethics Commission has no authority to punish officials violating ethics laws, state leaders argue
Photo illustration by Mark Harris for ProPublica. Source images: Getty, Kyle Martin for the North Dakota Monitor. This article was produced for ProPublica's Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Ever since North Dakota voters created an ethics watchdog agency seven years ago, dubious lawmakers have pushed back against giving it power to actually keep an eye on state officials. That was true in the session that just ended, as legislators shut down many requests from the Ethics Commission, keeping the agency on a modest budget and rebuffing measures that would have given it more latitude in its investigations. The offices of the governor and attorney general also argued during the session that the state constitution does not permit the commission to create or impose penalties for ethics-related violations. 'I was hopeful that the tide was turning,' said Rep. Karla Rose Hanson, a Democrat from Fargo and member of the Appropriations Committee, which worked on the commission's budget. 'But my general perspective is that the legislative body as a whole, specifically the majority party, is very hostile to the Ethics Commission and their work.' Voters created an ethics commission in North Dakota. Then the Legislature limited its power. North Dakotans, fed up with what they saw as ethical lapses by public officials, voted in 2018 to amend the state constitution and create the Ethics Commission. The amendment set rules for public officials and empowered the commission to both create more rules and investigate alleged violations related to corruption, elections, lobbying and transparency. North Dakota was one of the last states to establish an ethics agency and since then, the commission has struggled to fulfill its mission, the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica reported this year. The amendment left some ambiguity about the commission's role and whether it can enforce ethics laws, leading to ongoing disagreements about how it operates. State leaders' actions this year further hamstrung the agency at a time when public officials across the country have been working, in various ways, to reverse or rein in policies created through citizen-led ballot initiatives, including those related to abortion and employee benefits. Danielle Caputo of the national nonprofit Campaign Legal Center said several state governments have worked to undermine ethics initiatives in particular. North Dakota leaders' assertions this year that the ethics agency cannot punish officials for wrongdoing is another example of that, she said. 'We have seen what appears to be a concerted effort in those states to overturn ballot initiatives or to twist their language in a way that's most beneficial to those who want less enforcement,' said Caputo, whose organization has studied the issue. She said North Dakota is 'one of the more egregious examples of that that I've seen.' In an email to the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica, the governor's office called Caputo's take a 'gross mischaracterization' and said the governor does not oppose the Ethics Commission. In a separate email, Chief Deputy Attorney General Claire Ness called the notion that the attorney general's office is undermining the intent of voters 'unimaginable.' As government officials debate the commission's authority, North Dakotans have reported more concerns about ethics violations to the agency this year than in any other. The commission as of late May had received 72 complaints this year. There were 41 complaints filed in all of 2024. By the end of last month, the commission had 63 pending complaints, some of which date back to 2022. The agency — which has three full-time staff members and five commissioners who receive a small stipend to oversee the work — has yet to disclose whether it has substantiated a complaint. (State law requires that the commission keep complaints confidential until the end of the process, so little is known about the nature of the filings.) The Ethics Commission supported House Bill 1360 this session that it said would have overhauled its process to speed up investigations and allow it to close cases sooner. Under the measure, sponsored by eight Republicans and two Democrats, the commission would have been able to settle and dismiss complaints at any time instead of at only certain stages in the complaint process. It also would have been allowed to investigate alleged ethics violations without someone filing an official complaint. The agency currently cannot investigate some North Dakotans' tips because they must be submitted as formal complaints, which some complainants are uncomfortable doing, agency staff have said. Staff from the offices of Gov. Kelly Armstrong and Attorney General Drew Wrigley, both Republicans, testified against the bill because they said it would have given the commission too much power. Faced with strong opposition from state leaders and their own reluctance to give the agency more authority, the House voted overwhelmingly to reject the legislation. Most of the House sponsors voted against it. Rep. Austen Schauer, a West Fargo Republican who chaired the committee that worked on the legislation, acknowledged tension between the Ethics Commission and the Legislature and oppositional testimony from the executive branch. 'The bill was basically DOA, and we just had to move on,' Schauer said. Lawmakers instead settled on tweaks to the existing process; one requires the commission to develop time management standards and another allows it to informally settle ethics complaints with the accused. Those settlements would only be made public if all parties to the agreement consent. 'There's people that for years have been sitting with this complaint over their head, which is absolutely unfair,' said Rep. Mike Nathe, a Bismarck Republican who has criticized the commission and proposed some of the changes. He also said he thinks the commission's caseload includes fake complaints submitted by North Dakotans who want to 'weaponize' the system against their political opponents. (Because state law requires that the commission keep complaints confidential, this claim cannot be verified.) Rebecca Binstock, the Ethics Commission's executive director, said the agency will look for ways to work around the hurdles that continue to slow down the investigation process. 'The Commission must now consider how to fix the process absent legislation,' Binstock wrote in an email. The Legislature also approved a measure that protects its members from prosecution for voting on something that would provide them with a financial benefit as long as they disclose their conflicts. Lawmakers, some of whom said they want to keep the commission small out of consideration to taxpayers, also turned down the agency's request for $250,000 over the next two years for a fourth staff member who would conduct training and education for the public. That would have allowed current employees to spend more time investigating complaints, agency staff said. 'I don't recall a discussion with the public being, 'We're gonna have a multimillion-dollar branch of government,'' Rep. Scott Louser, a Minot Republican, said during a legislative hearing in April. State leaders also argued the Legislature is the only entity that can create penalties for ethics violations and delegate enforcement of those penalties to state agencies. The commission can only punish officials for wrongdoing if the Legislature gives it that authority, they said. Chris Joseph, the governor's general counsel, testified this year that if the commission were given the power to both create and enforce penalties, it would be 'defining, executing and interpreting its own rules' without oversight from other parts of state government. The commission, however, says its enforcement authority is implicit in the constitutional amendment. That interpretation could soon be tested. Binstock indicated in an email that commission staff members have wrapped up investigating several cases and are waiting on commissioners to take action, which could include imposing penalties. Ellen Chaffee, part of a group called the Badass Grandmas that organized the ballot initiative and drafted the amendment, said voters intended for the Ethics Commission to impose punishments for wrongdoing. 'The people who worked on the amendment had understood that the only way to have unbiased follow-up on any violations of ethics rules was for the Ethics Commission to have that responsibility,' she said. Mike Nowatzki, the governor's spokesperson, said if the amendment does not reflect what the advocates wanted, 'they can always seek to clarify it with another constitutional amendment.'
