SO HOW HAS SHE ESCAPED JUSTICE?

Despite a mountain of damning evidence, she lives a genteel retirement on fat NHS pension . . .

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 coincidence 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. 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.

After qualifying as a doctor she married Timothy Barton, a royal Navy Commodore, and followed her father into general practice, becoming a partner at the busy Forton medical Centre in Gosport, Hampshire. The couple had two children (at least one is believed to work in medicine), and lived in an imposing £700,000 Georgian townhouse, with a large garden, a conservatory, and, in recent years, three smart cars parked on its gravel driveway. During their free time they indulged passions for running – the local club awards a ‘Jane Barton Plate’ for most improved female runner – and bird-watching, and moved in a smart social circle which included Peter Viggers the longstanding local mP.

Viggers, who stepped down in 2010 after being caught spending £1,645 of parliamentary expenses on a ‘floating duck island’ for his pond was, by further happy coincidence, of great help to Barton during the period when the appalling opioid scandal slowly escalated.

Indeed, over the course of almost a decade, the mP repeatedly used his position to question the need for further inquiries into the mysterious deaths at Gosport War memorial Hospital. Perhaps understandably, he was heavily criticised in yesterday’s damning report. But, again, we digress. These days, Barton is, at 69, enjoying the eighth year of a genteel retirement, financed by a fat NHS pension which presumably helps fund regular holidays with her husband to Australia, where one of her children is thought to live, and majorca, where she is believed to own a holiday home.

As the media descended on their home yesterday, neighbours claimed that the couple had hotfooted it to the latter destination.

When they are in Gosport, the Bartons are often to be seen pottering to the nearby shorefront, from where you can look across the Solent to the Isle of Wight, equipped with binoculars and expensive camera equipment to photograph the local wildlife.

Thanks to Timothy’s former career, both are also members of the royal Naval Birdwatching Society. In 2015 they even contributed an article to the society’s newsletter after joining a costly expedition to the remote Lord Howe Island in the Tasman Sea, east of Australia, to study the local flora and fauna. In a short essay the duo were critical of a ‘frightening eradication programme’ being used by local conservationists to control invasive species which are thought to be harming the small island’s indigenous wildlife.

But what of the ‘frightening eradication scheme’ closer to home? The one which Dr opiate oversaw at the War memorial Hospital over the course of 12 deadly years?

By all accounts an inveterate workaholic, with a somewhat cold bedside manner, she decided from 1988 until 2000 to add to her extensive workload as a GP by taking on the now-notorious role there as clinical assistant in the ‘Department of medicine for Elderly People’.

Under Barton, her wards, Dryad and Daedalus, became informally known to staff as ‘the end of the line.’ A GmC tribunal was told how her daily schedule involved ward rounds starting at 7.30am, followed by a full shift at her GP’s practice, before an evening round back at the hospital. She was also on call every other weekend and on regular week nights.

Evidently unable, or unwilling, to properly fulfil her arduous responsibilities, Barton presided over a deadly system of ‘pre-emptive prescribing,’ allowing nurses on the wards to increase the amount of painkillers being used without the need for her consent.

As we now know, she would communicate to staff in a sort of grim code, scribbling ‘please make comfortable’ on to the medical notes of incoming patients who would then be given huge doses of opioids, often via a device called a ‘syringe driver,’ which would pump drugs constantly into their system.

Under this regime, hundreds perished, including many elderly men and women who had been admitted with relatively minor conditions. Barton signed off 833 of their death certificates, keeping sparse and in many cases incomplete notes detailing their care.

There is no suggestion this conduct amounted to murder (critics argue she was instead criminally negligent, though the Crown Prosecution Service has on multiple occasions declined to press charges).

However her treatment of the relatives of patients was at times insufferably cruel.

Alan Lavender, whose mother Elsie was admitted to Daedalus at 83 with a broken neck, told an inquest how he’d asked Barton when she was likely to be discharged, since arrangements had to be made to take care of her cat. ‘You can get rid of the cat,’ came the reply. ‘ Don’t you know your mother has come here to die?’

Lavender declared himself ‘shocked’ by the ‘cold way the news had been broken to me’. Another grieving relative, Bridget Devine, whose 88-year-old grandmother Elsie died under Barton’s care, has branded her a ‘monster’. Since the scandal began to unravel in the late 1990s, Barton responded to growing anger over her conduct with a cold dismissiveness that borders on arrogance. While grieving relatives have spent 20 years seeking answers about deaths of loved ones, they say she has largely refused to respond to their inquiries.

Her only extensive public statement, issued through the medical Defence Union, claimed she was ‘faced with an excessive and increasing burden in trying to care for patients’ at the hospital, and added: ‘ Throughout my career I have tried to do my very best for all my patients and have had only their interests and wellbeing at heart.’

When she’s been interviewed by police under caution over ‘potential homicide’ she has responded in similarly cynical fashion ‘through provision of prepared statements’ and refusing to answer questions.

When the mail knocked on her door last week, she reacted with the same brand of inscrutability, saying: ‘I don’t know what will be in the report, but I don’t think it will be very pleasant. I’ve never spoken to the Press about what happened and I don’t plan to now.’

Husband Timothy, for his part, has lambasted the media for seeking to ‘find a new Harold Shipman’.

She is no Harold Shipman. But the more we find out about this ghastly scandal, and the manner in which it was covered up, the more appropriate those Shipman comparisons become.