Inside Tracey Connelly’s Prison Life After Baby P’s Death

For the women of the so-called ‘Friday Club’, the weekly gathering comes with plenty of gossip — and generous helpings of cake, crisps and fizzy drinks.

The group, made up of about eight women, treats the meeting as a valued ritual. They experiment with hairstyles, apply each other’s make-up and catch up on the events of the past seven days.

It could be an ordinary get-together in homes across Britain. But this particular Friday Club meets inside HMP Low Newton, the women’s prison in County Durham, which holds some of the country’s most notorious female offenders.

One of its regular attendees is a woman whose name once triggered extraordinary public disgust.

Tracey Connelly presided over horrific abuse that came to symbolise one of the gravest child-protection failures in modern British history.

Connelly was the mother of ‘Baby P’, 17-month-old Peter, who was beaten to death in August 2007 by her boyfriend Steven Barker, then 31, and his 35-year-old brother Jason Owen. Peter had endured months of unimaginable cruelty, much of which Connelly failed to stop.

In May 2009, 21 months after Peter’s death, Connelly admitted causing or allowing it and was sentenced under an Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) order. Although she received a minimum term of five years, the order meant she would not have a fixed release date unless she could demonstrate that she no longer posed a danger to the public.

Connelly, now 45, has struggled to satisfy that requirement. She has been released from prison twice, only to be recalled on both occasions for breaching her licence conditions. Her most recent return came in August 2024.

Now, it has emerged, Connelly is again asking authorities to give her a chance outside prison.

That leaves the Parole Board facing a central question: has she truly changed, or has she simply become more skilled at saying what people want to hear?

“Tracey Connelly is highly manipulative. She understands how to handle people and can be very charming when she chooses to be,” a prison insider told the Daily Mail this week.

“But there is another, far less pleasant side to her character.”

The insider described her as having a history of selfishness and dishonesty, regularly placing her own needs ahead of others.

“The challenge is working out when she is sincere and when she is simply giving you the answer she thinks you want. She is certainly not unintelligent. She has spent much of her adult life behind bars and knows how the system operates.

“She understands what prison officers, psychologists and probation workers expect, as well as what she must show if she wants to be released. But knowing the rules and consistently obeying them are entirely different matters.”

The insider also said Connelly had formed relationships with women in prison and exchanged secret love letters with another inmate, despite knowing that doing so breached prison regulations.

“One of the longstanding concerns about Connelly is her relationships. She appears to have a powerful need for affection and attention, and that has repeatedly caused problems for her,” the insider said.

At her latest Parole Board hearing this month, Connelly appeared willing to acknowledge her shortcomings.

Appearing off camera and cutting a strikingly different figure to the surly mugshot released to the public in 2009, having gained a significant amount of weight while behind bars, she told the panel that she was a terrible mother, acknowledged that she could be manipulative and promised that, if released, she would avoid children altogether.

‘I was crap with my own children,’ she declared. ‘I don’t want to be around other people’s children because I know how bad I was with my own.’

Nor, she insisted, would she pursue relationships with anyone who had children, even after her licence restrictions eventually ended, and while she hoped to find love again, she had no intention of living with a partner.

‘I want a relationship. I just don’t want to live with someone again. I want my own space. I want my own home,’ she said.

Her previous experience of domestic life had, of course, ended in unspeakable tragedy.

Back in 2006, she lived in a council house in Tottenham, north London, having emerged from a brief marriage to Peter’s father, who was 17 years her senior and whom she had met aged just 16.

The couple had three children before the arrival of their fourth, Peter, in March 2006, their 2003 marriage breaking down shortly after the boy’s arrival.

By the end of that year, Steven Barker had moved in with Connelly, followed in due course by his brother Jason, Jason’s three children and a 15-year-old girl.

Eight months later, Peter was dead, his unresponsive body found in a bloodstained cot in an upstairs bedroom by Barker and Owen.

A post-mortem subsequently revealed that the angelic-looking, blond-haired, blue-eyed toddler had suffered more than 50 injuries, including a broken back, a torn earlobe and damage to his fingernails and toenails.

The house itself was a scene of almost unimaginable squalor, infested with fleas and featuring floors dotted with both human and animal faeces.

Peter’s death provoked national outrage, not least when it emerged that he had been on the child protection register for eight months and seen a total of 60 times by police, health professionals and social workers from Haringey.

Nonetheless when, in November 2008, Connelly pleaded guilty to causing or allowing the death of a child, it appeared she had faced up to her actions.

Yet it later emerged that prior to sentencing, she wrote a letter to the judge claiming she was too naive to understand the extent of the ordeal her son had experienced.

These protestations of ignorance were rebuffed by Judge Stephen Kramer who, when sentencing her in May 2009, declared that her insistence that she had been unaware of Peter’s suffering ‘defies belief’.