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Dr Elisabeth Whipp, innovative oncologist who spoke out on television against ‘postcode prescribing'
Dr Elisabeth Whipp, who has died aged 77, was a leading oncologist who was suspended from Bristol Royal Infirmary in 2002 for carrying out an unapproved form of radiotherapy treatment; she was later cleared of wrongdoing, amid suggestions that her real transgression had been to make public criticisms of the vagaries of NHS funding. She made headlines in 1997 when she spoke out in an edition of Channel 4's Dispatches against the increasing prevalence of 'postcode prescribing'. She had been treating two breast cancer patients with the drug Taxol; one was from Taunton, and her treatment was funded by the Somerset Health Authority, but the second woman, from Bristol, had to negotiate an overdraft to raise £10,000 to pay for the drugs herself. 'There is always embarrassment about patients having to buy a drug,' Liz Whipp complained. 'After many years in the NHS I'm not used to bargaining with money.' In response, the Avon Health Authority argued that the money was more urgently needed for breast-care nurses. Liz Whipp was back in the news in early 2003 when it emerged that she had been suspended some weeks earlier amid questions over the experimental radiotherapy she had been prescribing. Previously, the location of tumour beds had been difficult to pinpoint and radiation had to be directed over the whole breast, with care taken to keep the dose low enough to minimise the risk of damaging the heart. Liz Whipp's innovation had been to use newly developed MRI scanners to locate the tumour beds more precisely and then target higher doses of radiation at a smaller area. Some of her colleagues considered that she was underestimating the risks that these higher doses posed, and Bristol Royal Infirmary took the decision to investigate her for carrying out treatment that had not been authorised by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). 'If we allow unfettered clinical freedom to take place we will end up with situations where patients will receive treatments which are not in accordance with Nice guidance,' a hospital spokesman insisted. Liz Whipp suggested in later life, however, that certain male colleagues had not approved of her breaking the omerta around NHS funding and had been waiting for an opportunity to take her down a peg. She was suspected of having broken rules by encouraging patients to complain to their MPs about NHS restrictions on the availability of drugs such as Herceptin. The suspension of Liz Whipp became a cause célèbre, with the shadow health secretary Liam Fox arguing that she was the victim of an NHS culture that victimised whistleblowers: 'I can't see any case to say this doctor acted in an unprofessional way. In fact, it seems to have been quite the opposite and she has acted in the interest of her patients. Dr Whipp has been suspended for what we regard as totally spurious reasons.' Her former patients queued up to praise her. One 77-year-old man told the press: 'She is an extremely compassionate woman and very sympathetic. She was the best doctor I could have had and I think that she saved my life.' Liz Whipp – who pointed out that, of 542 patients given the experimental treatment, only two had seen their cancer return – claimed that she had in fact always followed Nice guidelines. Nevertheless she was suspended for nearly two years while the United Bristol Healthcare NHS Trust investigated her. She was completely exonerated, but although she returned to work she was deeply pained by the experience and grieved by the thought that many patients had died unnecessarily while her treatment programme was on hold. The daughter of Brian Whipp, an academic, Elisabeth Clare Whipp was born on September 9 1947. She read medicine at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and worked at the London Hospital and the Royal Free Hospital before moving to Bristol in the early 1980s. As a long-serving radiotherapy consultant at the Royal Infirmary's Haematology and Oncology Centre, Liz Whipp gained a reputation for speaking her mind. In 1983 she made waves by criticising Prince Charles for visiting the Bristol Cancer Help Centre, a charity that was advocating the rejection of orthodox medicine in favour of alternative treatments: 'I do feel strongly about the Prince of Wales making a Royal tour of something that's full of bogus notions.' She became renowned for her innovative thinking, which was not confined to the development of radiotherapy. Convinced that the mental welfare of patients played a large role in their recovery, she appointed a clinical psychologist, Dr James Brennan, to work with her at Bristol; this was the first full-time clinical psychology post in cancer services in the NHS. Experience taught her that when it came to coping with cancer, 'single women… do better, because they tend to have women friends, whereas a lot of married women have husbands they can't talk to about health.' Described by one friend as 'a statuesque woman, combining a pre-Raphaelite beauty with the charisma of a Valkyrie', Liz Whipp was a keen painter and a fine pianist and singer: on one occasion she found herself in a musical duel with Germaine Greer, competing to see who could give the better rendering of the Queen of the Night's aria from The Magic Flute. She had recently finished the first draft of a gleefully horrific thriller, utilising her medical background to devise a series of especially gruesome murders. She created a beautiful garden at her home in Clifton, finding room in a relatively small space for a pool of koi carp, a stream, quiet pathways, a grotto and a bamboo grove. Her wide circle of friends was treated to extravagant garden parties complete with fireworks. On one occasion a neighbour disgruntled by the noise spitefully padlocked the gates at the end of her drive to inconvenience the guests – a futile gesture, as no guest at one of Liz Whipp's parties left until they absolutely had to. Elisabeth Whipp, born September 9 1947, died April 26 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
