You set light to it. After a short while Mairead Philpott spoke to the emergency services. The jury on Tuesday convicted Philpott, 56, and Mosley, 46, unanimously. Mairead Philpott, 32, was convicted by majority verdict. The judge accepted that Mick Philpott did not mean serious harm to come to any of the children who were in the house, but added: "What you did intend, plainly, was to subject your children to a terrifying ordeal.
They were to be woken from their beds in the middle of the night with their home on fire so you could rescue them and be the hero. Their terror was the price they were going to pay for your callous selfishness. The judge described how firefighters and neighbours tried to rescue the children during the blaze, and chastised Philpott for his lies afterwards. I very much regret that everything about you suggests that your grief has very often been simulated for the public gaze.
Philpott ensured his wife and Mosley stuck to their stories, and the judge said the wife too would have been expendable for Philpott. Sending him to prison for life, Thirlwall said: "You are a disturbingly dangerous man. Your guiding principle is what Mick Philpott wants he gets. You have no moral compass. I have no hesitation in concluding that these six offences are so serious and the danger you pose is so great that the only proper sentence is one of life imprisonment and that is the sentence I impose upon you.
Mairead Philpott cried at times during the sentencing, as the judge told her she had put her husband ahead of her children, whom she had now lost: "I accept that he treated you as a skivvy or a slave, and you were prepared to put up with that. The children owed their existence to his desire to milk the welfare system. Of course this is a story of tragedy — six children have been killed in horrible circumstances. It is also a story of great human wickedness for, even if the plot had gone according to plan and the children had been rescued, Philpott and his wife were conspiring to make it look as if another person had attempted to murder them.
But where did all this evil come from? Evil no doubt comes from the heart of human beings and we are all capable, in one way or another, of wrongdoing. And yet, and yet Those six children, burnt to a cinder for nothing, were, in a way, the children of those benevolent human beings who, all those years ago, created our state benefits system.
Two years ago, the BBC showed a six-part documentary called The Scheme which is the Scottish word for a housing estate. But the people living on the scheme are not poor by the standards of those living in the slums of Mumbai, let alone struggling for survival in famine-stricken north-east Africa. The houses on the scheme are heated, they have bathrooms and lavatories and kitchens and television sets — as did the Philpott house in Derby.
The respectable people on the scheme were passionate gardeners — old people who led a perfectly decent existence there.
It was the next generation down, the ones who had been corrupted by the benefits system, who were trapped in a cycle of drug abuse, criminality, prison and a pathetic inability to see that they had done anything wrong.
I have a vision in my head still, two years after the programmes were aired, of one woman lying in bed with a fag in her hand, yelling at her truanting children to get up and go to school. She had not got up herself. She would not be able to stir herself to look for a job. Her children were doomed to be as feckless as she was.
She had been dismissed from her job in a meat-packing factory. Like all the other people on the programme except the old gardening enthusiasts she exuded self-pity. Likewise, when the others on the scheme were found drug dealing, pilfering, scrounging, lying or indulging in acts of violence, it was never their fault. Michael Philpott sobbed after he had killed six children — but they were not tears of penitence, they were of simple self-pity and horror at having being found out.
Whatever welfare system we were to devise, there would always be nasty individuals; and few are so nasty as Michael Philpott. Yet the particular manner in which his nastiness was exercised, and the way in which he lived, was the direct consequence of his being able to live scot-free at the expense of the taxpayer. Philpott was a domestic tyrant who controlled all the money coming into the house. This was a family, and a collection of human beings, who were on benefits the way other people are on drugs.
Many, of course, are on both, for idleness breeds depression, and if you are depressed, unemployed and unemployable, then taking drugs numbs the pain.
It also diminishes your capacity to get up in the morning, keep to a timetable or do any of the things that would enable you to get a job. One of the most gruesome moments of the trial came when Philpott was in the witness box, answering questions from his defence counsel.
Asked why he had petrol stains on his trousers, he said he had lent his lawn strimmer to a neighbour several months earlier. In 12 weeks he had not changed his trousers, nor had a bath or a shower.
Philpott was always on the dole, never looking for a job, always on the scrounge. His house was paid for, his utterly feckless way of life was paid for, his children were paid for, by taxpayers.
The cannabis he smoked in front of the telly had been paid for by someone else who went out to work and paid taxes. So had the telly. Otherwise, this sleazy, awful human being did nothing useful with his life. His poor, tragic children came into the world as a result of such sordid pastimes.
