Newsnight

From the moment of her birth, Jane Ann Barton was earmarked for special treatment by the medical establishment that would one day close ranks to protect her.

When the future 'Dr Opiate' came into the world, in October 1948, the year the NHS was founded, her proud parents chose to place a birth announcement not in The Times, but instead in the hallowed pages of the British Medical Journal.

The daughter of a Sussex GP called John Bulstrode and his wife, Jacqueline, she grew up in an extended family peppered with eminent physicians and scientists, before fulfilling her preordained role by completing a medical degree at Oxford.

Among contemporaries at the university's medical school was her younger brother Christopher Bulstrode, a dashing individual who would variously become an Emeritus Professor at Oxford, a trauma surgeon for British troops and a doctor on Antarctic expeditions, earning a CBE in the process.

Christopher, it later emerged, was by co-incidence serving on the council of the GMC during the early 2000s when his sister was being investigated, though he took no part in the probes.

But we digress. Dr Barton's career may not have been quite as glamorous as her exotic sibling's, but it was nonetheless a model of middle-class respectability.