His partner thought she would die when he held a pillow over her face and punched her repeatedly
His partner thought she would die when he held a pillow over her face and punched her repeatedly
'I tried to kill myself three times over what he did to me and overdosed three times... I can't trust a man near me or even my own family'
Matthew Clarke, 41, suffocated his partner by holding a pillow over her face and punching her repeatedly
(Image: Gwent Police )
A woman was suffocated by her partner who held a pillow over her face and punched her repeatedly. The victim thought she was going to die and armed herself with a kitchen knife.
Matthew Clarke, 41, assaulted his partner at her home in Tredegar on October 29 last year. He breached bail conditions after turning up at her house. While there he accused her of cheating on him and was physically abusive towards her to the point she took hold of a blade in order to protect herself.
A sentencing hearing at Newport Crown Court on Tuesday heard the defendant entered the victim's home at 1.30pm while she was showering and he was aggressive towards her. For the latest court reports sign up to our crime newsletter.
He accused the victim of cheating and smashed her phone against a bathroom radiator before throwing it at her.
Later that day, the victim was in bed and she told Clarke to leave but he picked up a can of cider and hit her to the head with it before drinking it.
He then shook another can and opened it over her before also pouring another can over her. He claimed she owed him money and she responded by throwing a remote control at him.
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Prosecutor Amelia Pike said Clarke returned to the victim's home at 10.30pm and he entered her bedroom where he was shouting and aggressive towards her.
How to access free domestic abuse helplines in Wales
If you, a family member, or a friend have experienced domestic abuse or sexual violence, you can contact the Live Fear Free helpline 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for free advice and support, or to talk through your options. Call 0808 80 10 800, text 0786 007 7333, email info@livefearfreehelpline.wales or go to gov.wales/live-fear-free
Live Fear Free (funded by Welsh Government and run by Welsh Women's Aid) is a confidential service. Calls to 0808 80 numbers are free to call from landlines and mobile phones in the UK. They do not appear on itemised bills. The helpline provides support in English and Welsh, and access to an interpreter for callers with language support needs.
The Refuge charity also provides information, support and practical help 24 hours a day to women experiencing domestic violence. The service can refer women and children to refuges throughout the UK to help them escape domestic abuse. Refuge can be called on 0808 808 9999.
The defendant continued to accuse her of being unfaithful, which she denied. The victim told him to leave her alone and said if he hit her again "that would be the last".
Clarke responded by beginning to strike her multiple times to her face and body using both hands.
He then got on top of the victim and straddled her arms before grabbing a pillow and holding it over her face.
The defendant did this on three or four occasions for minutes at a time and the victim could feel blows from him punching the pillow.
She was unable to breathe and feared she was going to die.
Eventually, Clarke stopped and said he wanted a cigarette and told the victim he "loved and hated her".
Ms Pike said the victim was "frozen in pain and in shock". He hit her again and she got out of bed, saying she was going to sleep in the living room, but he said if she did she would "get another beating".
The victim went to the kitchen and retrieved a kitchen knife. The defendant asked her if she was going to stab him or come back to bed.
She told Clarke to let her go and called for help from the doorway. A neighbour had called the police in relation to an unrelated matter and despite the defendant trying to prevent her from shouting, she was heard by officers who came to the door and arrested the attacker.
Samaritans details
You can contact the Samaritans for non-judgmental advice 24/7, 365 days a year, by calling 116 123 or by emailing jo@samaritans.org.
They also have an online chat service and a self-help app, or you can write them a letter for free at Freepost SAMARITANS LETTERS
The victim, who suffered a black eye and bruising, told the court in her victim personal statement that she "thought she was going to die" when the defendant suffocated her.
She added: "I started having flashbacks and when I walked out the flat I never went back to the property. I couldn't sleep because I thought he was going to get me again or kill me. As a result of flashbacks of Matt harming me I went to my mother's in a different area to stay with her.
"I am suffering with problems with my mental health and flashbacks of what happened that night with Matt. I tried to kill myself three times over what he did to me and overdosed three times... I can't trust a man near me or even my own family.
"I see doubles of Matt everywhere I go and I'm completely still with fear. I don't want to go out anymore and get nervous when men are behind me. I don't see friends or even my brother as often as I used to as I don't want to go outside."
Clarke, of Market Street, Tredegar, pleaded guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm and two counts of criminal damage.
