Further evidence has emerged that there are kangaroos loose in the General Medical Council’s top paddock.

Since the General Medical Council hopped into bed with the Department of Health earlier this year, we have seen surprisingly little in the way of overt matrimonial activity. It does appear, however, that there has much foreplay going on under the duvet, and the happy couple are moving ever nearer to that orgy of wanton destruction that will soon be on us – the orgy of enhanced professional regulation for doctors.

For some time, Dr No has been troubled by a particular aspect of the suicide of Kerrie Wooltorton. It is an aspect that has received little coverage, perhaps because it is a complex and murky area, but it is nonetheless important. It is counter­transference, and how it may have influenced Wooltorton’s treatment, even to the extent that it may have contributed to her death.

Alan “You’re Fired!” Johnson, who appears to belong to the shoot-the-bastard, simple-but-effective school of ministerial authority, is now finding that, far from cracking the Nutt, he appears to have instead shot himself in the foot, and produced an outcome that is neither simple, nor effective. Or, for a minister, desirable.

One of Dr No’s light-bulb moments, which occurred many years ago, was when he realised that his then world-famous professor was, as we used to say in the old days, not mazda. Lights were on, but there was nobody at home.

Most UK doctors are not doctors, at least not proper doctors. The primary medical qualifications available in the UK are bachelor degrees, not doctorates. The public, as a courtesy, call us Doctor, but even that goes when the provenance of the practice is from the barber-shop – and so we call our surgeons Mr or Miss.

To most people, screening for medical conditions is simple – a bit like taking a car for an MOT. You catch things in time, and fix them before they go seriously wrong. Often it is like that, but sometimes it is not so simple; and there are even times when screening can be bad medicine.

ANIMATION: including dancing Botticelli Venus, which links to locum agency: medical staffing officer (CLEESE) walks into the agency carrying a dead doctor in a cage. He walks to counter where a recruitment consultant (PALIN) tries to hide below cash register.

“[Most] patients would much rather be a live problem than a dead certainty.”

—Lord Cohen

There are those who say that holocaust denial is a crime; and those who say that the BBC had no business allowing the BNP leader Nick Griffin space on Question Time. Giving air to vile thoughts, they say, allows those thoughts a legitimacy they do not deserve.

For many years, the medical journal The Lancet carried a short column called "In England Now". It would contain a snapshot of some aspect of life. One memorable example – Dr No can’t trace the original – cut to the core of the difference between law and medicine.