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The Naming and Timing of Two of My Books

Proinsias-mac-an-bheatha via Unsplash

We have two magpies nesting in our garden, which is marvellous. Two For Joy! Probably not so marvellous for our cloud of sparrows who live in the brambles over the shed. We’re so wedded to the black and white motif, it’s always a surprise to see shimmering blue if the light catches a magpie just so. (Why no photo of two? Welcome to free stock photography. There’s a lovely painting on artvee of four eating a dead bird. I must write a wish-list and buy a Dreamtime splurge of photos during their sale.)

With the clematis out, and the sun shining, 2025 seems to offer some good news. Also bad. I used to belong to Westminster Quaker Meeting whose door was kicked down this week, by 20 armed police to arrest six possible climate protestors.

Two books out next 12 months!?*

The Spooky Victorian Murder Mystery has been bouncing off agents and publishers for over a year. Feedback has been good and I think the world deserves it. So, decision!

I am planning to self-publish this, although I’m still open to the right traditional deal if one pops up suddenly. It’s with an editor and I’m exploring the glory of COVERS.

The novella, Top Tips for Loving a Lizard is with my editor at Arcadia. That has other markets I can try. It is a darling little love of a book and the world deserves it.

The third novella is also on submission but that’s behind the other two in urgency and time.

*I hope

The Naming of Books is a Serious Thing

I’ve known for well over a year that DEAR HEART needed to be called something else. NUMBER ONE VICTORIAN SPOOKY MURDER MYSTERY is OK but doesn’t quite trip off the tongue.

Names are a funny business. Some people claim the name is the biggest marketing call a publisher makes. (As opposed to the cover?) The name is something which makes people pick up the book or click to find more.

Ideally the name gives vibe, genre, and setting. Although one immediately thinks of famous books whose titles do very little of that. Catcher in the Rye, anyone?

My first book used to be called A SONG FOR CORY which is the kind of poetic title which only makes sense once you read the book. Unlike OUR CHILD OF THE STARS which tells you something about the book before you read it.

DEAR HEART doesn’t do that other than radiating a vague old-fashioned camp. The cross-class sapphic relationship between Mrs Ashton and Braddie is one thread of the book, but that name doesn’t even hint at that lovely, grumpy couple.

I have a new title �� six words. I tested the new name on a few people and they guessed genre, protagonist, vibe, ‘possible a bit tongue in cheek��, and that it wasn’t set in the modern day. My editor loves it (but not enough to take the book.)

A CROOKED MEDIUM’S GUIDE TO MURDER

Good, innit? The cover add to what the title can’t.

In public I may call this CODENAME CROOKED for a bit. If the book turns into a series �� and it was designed to be �� I may call them the Dear Heart Mysteries.

Anyone who responds to this newsletter �� sharing, boosting, liking, commenting, �� goes on into a raffle for a free copy.

What’s your favourite title which really doesn’t explain the content?

An autumn of conventions

I am at EdgeLit in Derby, 7th Sept,

BristolCon, Oct 25-26,

World Fantasy Con in Brighton, Oct 30-2 Nov.

Come and say hi.

If all goes according to plan, I will either have

copies of A CROOKED MEDIUM’S GUIDE TO MURDERor a means to order them.Review copies

I’m collating a request list for review copies which will prioritise

Established bloggers and reviewers, particularly those I already know like my stuff.Suitable figures strong in the new genreBeta readers and others who have helped me work on the text

I can’t promise to send a free copy to everyone, particularly not print copies.

Use the to send name, blog/podcast/other forum, what format you prefer and what you would tolerate (eBook, PDF, print.)

THE SECRET MURDER CLUB

There’s a handshake and a clubhouse and everything. More next time.

Quick point about self-publishing.

Self-publishing evangelists preach its superiority in every way. Traditional publishing snobs dismiss it. I’m pragmatic and in the middle.

Things are happening, more next month

PS, I’m coping with ‘everything�� by trying to doing ‘something�� every week.