The court heard the defendant had 19 previous convictions, including five offences against the person including assault occasioning actual bodily harm for which he received a suspended sentence order he is now in breach of.
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In mitigation, Gareth Williams said his client had a "difficult upbringing and childhood" and as an adult he suffered with alcoholism and homelessness.
Judge Daniel Williams sentenced Clarke to a total of two years and 10 months imprisonment, and made him subject to a restraining order for 10 years.
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And they write about this. They talk about the crazy ideas that are spreading in the universities and amongst the young. They discuss the crumbling of the old conservatism of throne and altar, the spread of atheism, the spread of liberalism and socialism. They discuss new technologies like rail and the telegram. And they discuss how they can feel the 1815 international system, the international security system, is also starting to crumble. Then, in 1848, dominoes fall, regimes fall, new countries are created; and then in the 1860s and 1870s, you see a whole bunch of books being published reflecting these huge conflicts in the modern world. You have Fathers and Sons. You have Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. You have Nietzsche publishing Beyond Good and Evil. 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The big battle in Whitehall over power is not what people say in meetings, which are largely fake and irrelevant. The battle for power in Whitehall is about who gets to write the conclusions of what the Prime Minister says before the meeting starts. That's not how Pitt did things, but it's how it's how Whitehall works now. It's a system that's coming apart in Whitehall and it needs to be replaced by a different system Back then, technologists and entrepreneurs could build great things fast and at scale because of wise procurement, which was taken extremely seriously. Parliament threw people in jail during the Napoleonic Wars for procuring cannons. In stark contrast to how, after Covid, those responsible for procurement scandals were all obviously promoted. So the Whitehall in 1795 was more like Space X 2025 than Whitehall 2025 is. 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You can't carry on with a system where the political ministers are essentially non-player characters in a video game, and the characters with real power are the unelected officials. You can't carry on with a system where the ministers all walk up Downing Street and smile for the cameras, and the media and the MPs pretend that the decisions are actually being made in the cabinet. The Cabinet Secretary now has something like 100 times more power than the average minister does I can tell you the decisions are not made in the cabinet. In the whole of 2020, I never even bothered attending cabinet once. The reason is because it's become fake. Fake meetings, whereas the real decisions and the real power have moved elsewhere. So you replace people, you bring in new people, you close down the Cabinet Office, the prime minister takes over the Cabinet Office, the powers of the Cabinet Office. 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The Brahmins are insiders promoted through the system, regardless of failure. Look at our current Cabinet Secretary; he was responsible for pandemic preparation and planning. Of course, therefore, the old system has not fired him. It's promoted him. It's given him honours. And it's now put him in charge of the entire civil service. The Untouchables are the roughly 100 per cent of the world's most effective people, none of whom could be hired inside Whitehall by ministers. And the insane HR system means that everybody changes jobs every two years, roughly. So if you're sitting in Number Ten, you have a series of meetings with someone in charge of, for example, Chinese cyber operations. And you talk to them and you talk to them. You have meeting after meeting, and then suddenly this person vanishes completely and some new person arrives in Number Ten and you say: 'Oh, hello, who are you?'. And they say: 'Oh, I'm so-and-so'. And you say: 'Oh, right. Okay. Um, so what are you doing?'. 'Oh, I've been in charge of special educational needs for the last two years'. 'Oh, right. Okay. You're now in charge of Chinese cyber operations?'. 'Yeah'. So the justification for the entire permanent civil service system is supposedly that it develops expertise. But the actual way in which it works now is pathologically hostile to actual expertise. It doesn't let anyone develop expertise. And it forces people, if you want promotion and you want to get a pay rise, you have to do this constant zigzagging every two years up through the HR system. All of that needs to be completely swept away. It was created in the 1850s, and, in my opinion, it's no coincidence that from the time that the so-called professional civil service took over, that marked the beginning of institutional dysfunction spreading throughout the Westminster system, because it became fundamentally impossible for elected ministers to change things by changing the people. And that's really where I think responsibility and fake meetings started to take over. So there's a few other things that you need to do in parallel with this. Once you've actually taken power, and the prime minister is now actually in charge of Whitehall, the power of the Treasury has to be shattered into a thousand pieces. The Treasury's processes for all long-term projects are an absolute disaster. They make it impossible for people to plan. They make everything super expensive. Today, with the