Sandra Gregory has a story to tell. It is the story of an ordeal that would have broken most people and came close to breaking her. Its redeeming features are her courage and resilience, and the enduring love and loyalty of her family. On the face of it, it is a story about a young woman imprisoned for drug trafficking in Thailand. It is also – and this is how she herself sees it – a story about love and the things people don’t say when they should. In 1993 she was arrested at Bangkok airport, with her companion Robert Lock, about to board a flight for Japan. She was found to be carrying 89 grams of heroin for him. Her pay-off, had they not been intercepted, would have been the £1,000 which would have bought her air ticket back to Britain with plenty to spare. It wasn’t the easy money that it seemed. Instead, she was sentenced by the court in Thailand to 25 years in prison. Robert Lock, already known to the police, was acquitted; he was released and had already re-offended while she was still in jail. The title of Sandra Gregory’s book, Forget You Had A Daughter, comes from the letter that she wrote to her parents after her arrest. It is a story told without self-pity or self-justification.‘What I have done is not excusable,’ she writes,‘and above all else I knew better than to do what I did.’Nor does she reproach the Thai authorities and their system of justice, except to allow herself the wry reflection that their prison sentences are perhaps a touch on the long side. She served four years in Bangkok before being transferred to British prisons including Holloway and Durham. She found them no better, and in some respects worse, than Lard Yao, the women’s section of the notorious ‘Bangkok Hilton’. Back in Britain she was spared no brutality, partly as a consequence of the length of her sentence, which led to her being classified – along with Myra Hindley and Rosemary West – as a high security risk. Anyone who thinks that we operate a prison system which, for all its faults, is fundamentally humane and decent, should read her personal account of it and think again. In Durham especially she found herself living in hell and surrounded by evil.And as for Holloway, it was ‘home to the biggest bunch of nutcases, psychos, robbers, thieves, druggies, gang members, whackos and dysfunctional lunatics I had come across’. The irony was that, although detained in British prisons, she was outside the British justice system. She could be released only through a pardon by the King of Thailand. As her ordeal entered its eighth year, the prospect of the pardon still seemed remote. Her parents wrote to me, as to many other MPs, about her plight and the disproportionate length of her sentence. Sympathy for drug-smugglers was not a popular cause; but I am proud to have supported her own MP, the Liberal Democrat Malcolm Bruce, in his campaign for her release. The King’s pardon was eventually granted, following an adjournment debate initiated by Mr Bruce. Contrary to popular belief, MPs are sometimes able to play a part in making good things happen. The chapter that Sandra Gregory wrote about her release, into a foreign country known as freedom, is one of the most eloquent in the book. She was still unsure of herself, and almost in a state of exploration, when she came to meet us in the House of Commons.The more I learned of what had happened to her, the more I felt that she should write it down, for the benefit of others; and I urged her to do so.