Philpott happened to live in Derby, but versions of the Philpott family can be found in any town in Britain. Whole blocks of flats, whole tenement buildings are filled with drug-taking benefit fraudsters, scroungers and people on the make. The riots that began in Tottenham, North London, two summers ago, and then spread to other British cities, showed what has happened to Britain as a result of the perversion of our benefits system. We have turned into a country where ordinary morality — the simple concept that you do not take what is not yours — does not seem to register in whole rafts of society.
What the Philpott trial showed was the pervasiveness of evil caused by benefit dependency. The welfare state, which was designed to provide a safety net for those in genuine need, worked only in those vanished times, more than half a century ago, when there remained a culture of honesty, respect for the police and the law. They were heroes with the most honourable of intentions, determined that the conditions they had witnessed during the s and the war — hungry children suffering from rickets and tuberculosis, appalling housing conditions, the persecution of the unemployed — would never come to Britain again.
In post-war Britain, where there was high employment and everyone had to accept a low standard of living, it really looked as if a just and decent society was being formed.
A society in which benefits helped those who genuinely could not help themselves. But in time, the welfare state became an exercise in Whitehall empire-building. Ever more people were entitled to welfare and, understandably, ever more people grabbed it. With such sums being disbursed so readily, little wonder there is so much waste and fraud. Until recently, more than two million people of working age claimed disability benefit.
Are we really so infirm as a nation? Evidently not, given that since the Government brought in tougher tests, , people have chosen not to be reassessed, while a further , have been declared fit for work. Some 13 per cent of the population live in households where absolutely no one works — compared with just three per cent in Japan.
The litany of depressing statistics goes on and on. I see, rather, Duwayne, John, Jack, Jade, Jesse and Jayden — killed not only by their father but also by the system which had been designed with the best intentions to help them but has now been corrupted seemingly beyond repair.
What possible chance did any of them have of growing up as the sort of decent, sensible members of society envisioned by the idealistic social engineers of the s and s who created that system? Philpott himself would have been decently employed and his children would all have received an excellent education from the state in selective, well-disciplined, well-funded local schools.
They might have gone on to become teachers, civil servants, engineers, pharmacists, retailers and wealth creators, buoying up the national economy by paying their taxes. Philpott did not suddenly decide, after a blameless life, to set fire to his house, with six children inside it, and blame it on his ex-mistress. He did so after years of cynically exploiting the system; years of having children so as to claim yet more benefit; years of rampant dishonesty; years of treating the women in his life as objects of pleasure and the resulting children as a means to an end of more money for beer and cannabis.
Do you think that Philpott would have done this crime if he had worked regularly for the past 20 years and provided for those six children out of his own pocket? Group sex on a snooker table, dogging and a girlfriend who shared his marital home: The sordid sex life of 'manipulative' Mick Philpott and his wife Mairead. Mick slept with wife and live-in lover Lisa Willis, 28, on alternate nights. Couple had threesome with friend Paul Mosley on family's snooker table on night children died.
Mairead later performed sex act on Mosley in hotel room while husband watched. Couple regularly went dogging - having sex with strangers while others watch. Mick Philpott was said to be someone it was difficult 'not to take an instant dislike to' and throughout his eight-week trial the jury heard details of his sordid sex life including threesomes, a live-in wife and lover and frequent dogging sessions.
The latter even led to his wife Mairead Philpott falling pregnant to an unknown man and having an abortion. Among the other depraved acts revealed to the court were the fact that the couple had a threesome with best friend Paul Mosley over the family snooker table hours before the children died.
They had three or four further sexual encounters together and smoked cannabis frequently. In the days following the fatal fire, it also emerged that Mairead, 31, performed a sex act on Paul Mosley inside a bugged hotel room while her husband Mick watched.
Afterwards he praised his wife acknowledging that she did not want to perform the act. Mick Philpott - a sham, controlling, manipulative, abusive, aggressive, domineering - were all words used to describe him during his trial. The year-old preyed on young and damaged women from troubled backgrounds, who had few family or friends around for support. Jurors heard how in the early stages of his relationships he would charm the women, who were usually decades his junior, and appear to them as a protector and saviour.
It was only when they had set up home with him that they realised the extent of the control and violence he was willing to unleash to keep them. Irish Mairead Philpott, who was connected to the travelling community, was a year-old single mother who was at 'rock bottom' when they met. When Philpott came into her life, he seemed to offer the prospect of happiness and stability. Little did she know the control he would come to exert over her, and the sordid acts in which she would be persuaded to participate.
