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David Southall, the disgraced paediatrician, explains why he remains unrepentant David Southall looks surprisingly calm for a man who has lost his job, his income and his reputation. The paediatrician and child protection expert was struck off by the General Medical Council last week for inappropriately accusing a mother, Mandy Morris, referred to in the hearing as Mrs M, of drugging and hanging her ten-year-old son, Lee. The ruling crowns a decade in which Southall, 59, has been targeted remorselessly by campaigners, mostly parents who believe that he has wronged them. In 2004 the GMC found him guilty of serious professional misconduct for accusing Sally Clark’s husband of murdering the couple’s two sons. Southall based his opinion on a TV interview with Mr Clark. He was suspended from child protection work. In last week’s ruling, the GMC’s fitness-to-practise panel criticised Southall for “deep-seated attitudinal problems”, illustrated by his refusal to apologise to the parents involved in the two hearings. Southall calls it “a massive miscarriage of justice” and says that he will appeal. Meanwhile, he remains unrepentant: “How can I say sorry for something I didn’t do? I did not accuse Mrs M, and my denial [of having made an accusation] was backed up by the experienced social worker who was there. I can understand how this last GMC panel – three lay people and an orthopaedic surgeon – could have empathy with Mrs M and find what they found. But that doesn’t make it the truth.” As for the Clark case, Southall still believes that he behaved appropriately. “If I say sorry for something I didn’t do just because a panel has found that I did it, even though I didn’t, all that does is compound the injustice and wrong of the situation. It would be intellectually dishonest to do so.” He likens it to saying sorry for a murder that he didn’t commit. Is it not high-handed to refuse to apologise? “I can see why people think that. But I’m not going to be dishonest about something just to make people believe I’m a nicer person.” It’s a good job that Southall doesn’t care greatly about making enemies. This is his analysis of why he has become so reviled by campaigners and the media: he has been hounded by “obsessive, distressed, disordered and vengeful” parents and campaigners who have fed a complicit media emotion-filled stories of families torn apart by overzealous doctors and social workers; he is legally unable to respond because child abuse is dealt with by family courts and the officials involved, including him, must observe confidentiality; postShipman, the GMC wants to look tough and has become a slave to public opinion; the GMC panels that have judged his competence were insufficiently qualified to do so because they included no specialists in child protection work. Not only have his judgments in child protection come under fire, but also his research on children with breathing difficulties. One newspaper suggested that he was implicated in the deaths of 28 babies. Southall says that he has been the target of “vexatious complainants”, who, by keeping him under investigation by both his hospital trust and the GMC, have ensured that he cannot speak out for fear of prejudicing his hearings. He was also advised to keep quiet by the Medical Defence Union, which has funded his legal representation. Now, he feels, it is time to break the silence: “I have been unable to defend myself for ten years. I am regarded in the public domain as somebody who researches unethically on babies – I have even been compared to Josef Mengele – and who falsely accuses parents of abuse, splits up families, and so on. That's not how I’m seen by patients and colleagues but it is how I’m seen by the campaigners. Because they have the ear of the media and because the GMC follows the public perception of people, that’s how and why I was described like that by the panel. Sir Roy Meadow and myself were made into hate figures in this country by the campaign and media coverage. “When you have predominantly lay panels [at the GMC] who cannot possibly be immune from public opinion, faced with me as a doctor, I don’t see how I could have obtained a fair hearing.”
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