Along with plenty of gossip, an abundance of cake, crisps and fizzy drinks are the order of the day for members of the so-called ‘Friday Club’.

Numbering around eight women, the meeting is a cherished ritual, during which the group like to try out new hair styles, do each other’s make up and ‘debrief’ on events of the previous week.

It sounds like the sort of harmless gathering that takes place in any number of homes across Britain – except that this particular group meet behind the walls of HMP Low Newton, the women’s prison in County Durham, which houses some of the UK’s most notorious female criminals.

Among regular members is a woman whose name once provoked almost unprecedented public revulsion.

That name is Tracey Connelly, and the appalling abuse over which she presided would become synonymous with one of the most catastrophic failures in child protection in modern British history.

She was the mother of ‘Baby P’ – 17-month-old Peter – who, in August 2007, was beaten to death by her boyfriend Steven Barker, 31, and his 35-year-old brother Jason Owen following months of almost incomprehensible cruelty, which she did nothing to prevent.

Twenty-one months later in May 2009, after admitting causing or allowing Peter’s death, Connelly was sentenced under an Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) order, meaning that even after her minimum sentence of five years was reached, she would not be given a fixed release date until she could prove she was no longer a public risk.

It is fair to say Connelly, now 45, has struggled to do that: having been released from prison twice, she has twice been returned after breaching her licence conditions, the last occasion in August 2024.

Now it has emerged that Connelly is once again asking the authorities to trust her with her freedom.

And the question facing the Parole Board is this: has she genuinely changed, or has she simply become better at telling people what they want to hear?

‘Tracey Connelly is a very manipulative woman who knows how to deal with people and can be quite charming when she wants to be,’ a prison insider exclusively told the Daily Mail this week.

‘But there is another side to her personality which is much less pleasant.

‘She has a history of being selfish, deceitful and putting her own needs before those of other people.

‘The difficulty is knowing when she is being genuine and when she is simply telling you what you want to hear. She isn’t stupid by any means. She’s spent a large part of her adult life in prison and understands how the system works.

‘She knows what prison officers, psychologists and probation staff expect of her and what she needs to demonstrate if she wants to be released. But understanding the rules and actually following them are two very different things.’

The insider added: ‘She’s had relationships with other women in prison and exchanged secret love letters with another inmate, even though she knew she was breaking prison rules.

‘One of the biggest concerns about Connelly has always been her relationships - she seems to have a desperate need for affection and attention, and that has repeatedly led her into trouble.’

At her latest appearance before the Parole Board this month Connelly seemed more than willing to admit to her failings.

Appearing off camera and cutting a strikingly different figure to the surly mugshot released to the public in 2009, having gained a significant amount of weight while behind bars, she told the panel that she was a terrible mother, acknowledged that she could be manipulative and promised that, if released, she would avoid children altogether.

‘I was crap with my own children,’ she declared. ‘I don’t want to be around other people’s children because I know how bad I was with my own.’

Nor, she insisted, would she pursue relationships with anyone who had children, even after her licence restrictions eventually ended, and while she hoped to find love again, she had no intention of living with a partner.

‘I want a relationship. I just don’t want to live with someone again. I want my own space. I want my own home,’ she said.

Her previous experience of domestic life had, of course, ended in unspeakable tragedy.

Back in 2006, she lived in a council house in Tottenham, north London, having emerged from a brief marriage to Peter's father, who was 17 years her senior and whom she had met aged just 16.

The couple had three children before the arrival of their fourth, Peter, in March 2006, their 2003 marriage breaking down shortly after the boy’s arrival.

By the end of that year, Steven Barker had moved in with Connelly, followed in due course by his brother Jason, Jason’s three children and a 15-year-old girl.

Eight months later, Peter was dead, his unresponsive body found in a bloodstained cot in an upstairs bedroom by Barker and Owen.

A post-mortem subsequently revealed that the angelic-looking, blond-haired, blue-eyed toddler had suffered more than 50 injuries, including a broken back, a torn earlobe and damage to his fingernails and toenails.

The house itself was a scene of almost unimaginable squalor, infested with fleas and featuring floors dotted with both human and animal faeces.

Peter’s death provoked national outrage, not least when it emerged that he had been on the child protection register for eight months and seen a total of 60 times by police, health professionals and social workers from Haringey.

Nonetheless when, in November 2008, Connelly pleaded guilty to causing or allowing the death of a child, it appeared she had faced up to her actions.

Yet it later emerged that prior to sentencing, she wrote a letter to the judge claiming she was too naive to understand the extent of the ordeal her son had experienced.

These protestations of ignorance were rebuffed by Judge Stephen Kramer who, when sentencing her in May 2009, declared that her insistence that she had been unaware of Peter’s suffering ‘defies belief’.

