Loose Women's Christine Lampard opens show with heartbreaking news 'it's awful'

Christine Lampard opened the latest instalment of Loose Women with news that Constance Marten and Mark Gordon had both been jailed for 14 years for the death of their baby.

The couple were convicted of gross negligence manslaughter earlier this year after the body of their baby girl, Victoria, was found in a shopping bag in a disused shed.

Opening Tuesday's episode (September 16) of the ITV show, Christine said: "First today, the couple who caused the death of their newborn baby have been sentenced to 14 years each in prison. Constance Marten and Mark Gordon went on the run in late 2022 with their daughter to evade social services.

"The next year, their baby was found dead in a shopping bag. At yesterday's sentencing, Constance's mother made a plea for clemency, writing to the court that the cruel labels did not reflect the daughter she remembered.

"However, the judge ignored the plea, accusing Constance and her partner of showing no genuine remorse."

"It's an awful story from start to finish," the TV star said as her fellow panellists Janet Street-Porter, Brenda Edwards, and Mariella Frostrup looked on.

Janet said: "I think with Constance Marten, I've been following the case really closely, and I've noticed a lot of very distinguished female writers in serious newspapers follow this trial and try to get inside the head of Constance Marten and try to understand what motivated her and, you know, what are the rules that she led her life by and why did she make the choices that she did, because she'd had four children before this one.

"Anyway, I think that all the profiles that I read of her seem to come to the conclusion that Constance Martin lives almost in a parallel world, that she displayed no emotion, that she seemed to get irritated at times during the trial, as if she was somehow apart from it."

Janet also suggested that "we as a society are very judgmental about women who commit terrible crimes".

"I'm not belittling this," she said. "This is a terrible, terrible crime. But we seem to just look at the mugshot of Constance Martin and form an opinion about her. And our opinion is she doesn't have feelings. She doesn't have remorse.

"And we felt like that about Myra Hindley because her police mugshot was so appalling, she became the poster girl for the Moors Murders."

Loose Women airs on ITV on weekdays at 12.30pm.