Mairead had previously had sex with other men while her husband watched, and had been doggingwith him - having sex with strangers while others looked on. In one such incident she became pregnant by another man and eventually had a termination.
Her explanation for such behaviour, the court heard, was to make Philpott happy, while she was left feeling disgusting and ashamed. Mick Philpott treated the women in his life as possessions, wanted to play the system for maximum financial benefit, argued his case by using his fists, and was said to have joked about wanting enough children to make up the numbers for his own football team. A leading police officer in the investigation into the fire that killed six of Philpott's children said it was 'difficult not to take an instant dislike to him'.
Philpott's own barrister, Anthony Orchard QC, described him in court as being portrayed as a 'benefits scrounger' following his television appearances in and on The Jeremy Kyle Show and a documentary made by MP Ann Widdecombe. People either love him or hate him,' Mr Orchard said. He could be a bit of a loud mouth. He would shout his business to anyone who would listen. He could rub people up the wrong way.
He was fixated on money - jurors heard during his trial that one of the many possible reasons for setting fire to the house might have been because he wanted all of his children in one place so he would get the most benefits payments. Previous partners claimed he often said his desire was to not work and to stay at home and look after his children. A decision was made that any money left over from donations by the public following the children's deaths, after funeral expenses had been paid and headstones bought, would be given to family in the form of Argos vouchers, prosecutors said - a fact disputed by defence teams.
It was rare that the wages earned by the women in his life would go into their own pockets. Most had their salary paid into a bank account controlled by Philpott. The details of his sex life were like something out a low-budget film with descriptions of how his wife Mairead and Miss Willis took it in turns to sleep with him, how he went dogging with his wife, and how he persuaded her to have sex with other men in front of him.
All this from a man who admitted he did not bathe regularly. He told the court he had not used the shower or bath in his home for around three months before the blaze last May, and rarely changed his clothes.
His fake collapses and his overreaction to any kind of drama or event that was out of his control testified to the fact that he was a man who behaved in the most extreme way if he could not get his own way. But the move has been slammed by the Centre For Crime Prevention think-tank which said: 'This is not justice.
Philpott, along with husband Mick and friend Paul Mosley, burnt down the family's three-bedroom council house in in a bid to get a bigger home. But the couple's six children - Duwayne, 13, Jade, 10, John, nine, Jack, seven, Jesse, six, and Jayden, five - died from smoke inhalation as a result of the blaze. The taxpayer will cover thousands of pounds worth of costs for Philpott to stay in a hostel with a new identity.
The couple's six children - Duwayne, 13, Jade, 10, John, nine, Jack, seven, Jesse, six, and Jayden, five - died from smoke inhalation as a result of the blaze. David Spencer at the Centre for Crime Prevention told The Sun : 'The case shocked the country and it will be nothing less than abhorrent that the children's mother is being released after 8 and a half years.
This is not justice. A source also told the publication: 'Mairead is pleased as punch. She is not popular. The Philpotts married in and shared a cramped three-bedroom council house in Derby with his lover Lisa Willis and their children. Philpott led his wife and accomplice Mosley into a scheme to get a bigger council house by burning down his home and framing Ms Willis for the crime after she walked out on him. He also hoped to win back custody of his five children who had recently moved out of the home.
His intention was to rescue the sleeping children through an upstairs window but the plan went disastrously wrong after too much petrol was used and the fire burned out of control.
Philpott, who had previously been jailed for stabbing his schoolgirl lover 27 times, wove a web of lies trying to get away with the crime and even plotted to 'get rich quick' off generous donations from the local community meant to pay for the funerals of his children.
Callous: The couple wept at a press conference as they appealed for help to find the killer or killers. Pictured: The coffins bearing the bodies of six children who died in the fire they started. In the days that followed the fire, Philpott began his elaborate ruse to appear blameless and even appeared at a press conference appealing for information. Then 21, he attacked his former girlfriend, 17, with a knife as she lay in bed after ending their relationship.
Philpott was jailed for life in April after killing six of his children in a fire when a plot to frame his ex-lover went wrong. The six victims — Duwayne, 13, his sister Jade, ten, and brothers, John, nine, Jack, eight, Jesse, six and Jayden, five — perished as fire swept through their home in Allenton, Derby. Mick Philpott hatched a plan with Mairead and Mosley to incriminate Lisa while posing as a hero who saved his children.
But the planned rescue went tragically wrong when he was beaten back by the flames as the blaze — started with petrol poured through a letterbox — got out of control in seconds.
Mairead was freed in November from HMP Send in Surrey to a hostel in the south of England, where she will be supervised while on licence.
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