Browsing through his morning post earlier this month, Dr Keith Wolverson came across a large envelope bearing the stamp of the General Medical Council and felt his heartbeat quicken
Browsing through his morning post earlier this month, Dr Keith Wolverson came across a large envelope bearing the stamp of the General Medical Council and felt his heartbeat quicken.
When doctors are contacted unexpectedly by this public body — whose chief purpose is to discipline, and sometimes de-register, practitioners guilty of professional misconduct — it is seldom good news.
For a moment, he hoped the documents might concern a minor administrative matter. Since he had recently moved to a new home in the Derbyshire market town of Melbourne, perhaps they related to his change of address.
As the locum GP read the letter, his worst fears were confirmed. It referred to an unpleasant incident that had occurred so long ago he had almost forgotten it.
In May 2018, while working his regular £80-per-hour shift at the Royal Stoke University Hospital's walk-in clinic, Dr Wolverson had been consulted by a Muslim woman wearing a full-face veil.
She wanted him to treat her five-year-old daughter's sore throat, but her voice was 'muffled' by the veil, he says, making it difficult to understand. With courtesy, he insists, he asked her to remove it.
By his account she complied, yet when she told her husband he was seemingly furious and complained to the hospital.
Stock photo: She wanted him to treat her five-year-old daughter's sore throat, but her voice was 'muffled' by the veil, he says, making it difficult to understand
Now, a year later, the General Medical Council is to hold a formal inquiry.
Dr Wolverson has treated countless Muslims without incident, and says women usually remove their veils voluntarily.
He was initially 'filled with dread' at the prospect of being hauled before a disciplinary panel on this serious charge.
'It's very difficult for anyone outside the medical profession to understand what this means to a doctor,' the 52-year-old told me, relating the full background to this perplexing case for the first time.
'It is a threat of unimaginable proportion. These matters usually take about a year, during which one can't get any locum work because one is obliged to declare that one is being investigated, and no one will touch you while it is going on.
'So I knew my life would be on hold for months, and my 23-year career could be left in ruins.'
With a hollow laugh, he added: 'The documents included an advice leaflet. It offered free counselling. I tore it up and threw it in the bin. I would rather a rattlesnake babysit for my six-year-old daughter than be advised by the GMC.'
Dr Wolverson's worry turned to anger, and he resolved to fight the slur on his reputation.
Stock photo: Dr Wolverson's worry turned to anger, and he resolved to fight the slur on his reputation
'I thought, I'm not going to be a victim here. I can feel sorry for myself — or I can be that decent, honourable Englishman that stands and fights, the way I had been brought up.
'I chose the latter option to right what was, to me, an enormous miscarriage of justice. A slight on an honourable and decent man's character that his career and professional reputation may never recover from.'
Though friends and colleagues counselled him against speaking out about his plight, Dr Wolverson has ignored them, believing publicity will further his cause.
An engagingly eccentric man who swims in lakes — 'the colder the better, to feel the sting' — and is restoring an old red postbox and a phone box in his back garden, he took his story to the press.
Within days, more than 50,000 people had signed a petition on the website change.org stating that, by asking the mother to remove her veil, he was acting in her child's best interests and that there was no religious or racial discrimination.
'Our NHS is severely understaffed and we cannot lose doctors,' it states, calling for Dr Wolverson's reputation and job to be saved.
Regrettably, though inevitably, some from the far-Right leapt on the bandwagon, endorsing the petition with deplorable comments.
Yet the vast majority of the GP's supporters appear to be people with moderate views, furious that he faces career ruin for what they claim is prioritising the needs of the child over cultural sensibilities of others.
I use the word 'cultural' rather than 'religious' advisedly.
For, as Dr Amra Bone, Britain's only female sharia court judge and a leading Islamic scholar, told me, covering one's face is not obligatory for Muslim women, according to the four major Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence (although some individual scholars recommend it).
Rather, for some, it is a personal choice which, she says, should be respected. Dr Bone believes there ought to be an inquiry into what happened to establish the truth of the matter and prevent a recurrence of such incidents, and hopes that 'we can provide cultural awareness training to professionals so that we do not have to resort to punishments'.
Rather, for some, it is a personal choice which, she says, should be respected
Other Muslims will doubtless take a less conciliatory view. For this is a deeply divisive story that goes to the heart of the ideological and cultural schism running through today's multi-ethnic Britain.
It also exemplifies the delicate balancing act front-line professionals face dealing with the public — and this includes not only doctors, but the police, emergency services and school teachers (witness the continuing stand-off in Birmingham between Muslim parents and primary schools intent on teaching their children about sexual diversity).
Thirteen years have passed since Labour's Jack Straw caused a heated debate by revealing that he requested Muslim women to remove their veils at his weekly surgery in Blackburn.
He did so because he felt uncomfortable talking 'face-to-face' with someone he couldn't see.
A lifelong Conservative voter, Dr Wolverson's political views are different to Straw's, yet he makes similar points. The son of a railway engineer, he trained at the Royal Free Hospital in London and chose to be a GP because he relishes making vital, and sometimes life-saving, decisions.
He prefers to work as a freelance GP as the flexible hours allow him to share parenting duties for his children, aged 15, 11 and six.
Since the veil complaint was lodged last May, he's been dropped by Vocare, a Newcastle upon Tyne-based healthcare agency he used to work for. This was without waiting for the GMC to determine the case.
Beyond saying they used a senior doctor to 'thoroughly investigate every patient complaint', Vocare declined to comment.
In the meantime, Dr Wolverson has been earning a modest income by giving hay fever and joint-pain injections to private clients, and
