David Lammy told MPs that Ruth Ellis is being granted a conditional posthumous pardon, 70 years after she was executed on 13 July 1955. The decision concerns the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom and leaves the historical record with a narrow but important distinction.
Lammy said His Majesty the King had accepted advice to grant the pardon, and he used the Commons to spell out its limit: the move does not say Ellis was innocent of killing David Blakely. It does replace the death penalty with a sentence of life imprisonment, a legal correction that acknowledges the case without rewriting the conviction.
Commons announcement on Ruth Ellis
The announcement came at the end of a deputy PMQs session focused on early prisoner release schemes, with James Cleverly standing in for Kemi Badenoch. Lammy framed the decision as one that recognises “a profound injustice in this exceptional case,” while keeping the conviction itself intact.
He told MPs: “I have the honour to say that His Majesty the King has accepted our advice to grant Ruth Ellis a conditional pardon, the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom,” and added: “While the pardon does not claim she was innocent of killing David Blakely, it replaces the death penalty with a sentence of life imprisonment to recognise a profound injustice in this exceptional case.”
Ruth Ellis family pressure
Ruth Ellis’s grandchildren called for a posthumous pardon last year and applied to Lammy for a conditional pardon. They said she was physically and emotionally abused by her partner before she killed him, and Lammy responded with a direct appeal to the family’s long wait for recognition.
“We hope this brings a measure of peace to Ruth Ellis' family who have carried the weight of what happened to her for over 70 years,” he said. That line turns the announcement into more than a legal formality: it is the state’s delayed acknowledgment of a case that has stayed open in family memory long after the execution ended the court process.
The Magdala pub in Hampstead
Ellis was convicted of murdering David Blakely after she shot him outside The Magdala pub in Hampstead, London. The location matters because it ties the pardon to a single act, a single sentence and a single execution, rather than to a broad review of the period.
The practical effect of the pardon is limited and precise. It changes the punishment attached to the case from death to life imprisonment, but it does not clear Ellis’s name. For readers tracking what changes now, the answer is narrower than a full exoneration and broader than a symbolic gesture alone.
The immediate consequence is that the Commons has now recorded a formal ministerial statement on the case, and the family has received the recognition it sought. No further legal step was set out with the announcement, leaving the pardon itself as the final confirmed action in the record.
