Published 16 October 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b4162
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b4162

Feature

Profile

Walter Merricks: in search of justice

Clare Dyer, legal correspondent

1 BMJ, London WC1H 9JR

ClareDyer@aol.com

Next month Walter Merricks will start work on creating the Office of the Health Professions Adjudicator. Clare Dyer talks to him about his career and his aspirations for the new role

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Walter Merricks remembers vividly the day when, newly unemployed, he signed on at the labour exchange in Camden, north London, and went on to lunch at the Athenaeum Club, gathering place of the great and the good.

It was 1981, and he had quit his job teaching social welfare law at Brunel University after being told he was about to be appointed deputy chairman of the Police Complaints Commission. As a former member of the royal commission on criminal procedure, he was an obvious choice for the job. But Margaret Thatcher, then Conservative prime minister, blocked the appointment (because, he believes, his leftish background meant he wasn’t "one of us") and he found himself unexpectedly out of work.

Cyril Phillips, the commission’s chairman, who had backed him for the post, took him to lunch at the Athenaeum to console him. "When I went to sign on at the labour exchange, . . . [Full text of this article]


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