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Haringey Creatives Against AI is a very loose group of creatives with some links to the All Good Bookshop. It’s not an official bookshop project (yet). Support our statement by messaging me on this site. Currently trying to sound out the local MPs �� Bambos Charalambous is supportive of creators and we haven’t heard back from the others. (No diss, just too early to have heard).

Name and what type of creating you do �� this is very much NOT just writersEmail to stay in touch on this (only) �� we have a privacy policyIdeally postcode so we can know who your MP is.

Bambos posted: “Great to meet author & constituent [Stephen Cox] today to discuss the importance of copyright as AI technology is on the rise. We must protect the rights of our creatives & value the contributions they make both to the economy & society.��

Write to your MP and any Lords you know

This finds out which MP is yours, and how to contact them. All you need is your postcode.  Write or call and ask for a meeting.  You’ll need to give your postcode as they need to know if you are a constituent. The alliance of creatives, Creative Rights in AI, has an . I would strongly suggest personalising this �� the more cut and paste your communication, the less attention an MP may give. Even if you say ‘I have three books X Y Z out�� or ‘my short film ��123�� was shortlisted for a regional prize��, it helps. It has a sentence ‘creators welcome the benefits of AI�� which personally I would remove.

The Government’s Sell Out Consultation closes 25 February

Copyright champions ALCS have which is sound, and some other actions.

Compensation for past training. The Government proposals allows an entire industry to face no cost for piracy. It basically screws us forever. Billion dollar companies should pay creatives for using their work.

In future say, companies can only train on your material if you OPT IN.

Right morallyWill create an actual market for high quality stuff to train on.

Here’s one letter to an MP, just as an example. But make it personal -how will it affect you, and your creative community. And using your own words is best.

We are deeply concerned about the proposals on AI and copyright going through Parliament and hope you will help us challenge them. We are an informal group of creatives and others connected with the All Good Bookshop. We are novelists, writers, artists, film-makers, etc.

Would you be able to meet us?

We are aware of the IPO consultation and some of us have answered it. It is framed to support the government position, and so longwinded that it will deter many from completing it.

The proposals pardon AI companies who have trained their LLMs on our work retrospectively �� the billion-dollar businesses they built using our work will never need to pay creatives any recompense. It upends the normal copyright law, which is that use requires the copyholder’s consent. The companies knew they were likely to be in breach of these rights. A recent court filing said Mark Zuckerberg personally authorised using 197,000 pirated books for train Meta’s AI despite internal concerns.

The proposals for the future are deeply flawed. An opt-out system will push administration onto the small creative �� with our material on many different platforms, often with opaque terms and conditions. Opt-in is right in principle, and it will force the AI companies to offer clear systems and fair reward.

The creative industries are 5% of GDP but their diversity, originality and vibrancy depends on thousands of individuals. Financial rewards are usually poor, we are confident we do better work than machines, but it is not fair that our work can be used to compete with us, and undercut us, without our permission.

As far as we know, all major bodies representing creators oppose these proposals.

Of course, we accept some uses of LLMs could be ethically trained and socially useful.

Yours etc

My newsletter ��

I try to write about a wide range of writing issues but the back issues contain a certain amount about AI!

Finally the statement by 40,000 plus creatives about AI. and be in the same list as members of Abba, composers, poets and National Treasures.

[If in North London, there’s a meeting 2pm Saturday 15th, All Good Bookshop, Turnpike Lane. All welcome.]

The government is throwing creatives big and small under a shiny new bus.

A new consultation on “AI��, so called Artificial Intelligence, will tear up copyright law, which is what protects all creatives from theft.

Actions and resources at the bottom of this page.

What’s the problem?

LLMs �� large language models �� are trained on data. For creatives, this is not ‘data�� �� it is our art. It is years of sweat and skill writing a book or a play, painting or photographing in our style, developing skills as an actor, editor or translator, etc.

The tech companies usually trained on copyrighted material without asking, knowing that this probably broke the law in the US, UK and EU.

The government proposes that it would be impossible for creatives to sue the AI companies or receive any other form of compensation for past wrongs.

The government does propose that you can ‘opt out�� of your stuff being used in future. Opt out is wrong in principle �� UK copyright law is usually ‘opt in��. It is also cumbersome and impractical. I have countless works across maybe 25 platforms.

