Military officials used Stasi-like tactics to try to “sink” a “whistleblowing” army doctor by suggesting that his opposition to the Iraq war made him a dangerous influence, a tribunal has heard.
Dr Stephen Frost was sacked by the Ministry of Defence with no notice and no explanation in September 2013 after an incident in which a pharmacist wrongly dispensed super-strength morphine to a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
Frost, who had 20 years of “blameless service” in the MoD, was never given a chance to plead his case at a performance review panel and was banned from working as a locum with the MoD, a tribunal in Manchester heard on Wednesday.
He insists he was sacked because he suggested that the morphine, six times stronger than that prescribed to the patient by another doctor, may have been siphoned off in a potentially criminal operation. Frost says he turned whistleblower after becoming convinced that the patient never took the drugs he was given, and was ignored and then sacked when he suggested police should be called.
This is disputed by the MoD, which says Frost never called for a police investigation and was sacked because he failed to tell the patient he may have been given the wrong drugs and was at risk of an overdose.
Several months after Frost decided to challenge his dismissal at a tribunal, one of the officers who terminated his employment did some internet research on Frost that his lawyers described as “intemperate, ill-advised and ill-judged”, and aimed at destroying his career.
Col Carson Black’s research was then forwarded to Frost’s hospital trust, which was deciding whether to strike him off its list of approved doctors. Black had noted that Frost was a “leading light in the group of doctors who wish to reopen the case of Dr David Kelly, the government scientist whose suicide in 2003 resulted in the Hutton inquiry. He is vociferously critical of government in the press and on social media ... a number of tweets refer to the ‘illegal war in Iraq’.”
Black had also drawn attention to Frost’s association with Dr David Halpin, a retired surgeon from the West Country who Black compared unfavourably to the conspiracy theorist David Icke.
Both men signed a letter to the Guardian in 2013 suggesting that Kelly had not killed himself. In 2008, Frost and Halpin wrote a letter to medical journal the Lancet, complaining about the “injustice ... meted out to the British air force medical officer Malcolm Kendall-Smith, who faced criminal charges for challenging the legality of the war against Iraq”.
Frost’s barrister, John Hendy QC, accused Black of using tactics reminiscent of the Stasi, the East German secret police, only mentioning Halpin in order to smear Frost with “guilt by association”. Black said he never intended to do so, but conceded: “Yeah, I do see what you mean.”
Hendy told Black the emails “were designed to sink [Frost] without a trace”, prompting Black to reply: “No, not at all.” Black then told the tribunal he was concerned that Frost could be a destabilising influence on younger doctors.
“When I read [the Lancet letter] I wondered if it could be that Dr Frost would pass his views on this to the young doctors who are around him, because that wouldn’t be acceptable,” he said, adding that it was “obvious that if a doctor deserts and doesn’t do his job, he will be harshly treated by the courts”.
Hendy told the panel Frost “actually loved working with soldiers” and his views on the legality of the Iraq war were “very widely shared”.
The tribunal continues.