publication of this spending review, you see this process. Now, behind the scenes, what happens is everybody lies in the spending review process, and all of the budget numbers everyone knows are completely fake. Everyone at the heart of power inside the Treasury at the Number Ten system knows those numbers are all fake. The long-term budgeting process also means that you have ca constant churn whereby entities all over Whitehall can't actually organise themselves over a five or ten or 15-year period. They're constantly told by the Treasury: No, your ceiling for budgets is just here. Even though the project extends for years beyond that. So you see completely crazy things like, the officials in charge of project X, say at the MOD, are told that everyone on project X will be fired in June because the Treasury won't guarantee that the budget is still going to be there after, say, November. People are fired, things closed down, And then, in November, the Treasury goes – oh, actually, some 30-year-old, who read PPE 100 yards from here (in Oxford) – says: 'No, no, no, actually this programme can carry on'. And the people are all hired again. All you've done is waste millions of quid and waste everyone's time. This is regarded as a completely standard, sensible way for Whitehall to organise how it spends all of your money. The Prime Minister's Office has got to take responsibility for building a completely new process for long-term budgets, and that obviously impacts with the government procurement. As I said before, 200 years ago, this country was the best country in the world at actually doing procurement. Now it is a poster child for some of the most insane decisions that you can possibly imagine. Even the simplest things like building a dual carriageway is now scheduled to take years. That is completely normal. And if you say: 'This is mad, and what we're going to do instead is just systematically rip up all of these rules', much of the system will go completely crazy. Because the system doesn't see itself as there to deliver for you, the voters, for the taxpayers. The system sees itself as there to protect itself. It's very routine when you're sitting inside Number Ten and you look at rolling news on TV and you see some story rolling, scrolling across the bottom of the screen saying 'Disaster on blah, blah, blah'. You look out the window and you see the official responsible for it just pottering through Horse Guards on the way to the Tube. The culture of direct responsibility is now almost completely unknown and is seen in Whitehall as something that's almost deranged if you try and do it. So during Covid, when we said: 'Okay, we've got to try and get testing going faster, we've got to try and get vaccines going faster. We've got to try and get a thousand things going. We're going to put a named individual in charge of each of these things, so that everybody knows that person is the person to call and that person is responsible, right?' This is not exactly revolutionary management. This is how every single functioning entity on planet Earth works. And this was seen in Whitehall as revolutionary and hostile and to be resisted. Now, if you think that that's the mindset, even when thousands of people are dying every week and it's a genuine crisis, imagine what it's like to change things in normal times now; that's why Keir Starmer is finding that he has meetings. Everyone nods and smiles. And then, three months later, no one did anything because no one really cares what the Prime Minister thinks. The system just rumbles on with its own priorities. Why has Starmer got himself into the single biggest political disaster of his premiership on winter fuel payments? Was that in his manifesto? No. Did he say he wanted to do it? No. Did Labour MPs want to do it? No. Why? What happened? It happened because it's on the 30-year-old Treasury official's priority list. And if you've got non-player characters as prime ministers and as ministers, and a system that operates in this mad way, the system will put its priorities in front of the ministers and push them out on TV to announce things. And then the rest of the MPs go, 'Where the hell is this coming from? Why are we doing this? We don't understand'. All of these different things need to change. The other thing that you need to do in Number Ten – so you've actually taken power from the Cabinet Office, you've closed the Cabinet Office you've got rid of the HR system so you can fire people, replace people, hire the world's best people to come and work on important government buildings – you change the procurement system so the government can now actually buy and sell and do things on normal timescales rather than on 20 or 30-year timescales. The other central thing that has to happen is science and technology have to become embedded in the Prime Minister's Office as a core priority of Number Ten Downing Street. We can't carry on with a government system in which we have a Western civilisation that's based on science and technology and a political cultural elite dominant in politics and Whitehall that is ignorant of, or contemptuous about, science and technology. That is a recipe for catastrophe. A new regime that's actually serious about turning the country around has to do – as well as these kind of bureaucratic and power changes that I've described inside the Number 10/ Whitehall complex – is to say that science and technology, both for prosperity and for security, are now going to become critical aspects of how the Prime Minister spends his time in the same way that they are on national security issues and budgets. They have to be at the top of the PM's inbox and completely integrated into how the Prime Minister's Office actually