This is a capitulation to large, unscrupulous and untrustworthy companies driven by greed.

Don’t give in without a fight. This can be fought.  

Sign the statement online, respond to the consultation (Society of Authors has a brief), write to your MP, share this information.

There are many other issues with so called AI. It uses vastly more energy and drinking water (for cooling.) It’s not intelligent. AI search can be dangerously wrong. It is being suggested for dozens of roles where it’s likely it will be catastrophic.

Creative Industries statement against AI training (online petition.)

(While petitions are useful, do at least one other thing as well.)

Society of Authors statement

A longwinded and biased government consultation concludes 25 February

Guardian report

The publishing sea is wracked with whirlpools, shifting sands, mysterious fogs and vanishing coastlines. My on works in progress, works I that made me, recent recommends, Orbital, and much more. Please subscribe for free, to get this conveniently to your inbox.

The short 2024 summary.

A half-apology. This is later than intended because I’ve been working to finish something I was really enjoying writing. It’s also long.

Photo by ���Dz���

The publishing sea is wracked with whirlpools, shifting sands, mysterious fogs and vanishing coastlines. There are more unseen currents than treasure islands. You can often be caught in the Typhoon of Bad News or be becalmed in the Doldrums of Submission. Worse still, you could be snared on the Reef of Over-Extended Metaphor.

Agents are cautious, and publishers are edgy, wavering to no, cancelling later books in a series. Plus, the churn of staff means one editor’s pet project becomes the next editor’s unwelcome Christmas leftovers. Yet the book world hears of wild six figure advances for Romantasy, or a celebrity author, or something that sparks a particular interest.

Should writers try to write what agents might think a publisher might think traditional retail and the supermarkets might buy? Is that what readers long for? How does anyone in that chain know?

I don’t know whether my latest project will sell but I’ve enjoyed writing it, and you can’t beat that.

Finally, so called genAI. The government is trying to throw creatives under the bus. Faced with authors, voice actors, visual artists, and many others protesting the historic and ongoing theft of their copyright material to train genAI, the government proposes to legalise theft. You will be able to opt out, and I assure you, across the twenty plus platforms I would have to look at, every one hides that opt out somewhere different. I’ll post about this more but there is a extremely biased consultation to respond to. More next week.

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I am still querying DEAR HEART the spooky Victorian murder mystery which I know totally works �� I have a publisher and an agent saying it is great �� just not one for their own small number of slots. Largely, to get an agent, you need a novel length work or a massive body of work. The emphasis is now publishers. I’ve had really mixed advice about trying American agents. I’ve some sequel thinking on DEAR HEART #2 �� THE HEARTENING now �� I need to be contracted to write it.

Dark Deeds (Novella 1) has been ‘one final look�� for ages. I’m at first wonky draft with Name TBC (Novella 2). I wrote the latter in an two month blitz, pulling together a twenty-year-old idea, a short story published in 2015, another done last year, and a lot of thinking about a novel some years back. The novella is a glorious form, and if there were more markets, I might adopt it wholesale.

Amazing to be reminded how writing something you truly want to write can feel. I read a chapter of Name TBC to my writers�� group and it landed really well. If you think Cory’s purple tentacles were controversial��

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Christmas/New Year can be difficult and I normally feel at least three things at once. My partner had her father die at Christmas, and recently we have had a run of dramas. My loving Dad died between the holidays in 2022, in Christmas 2023 we were only a few months after the death of my generous mother-in-law. We had a quiet, lovely, calm Christmas in 2024 with my wonderful mum. How things pan out for my mum is occupying our thoughts. I’m grateful that we three brothers and our partners work together as a team. It is always good when my grown up kids are home, seeing them forge their own lives. Both had big steps forward in 2024.

I wish you a happy, peaceful season and a creative and positive New Year.

The Five Books that Made Me (and two recent recommends)

Ericka Weller asked me to pick the  It was a hard task, 25 would have been easier. She says “what might be one of the most eclectic and wide-ranging selections yet.��

I chose five from the first half of my life. The books are A Wizard of Earthsea, The Persian Boy, Easter, Guns Germs and Steel, and the poetry of Sharon Olds (to stand in for poetry generally).

