Put Littlejohn in the dock

Nathan Upton, a 32-year-old primary school teacher, had finally come to the point where she could publicly become the person she had always felt herself to be - Lucy. Before Christmas 2012 parents and students at her school were told that after the break she was to be known as Miss Meadows.

A simple enough request. The schools governers and staff were supportive. Perhaps some of them bothered to read up about gender identity disorders which occur, for a variety of reasons, in perhaps 1 in 10,000 male and 1 in 30,000 female human beings.

Which cleary some of the parents - and uninvolved journalists - did not.

In particular Richard Littlejohn made it his business, on December 20 2012, to inform the readers of the Daily Mail about Lucy's situation thereby turning a discreet local event into a nationwide circus.There were press camped outside her house and parents were offered money for photographs, the sort of pressure that anyone would find unbearable let alone someone going through a major life change. On 3 January she complained to the Press Complaints Commission. On 19 March she took her own life.

At the inquest the coroner said

"Having carried out what can only be described as a character assassination, having sought to ridicule and humiliate Lucy Meadows and bring into question her right to pursue her career as a teacher, the Daily Mail's response was to offer to remove the article from the website," he said, adding: "It seems to me that nothing has been learned from the Leveson inquiry."

The Daily Mail has removed Littlejohn's piece from its web site.

It would not be possible to prove a cause-and-effect between Littlejohn's attack and Lucy Meadows's death. But it is time that powerful so-called journalists like Littlejohn, and their publishers, were made to take responsibility for their actions. Obviously manslaughter cannot be proved, but the very act of exposing the private lives of ordinary people to public scrutiny and ridicule is close to wilful misconduct and should be punishable with long prison sentences.