By imposing an IPP sentence (highly controversial, these were abolished in 2012 though there are still prisoners living under their terms) it meant that unlike a conventional fixed prison term, there was no automatic release date for Connelly once her minimum jail term had expired.

Instead it depends upon the Parole Board being satisfied that the risk posed by the prisoner can be managed safely in the community.

Even then, freedom comes with strict conditions and for Connelly this has meant a succession of assessments, hearings, periods of liberty and returns to prison.

First released in 2013 after serving six years (including time spent on remand), she was recalled to prison just 18 months later after breaching the conditions of her licence by developing intimate relationships online which she had tried to keep secret, and encouraging another resident of her accommodation to engage in inappropriate behaviour.

Further applications for parole were unsuccessful until eventually, in 2022, the authorities concluded that she could be released again – a decision that was notably opposed by the then Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab.

At that parole hearing, she acknowledged – for the first time – that she had known ‘deep down’ that Barker was abusing her son, but had wanted to believe in her own romantic fantasy.

‘I wanted my Prince Charming and unfortunately my children paid for that,’ she told the panel.

Yet barely two years after this apparent display of insight, Connelly was back behind bars, the reason depressingly familiar: she had formed a relationship with a married man she met online, failed to disclose it to probation officers and deleted messages and intimate photographs exchanged between them.

Her explanation was that she had been embarrassed because the man was married. To those responsible for supervising her, the key issue was her decision to conceal it, despite knowing that honesty about her personal life was a crucial condition of her freedom.

Either way, it put Connelly back in prison for the third time in August 2024 – returned, the Daily Mail understands, to HMP Low Newton, the closed women’s prison near Durham which has housed some of Britain’s most notorious female offenders, including serial killer Joanna Dennehy and Rose West, and where Connelly had been based between 2015 and 2022.

It is during that time that she first became a staunch member of the ‘Friday Club’, according to a prison insider.

‘Someone would bake a cake, and they would share crisps and fizzy drinks which they bought from the kiosk in the prison,’ the insider says.

‘She was one of the girls, not one of the leaders – she doesn’t really have the personality to set up something like that, but she was always there and was one of the main group,’ they recalled. ‘She liked to wear heavy eyeliner and bright red lipstick.’

There was also another reason, according to the insider, that Connelly sought the company of a group.

‘She would always try and befriend a group because she knew she was and still is vulnerable - women prisoners absolutely hate child killers so you need protection if you don’t want endless hours of verbal abuse.’

At the heart of her latest parole bid is whether she can finally be trusted on the outside.

The prison source stressed that a prisoner can be relatively easy to manage on a wing while still presenting more complicated concerns about honesty and behaviour after release.

‘She doesn’t have to be a constantly disruptive prisoner to be difficult to manage,’ they told the Daily Mail.

‘The concerns are much more complicated than that. They involve trust, honesty, emotional dependence and whether she can be relied upon to make sensible decisions when nobody is watching her.’

They added: ‘She has also expressed remorse for Peter’s death and accepted responsibility for the suffering of his family. Whether that remorse is genuine is something only she can really know.’

These observations are particularly striking in the light of Connelly’s latest evidence to the Parole Board.

At her most recent hearing, she promised to be open about future relationships, even if they involve unconventional sexual practices, including BDSM, sex clubs or threesomes.

She has also insisted that she would alert police and end any relationship if she discovered a partner had a sexual interest in children or had committed offences against them.

‘I would never sit back and watch that happen again,’ she declared earlier this month.

Yet the panel has heard that even professionals who support her release acknowledge that she may continue to test the boundaries of her licence conditions, while the parole board were told that other family members ‘have concerns’ about her latest attempts to emerge from behind bars.

Certainly, for Peter’s father, it seems there is little room for forgiveness.

Now 62, in 2024 he expressed his support for Connelly’s return to prison following her latest recall and said he would never be able to forgive her for the part she had played in their son’s death.

‘She can go to hell for what she did so far as I am concerned,’ he said. ‘Obviously it never gets easier. I go up to Peter’s grave whenever I can, to remember him. It will never go away. That’s why I can never forgive her, and I never will.’

Former Metropolitan Police Detective Jon Wedger, who interviewed Connelly two days before Peter died – and alerted authorities to the dangers she posed to her son – believes she cannot be rehabilitated, declaring earlier this year that she was a ‘deep rooted, manipulative liar’.

‘My opinion on meeting her – she will come across as plausible, respectable but she’s a liar,’ he said.

That is, of course, his opinion – but it may be that the most revealing comment came from Connelly herself.

Asked last week why she should be trusted not to breach her licence conditions for a third time, she replied: ‘I can’t give you a magic answer as to what’s different now.’

As they now contemplate whether to release this most divisive of figures back into the community, the parole board must work out if that is an answer they can afford to accept.