The book I am raving about is The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. The British government discovers time travel and rescues five people from history just before their deaths. The narrator is the minder-mentor of a Victorian arctic explorer. It’s a hot romance, a time travel story, a satire on bureaucracy, and ‘there’s a mole in the Circus��. And add a dash of BBC hit Ghosts. You can’t have a massive success with odd genres, eh?

Talking of a mole in the Circus, I read the acclaimed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time. Seedy, treacherous and gray, it lives up to its reputation.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Photo by ���Dz���

There is great interest in this novella which won the Booker �� my local bookshop struggled to get supply, the demand was so high.

Set largely on the International Space Station, but at times peeking on Earth, it has periods of sweeping majesty as it contemplates hurricanes, the range of places seeing dawn at the same time, and the vastness of space. And it also homes in on tiny details of the astronauts�� constrained and deeply peculiar lives. Like religious figures following arcane rites, in some dangerous rocky tower, they put their health and sanity on the line for the common good.

One controversy followed a few awkward responses Harvey made when asked if Orbital was science fiction or not �� and somewhere the term ‘space pastoral�� was used. Lots of SF writers got cross about that.

Orbital is a literary or poetic work, interested in working with language and metaphor. The characterisation is no better than adequate, it is often in omniscient viewpoint, there is not much peril on the station, and many people will say ‘Nothing really happens��. Which is a little unfair given the hurricane. As a work, it carries you forward to finish it. However, writing movingly about space and the whole earth is nothing new �� people have been doing it for decades.

Is it science fiction? In the odd page, someone imagines something �� for example a brief flight of fancy as to what it might be like if some alien civilisation finds the Voyager spacecraft and tries to read their golden records of Earth. One brief episode, irrelevant to the plot, isn’t enough to make something science fiction. If have a putative novel where a teenager spends a page imagines being a NYPD detective, the novel wouldn’t be made a police procedural��

Orbital is a space pastoral but to my mind, not SF. And I am confident, not the best or most memorable book published in the relevant year.

But all genres are fuzzy. Space pastoral is a good description of say, the works of Simak where a grizzled farmer guards a portal to another planet, and that’s definitely SF.

I feel very differently about Orbital �� doing what it sets out to do �� than I do about someone writing about AI and claiming they are thinking about it differently and deeper than anyone has in the time it has been a serious topic of discussion. Which is well over a century. ‘Robots have feelings�� and ‘robots demand their rights�� is the damn plot of Rossums Universal Robots, the Czech play which invented the word robot, in the 1920s.

What is literary anyway?

Literary fiction was on the agenda at Bristolcon. I got to moderate a firework display of a discussion.

Grimdark heroine Anna Stephens Spark defended her work as both literary and fantasy �� indeed as high literary and high fantasy, using language to its limits and drawing on literary modernism. Joanna Harris made a plea for imagination and fable, and asserted ‘being grown-up is over-rated��. She said that the only difference between her literary books and her fantasies was that she consistently made far more money from the literary ones. No reason not to write her fantasies. Naomi Scott expounded a widely held view in genre circles that ‘literary fiction�� is a meaningless term, from a self-defining clique of gatekeepers and snobs.

My own thinking is that there’s a sense in which books are on a spectrum of literariness, in terms of language and emphasis. You can have a meaningful discussion as to whether this book is ‘more literary�� than that, just as you can whether this book is ‘better paced�� than that. A book can be very **effectively** written without being seen as literary.

It’s a truth insufficiently realized that many literary gatekeepers accept speculative books from the literary world but disdain them from other people. It’s not an attractive trait.

As ever comments, questions and shares are welcome. In a time of churn in the media world, I value being able to talk to you direct to your inbox. I’m on  most at the moment but . X-Twitter is utterly ineffective now, and I’m weaning myself off it. I refuse to pay Josef Goebbels to reach a few more people.

A poem, after The Trees, by Philip Larkin

The stars are blooming on the ŷ������ Page.

