We had to tell cops manhunt was over

FOR a manhunt that gripped the nation and got a mention Parliament, it ended in such a humdrum fashion.

- BY PATRICK HILL

I saw no sense of drama or urgency when Billy Smith handed himself in at HMP Wandsworth yesterday, three days after being wrongly freed.

To underline the mood, two police officers in a marked car outside the jail were none the wiser that the hunt was over until Mirror photographer Jeremy Selwyn told them they had just missed Smith walking in.

Smith made no fuss as he stepped out of a flatbed truck and gave a sobbing woman a kiss before walking into the public reception area at the South-West London jail at 10.30am.

Rather than one of Britain's most wanted men, he looked more like an ordinary visitor popping in to Wandsworth jail see a banged-up relative. Seconds earlier, he was heard saying: "I'm the prisoner they're looking for. I'm about to hand myself in."

The calm was far removed from the drama of Prime Minister's Questions nearly 24 hours earlier, when Keir Starmer's stand-in David Lammy found himself on the ropes over prison release blunders.