I WAS waiting for it all day but funnily enough, I didn’t hear once the God-awful phrase ‘lessons must be learned’ after the mother and step-father of little Daniel Pelka were convicted of his murder.

I think we know the reason why.

Daniel – you probably won’t want reminding – is the Coventry lad whose mother, Magdalena Luczak and step-father, Mariusz Krezolek starved him to death.

But not before he was beaten and tortured by them, forced to eat salt and locked in his room.

The little boy was four yet had been so badly abused by Krezolek that he wet himself with fear every time an adult male spoke to him.

The reason no official dared to claim that lessons will be learned is because they know damn well that they have not.

They never will be until someone is given the authority to sack and relieve of their pensions, the overpaid bosses in charges of schools, police stations, and social services departments that can’t recognise a child being neglected and beaten to death when they see it.

If one lesson had ever been learned by anyone in authority anywhere, would the names of Baby Peter Connelly and Victoria Climbie be so grotesquely familiar?

If lessons had been learned over the killing of little Maria Colwell, battered to death in Brighton during the 1970s, she would be the same age as me, not lying cold in the grave like Daniel Pelka. Every time this happens we get the same sickening drivel from the ‘agencies’ – people whose job it is to make sure this doesn’t happen; they’re over-worked, over-stretched, under-resourced, too much bureaucracy, blah, blah blah.

But they all keep their jobs. They all keep their pensions. Even when they are relieved of their duties, like the vile Sharon Shoesmith of Baby Peter infamy, they take the council and the government to court to claw the money back.

When Daniel died he bore the marks of 30 separate injuries. He was six inches smaller than the average child his age and teachers had observed that he was so hungry that he would scavenge the bins for food.

Some of this was reported. But still nothing concrete to save him was done. And even that is not the most depressing thing about this terrible story. Out there another child is already being abused to death.

Primary-school aged, probably with a step-parent, possibly known to social services – the only thing we don’t know is that child’s name. But we soon will.

Just as we also know that we will be told that lessons will be learned, even when the evidence so comprehensively tells us that they haven’t.