Reviewing is a kind of grief,

We wait with fear and hope and rage.

Each kindly word is sweet relief.

The readers measure, judge, and speak,

Our labours handed to their tender care.

Our ratings ebb and flow, then peak,

So tardy friends bring ripe despair.

We bookmark sites, and fearing death

Will come before our friends�� review,

We tap to see the stars anew.

Refresh, Refresh, Refresh

Professor B was accused of sleeping with youths and men in a country where homosexuality is illegal. Some were his patients and with some he paid for their education. Some were under the UK age of sexual consent.

I worked for the UK hospital which was his main employer. We suspended him, for actions not in our service, to investigate. His suspension soon posed considerable difficulty delivering some parts of the cardiac service, and of teaching his extremely important new treatment to other hospitals across the world. His work meant some children could have a procedure done by catheter, not by cutting open the chest.

Photo from Mohamad Azaam at Unsplash. (This is a stock photo and no-one in it is implicated!)

Our working theory was that our hospital wasn’t a great place to attempt anything untoward. He didn’t have much contact with patients during their stay. There wasn’t much privacy, there were too many nurses with child protection training around, and a British children’s hospital usually has parents around, even overnight. Making relationships to exploit later was far more worrying.

The tough choice was this. Already other clinicians could do many cases with his method, but at the cutting edge, there were patients who needed his pioneering skill for the best outcome. One case was considered inoperable without him and several would be riskier. We needed him to train new staff, even faster than planned, so the department and the world could do without him if the charges were proved.

The department organised a plan that would allow him to work, under severe restrictions.

The CEO looked at me and said, ‘So can we defend this in the media if we let him work?��

‘Yes,�� I said. ‘Giving our patients the best chance is what we’re here for. We just need the plan to be credible.�� I knew who would be doing the defending.

Fierce rules were put in place. The Professor was not allowed in a room with a patient without an additional senior member of staff, solely to watch him. This even applied in clinical procedures, where there were several other staff anyway and the procedure was routinely filmed. Watching him in the procedure room was to manage understandable parental anxieties, rather than to believe there was a serious risk. He was a smart man and he wasn’t going to do anything while he was watched.

When the news did break, we immediately activated a patient and family helpline. People affected needed to talk this through with someone. The public and media response was as good as could be expected. The media’s “serious questions�� got serious answers �� the bald truth. It had been the right call.

Misplaced loyalty

The degree of staff denial was extraordinary. The admirable senior staff �� who felt personally betrayed �� accepted there was an issue and friendship couldn’t get in the way. The evidence was strong. Even if all sexual accusations were lies, the Professor’s actions �� inviting underage patients to sleep and shower in his rooms �� were scandalous and indefensible. The leadership had to manage staff who just didn’t want to believe it, including those who thought the management had made it up. In a field which lives and dies by evidence-based medicine, some believe to this day that this able man was brought down by a conspiracy.

Even now, the Professor is invited to the odd prestigious conference.

Some staff said we shouldn’t collude with ‘wicked African homophobia��. This ignored the realities that he abused his power. There was no homophobia. The disciplinary investigation came across a couple of consenting relationships with adults who weren’t patients or relatives.  Those posed no professional concerns, so they were dismissed as irrelevant.

This curious self-deception occurs elsewhere. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a Nobel Laureate with a distinguished career, brought 56 boys from Micronesia to the United States and paid for their education. Some of them later accused him of sexual misconduct, and there’s a heart rending documentary. Gajdusek also wrote in diaries and clinical journals about sex with boys, and incest, which he defended. When the accusations broke, eminent figures were quick to accuse the boys of lying, then to shift to the wholly different claim that sex happened but that they consented, and that these relationships were culturally acceptable. Gajdusek served one year of jail in a plea bargain. As an SFF fan, it pains me to mention Arthur C Clarke and his life surrounded by boys in Sri Lanka, although the allegations were never upheld in a court.