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By imposing an IPP sentence (highly controversial, these were abolished in 2012 though there are still prisoners living under their terms) it meant that unlike a conventional fixed prison term, there was no automatic release date for Connelly once her minimum jail term had expired.

Instead it depends upon the Parole Board being satisfied that the risk posed by the prisoner can be managed safely in the community.

Even then, freedom comes with strict conditions and for Connelly this has meant a succession of assessments, hearings, periods of liberty and returns to prison.

First released in 2013 after serving six years (including time spent on remand), she was recalled to prison just 18 months later after breaching the conditions of her licence by developing intimate relationships online which she had tried to keep secret, and encouraging another resident of her accommodation to engage in inappropriate behaviour.

Further applications for parole were unsuccessful until eventually, in 2022, the authorities concluded that she could be released again – a decision that was notably opposed by the then Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab.

At that parole hearing, she acknowledged – for the first time – that she had known ‘deep down’ that Barker was abusing her son, but had wanted to believe in her own romantic fantasy.

‘I wanted my Prince Charming and unfortunately my children paid for that,’ she told the panel.

Yet barely two years after this apparent display of insight, Connelly was back behind bars, the reason depressingly familiar: she had formed a relationship with a married man she met online, failed to disclose it to probation officers and deleted messages and intimate photographs exchanged between them.

Her explanation was that she had been embarrassed because the man was married. To those responsible for supervising her, the key issue was her decision to conceal it, despite knowing that honesty about her personal life was a crucial condition of her freedom.

Either way, it put Connelly back in prison for the third time in August 2024 – returned, the Daily Mail understands, to HMP Low Newton, the closed women’s prison near Durham which has housed some of Britain’s most notorious female offenders, including serial killer Joanna Dennehy and Rose West, and where Connelly had been based between 2015 and 2022.

It is during that time that she first became a staunch member of the ‘Friday Club’, according to a prison insider.

‘Someone would bake a cake, and they would share crisps and fizzy drinks which they bought from the kiosk in the prison,’ the insider says.

‘She was one of the girls, not one of the leaders – she doesn’t really have the personality to set up something like that, but she was always there and was one of the main group,’ they recalled. ‘She liked to wear heavy eyeliner and bright red lipstick.’

There was also another reason, according to the insider, that Connelly sought the company of a group.

‘She would always try and befriend a group because she knew she was and still is vulnerable – women prisoners absolutely hate child killers so you need protection if you don’t want endless hours of verbal abuse.’

At the heart of her latest parole bid is whether she can finally be trusted on the outside.

The prison source stressed that a prisoner can be relatively easy to manage on a wing while still presenting more complicated concerns about honesty and behaviour after release.

‘She doesn’t have to be a constantly disruptive prisoner to be difficult to manage,’ they told the Daily Mail.

‘The concerns are much more complicated than that. They involve trust, honesty, emotional dependence and whether she can be relied upon to make sensible decisions when nobody is watching her.’

They added: ‘She has also expressed remorse for Peter’s death and accepted responsibility for the suffering of his family. Whether that remorse is genuine is something only she can really know.’

These observations are particularly striking in the light of Connelly’s latest evidence to the Parole Board.

At her most recent hearing, she promised to be open about future relationships, even if they involve unconventional sexual practices, including BDSM, sex clubs or threesomes.

She has also insisted that she would alert police and end any relationship if she discovered a partner had a sexual interest in children or had committed offences against them.

‘I would never sit back and watch that happen again,’ she declared earlier this month.

Yet the panel has heard that even professionals who support her release acknowledge that she may continue to test the boundaries of her licence conditions, while the parole board were told that other family members ‘have concerns’ about her latest attempts to emerge from behind bars.

Certainly, for Peter’s father, it seems there is little room for forgiveness.

Now 62, in 2024 he expressed his support for Connelly’s return to prison following her latest recall and said he would never be able to forgive her for the part she had played in their son’s death.

‘She can go to hell for what she did so far as I am concerned,’ he said. ‘Obviously it never gets easier. I go up to Peter’s grave whenever I can, to remember him. It will never go away. That’s why I can never forgive her, and I never will.’

Former Metropolitan Police Detective Jon Wedger, who interviewed Connelly two days before Peter died – and alerted authorities to the dangers she posed to her son – believes she cannot be rehabilitated, declaring earlier this year that she was a ‘deep rooted, manipulative liar’.

‘My opinion on meeting her – she will come across as plausible, respectable but she’s a liar,’ he said.

That is, of course, his opinion – but it may be that the most revealing comment came from Connelly herself.

Asked last week why she should be trusted not to breach her licence conditions for a third time, she replied: ‘I can’t give you a magic answer as to what’s different now.’

As they now contemplate whether to release this most divisive of figures back into the community, the parole board must work out if that is an answer they can afford to accept.