works. If you do all these things, you won't solve all of our problems for sure, but you will at least have a functioning regime that can build things, rather than a dysfunctional and pathological regime. The last thing I'll say then is, if I was going to be on a desert island, one of the top three books that I would take with me is War and Peace. And if you think about War and Peace, there are two kind of strands running through. One strand is that these inexorable human forces, inexorable forces of history, collide and smash. And it doesn't really matter what individual people do and think. They just get broken and washed along in the flood. And the other part of the story is that, at some times, what one person thinks and does can have a huge effect on what happens. Both things are true at the same time. Over the next five years, everyone in this room is going to live through two things Over the next five years, everyone in this room is going to live through two things. They're going to live through these old regimes of the Western world continuing to crumble and disintegrate and fail. Both the old parties are like one of those Japanese movies where a samurai whips their heads off, but they haven't quite realised yet that they're dead. But they are. Samurai has done his bit, the Tories and Labour are (dead). And the AI and biological engineering strand is going to continue as well. And these two things are going to be very connected. These forces are going to smash into all of our lives. They're going to affect them in all sorts of ways. But also, I would just say there's a last thing that, as per Tolstoy's message in War and Peace, we can have agency at these moments of crisis. Everyone here can build things. You can prepare for this extremely different world that's coming. One of the most obvious things to do, I think, is not everything can be about Westminster, not everything should be about Westminster. It's one of the problems that it's centralised so much power there. We've got to deal with the dysfunction of Westminster. We have to return to a civilisation in this country where other parts of the country can actually build things and do things. And the most obvious thing? It strikes me that there's something that everyone in this room could get involved with, which is the replacement of the old school system. The AI thing means it's doomed, a bit like the old parties; the current system (with) fake exams, fake curriculum created by the bureaucratic state to try to justify that it knows what it's doing, has destroyed in lots of ways the old European (system of) education and the institutions. That old system is doomed. New things are definitely going to come. And the sooner the people like those in this room start building them, what comes next, the better. We don't have to wait for Westminster and Whitehall. They won't like it, but they're too broken to be able to stop us. So we can start building alternative things for our children to go into. And if you start creating alternative educational ecosystem in time, that will help us replace the rotten old political regime which is crumbling at the same time.
Wales Online
4 hours ago
- Wales Online
Driver high on drugs smashed into a lamppost in 120mph police chase
Driver high on drugs smashed into a lamppost in 120mph police chase Craig Peacock, 35, narrowly missed a group of pedestrians when he crashed into the lamppost at 80mph Craig Peacock, 35, reached speeds of 120mph during a police chase before crashing into a lamppost (Image: Gwent Police ) A driver under the influence of drugs reached speeds of 120mph during a police chase before crashing into a lamppost, narrowly missing a group of pedestrians. He said he drove away from officers as he had only recently been giving his driving licence back. Craig Peacock, 35, was seen driving a Peugeot 307 through Cwmbran on April 11 at speeds of 50mph in a 30mph zone. A police vehicle indicated its blue lights for the defendant to stop but he accelerated away aggressively and a pursuit began. A sentencing hearing at Cardiff Crown Court on Wednesday heard Peacock made his way on the A4042 at 80mph. For the latest court reports sign up to our crime newsletter. He increased his speeds and overtook vehicles at 120mph. Eventually Peacock lost control of the car near the Crow's Nest pub and collided into a lamppost at 80mph. The defendant managed to escape from the wreckage and ran off but he was detained. Article continues below A drugs wipe was carried out and Peacock tested positive for both cocaine and cannabis. Prosecutor Ben Jones said the defendant was taken to the Grange University Hospital and was later charged with cuts to his arms. At the police station, he provided a breath sample and tested negative for alcohol. But he refused to provide a blood sample to check for drugs, due to the cuts on his arms. Peacock, of Clarence Place, Newport, later pleaded guilty to dangerous driving, drug driving and failing to provide a specimen. The court heard he has numerous previous convictions for driving offences, and last year he failed to comply with a community order imposed following a conviction for drug driving. In mitigation, Jac Brown conceded his client had been drinking earlier in the day. He said the defendant had fled from police as he hoped to evade officers in order to keep his licence, which he had recently reacquired. Sentencing, Judge Rhys Rowlands said the defendant had narrowly missed a group of pedestrians when he crashed the car. He added: "It almost certainly would have been a fatal or serious injury collision." Article continues below Peacock was sentenced to 14 months imprisonment and was disqualified from driving for three years and seven months.