Interesting that the documentary about Gajdusek, The Genius and the Boys, was directed by Swedish investigative journalist Bosse Lingquist. He also first exposed Paolo Macchiarini, (, if not a cruel and dangerous crook.) Macchiarini was defended by Sweden’s most prestigious medical organisation despite enough alarm bells to wake a city.

A verdict

In Greek tragedy, the hero has many good qualities but is brought low by their flaws.

Most of the accusations were confirmed and after a very deliberate and careful investigation, the hospital dismissed him. In due course even younger victims were identified from his time abroad, including horrifically the family of a French boy aged ten he touched inappropriately. The family decided to give him a second chance, and so they hadn’t reported his behaviour several years before.  

The UK regulator, the GMC, brought the Professor before a professional tribunal to permanently deprive him of the right to practice as a doctor. He simply refused to engage with the process. The case turned out to have wider implications.

Rogues deserve rights

The Professor was found unfit to practice �� in layman’s term, banned from being a doctor �� and his team appealed. The GMC as prosecutor had assumed that none of the boys, youths and men could possibly be brought to the UK to face cross examination because of the stigma and legal threats they faced in their society.

The defence argued that the principle of testing prosecution evidence is important for fairness. The court agreed. It ruled that the GMC should have thoroughly considered every possible option, including new-fangled videoconferencing, before they relied on evidence which could not be directly challenged. The system needs to be fair, even if the person probably did it. I agree with the court but I recognise the GMC had a difficult job to do.

The GMC had to re-prosecute the tribunal which still reached the same damning conclusion.

This test case, named after the Professor, now binds all such bodies. This shows why rights cannot be kept only for ‘good people.�� Sometimes, throughout history, it has been the defence of absolute rogues which lead to legal protections for everyone. Disappearing MP John Stonehouse who staged his death to defraud his insurers, ended up in a test case, defending the right of the jury to decide on facts.

The African authorities did not prosecute the European philanthropist. I recognise the enormous risk the victims might have been under if they testified. UK authorities investigated �� the law had been changed to allow overseas offences to be prosecuted here �� but nothing came to court. Maybe the victims would have welcomed their day in court.

The balance of probability

Criminal courts work to ‘beyond reasonable doubt��, or as juries are now instructed, ‘you must be sure��.   Employers and professional tribunals (and civil courts) work to ‘the balance of probability,�� which is ‘more likely than not��.

That’s why a hospital can fire someone and the professional tribunal remove them from the register, and yet the same case might lose in court.

For a doctor, our law says that a hospital must be allowed to fire them if there is a reasonable chance but not absolutely certainty that they pose a danger.

In addition, if a doctor repeatedly refuses to follow good safe practice, the employer need not wait until someone is actually harmed before they are disciplined.

This is a sad tale. I suppose I take comfort in the fact that no matter how well respected and important the man was, he was not considered more important than the safety of children and young people in his care. Survivors were believed and hopefully protected, and the important clinical work will continue. At a personal level, I’m pleased that the difficult decisions we made balancing safety and delivering care were accepted.

CW: While abuse is mentioned, it is neither described at all, nor shown in an image.

An old child protection case at the hospital I used to work at. What were the issues as Head of Comms when a respected and important figure in his field turns out to have feet of clay?

What’s it like when a story of alleged sexual misconduct hits an organisation?

I’m not writing this to take shots at the individual, over ten years ago, to brood or gloat. I do think it gives a little insight into these cases.

Note: I can only write about my previous work respecting patient and staff confidentiality and consent, for personal/professional ethics and legal reasons. I am only writing from memory and publicly available information. If I don’t respond to certain comments and questions, that’s why.

I was Head of Communications. The Chief Executive and I had talked through the latest drama, and I was walking back to my office, a little off site. Then I was called to come back. Had I done something wrong? Or one of my team?

The CEO, a confident doctor, looked like she’d had a bad shock. I was one of the first few people to be told that a head of department, a charismatic and internationally renowned heart specialist, had been accused of sexual misconduct in his charitable work abroad.

Luring Professor B away from one of the top European hospitals to head our department had been a coup. His work was genuinely innovative, reducing the need for invasive heart surgery in children. It offered new vistas of better treatment for young and old, and through us, he was teaching it to the world. (Unlike Paulo Macchiarini who was a charlatan.)

