Julie Bailey: Enemy of the People

They’re running Julie Bailey out of town. The poison pen letters, foul-mouthed phone calls, slashed tyres, shit through the letterbox, boycott of her cafe and attacks on her mother’s grave have become too much.

Stafford’s upstanding citizens, or a good number of them, want her gone. So she is leaving her home and business, and looking for a better place.

‘People come up to me in the street and just start bawling,’ she told me. ‘I can’t go out by myself. I always need someone with me’”

Bailey had been the public face of the campaign to highlight the conditions inside Stafford Hospital. She showed that nurses left food and drink out of patients’ reach and that those in agony screamed for pain relief that never came. For many, Stafford Hospital was a torture chamber.

A proportion of the nurses ‘didn’t really want to be on the ward caring for patients and showed total disregard for their welfare,’ Bailey said when the report was published.