Accusations and scope of the crisis

The Professor regularly travelled to Africa with a surgical charity. Youths and men had accused him of enticing or pressurising them to have sex with him. Some were his patients or their relatives, for some he paid for their schooling. The abuse of power was obvious. Some were under the UK age of consent and homosexuality was both illegal and heavily stigmatised in that country.

The news was devastating. If true, two immediate questions. Were patients in our hospital at risk? And had we failed to safeguard them? Could the Professor have social relationships with UK parents and families �� could he groom discharged patients? How many victims �� how had he got away with it �� were there warning signs missed? Had our own systems failed?

He was heavily involved in fundraising and publicity. He was articulate, he could explain things without jargon, he spoke four languages and as a hobby he was a talented musician. He didn’t overclaim �� the sober accuracy of GOSH claims in our PR built credibility.

Our actions

We had to do the right thing. Incredulity as to whether this could be true soon turned to incredulity that he had been so bold and stupid. In Africa, he had not used the accommodation for other Western staff or the patients, but his own separate apartments elsewhere. He encouraged youths to bunk down with him. Jaw dropping, and it certainly convinced me we were going to part company with him.

A small team handled his suspension, the investigation, dealing with the regulators, and assessing the risks here and abroad. Everything had to be done by the book because that’s the only safe way to do it. No short-cuts or trying to massage facts. We would be under exceptional scrutiny �� from government and regulators straight away and the public when it got out. You can’t succeed in this stuff by smarm. You need practical plans to ensure patients are safe.

With our disciplinary process, the medical regulator, and the law involved, we needed a holding statement for different groups affected, and an immediate helpline for families concerned about their own children, ready to go live at very short notice.

The management and the department were devastated at this possible betrayal. The two cardiac leaders involved considered him a friend. I watched their professional discipline fight their personal feelings, and win.

A knotty issue in cardiac. (An open rope knot forming a heart shape. Pixabay via pexels).

Why the coffee?

I had to go and talk to him, as I would any member of staff who might be approached by the media, to discuss handling. I had a duty of care. He denied everything, he agreed talking to the press was a bad idea, and I made sure he knew he could get independent media advice from his medical defence organisation. I was confident the advice I was giving him was in his best interests whether he turned out to be guilty or not �� but there could come a point where he’d need his own team.

The Professor had trained in Italy and was a coffee buff. He was a little off his best, a bit shaken. He said the youths had been paid to lie. It was some sort of conspiracy to discredit him.

He wasn’t creepy; he was presentable, articulate and cultured. I remember thinking, he could have found any adult partner he wanted in London.

You “should have�� known

Without warning signs, how are you supposed to know when you hire someone?

There is no blood test we could give staff for wanting sex with children or teenagers. Polygraphs were discredited by their inventor a lifetime ago. There had been no complaints at our hospital or the previous employer. Many people thought there was something creepy about Jimmy Saville. I doubt many people got further with the Professor than noticing he didn’t talk about a partner and that vague sense that he might be gay. Like lots of NHS staff are.

And before long, we had a hard decision. The department would struggle without him. Should we let him do (some) of his clinical and teaching work, knowing the shock that would cause among families and the media.

‘Can we defend him working?�� the CEO asked me. Everyone in that meeting turned to me. What did I tell the CEO and why?

NB. To this day, the Professor continues to deny all the allegations and the finding of the UK regulator against him. I may or may not be able to answer questions.

Continued shortly.

I’ll be publishing this week part one of a long read about allegations of misconduct against a Great Ormond Street clinician, when I worked there. The misconduct was outside our service. The grim story, a tragedy for everyone, ended up having implications for justice everywhere.

In preparation, here’s an older post about misconduct by an Italian clinician which Great Ormond Street got dragged into. I knew this gentleman was a bad’un.

The best public relations is based on truth. Yes, the communications person may seek to sell a particular line, but I always held that fibs are both unethical and in the long run, bound to sink you.

Current events have shaken that view.

This is the new post

Picture is Cadence of Autumn by Evelyn Morgan