‘I think’, said the then Lord Chancellor Michael Gove on 3 June 2016, ‘people in this country have had enough of experts … saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.’1

A tide of anti-professionalism is on the rise. It seems nowadays that to claim any kind of expertise is to invite the scorn of politicians and the suspicion of a disaffected public. I had thought, wrongly, that we had come a long way from the days when Bernard Shaw could write ‘All professions are conspiracies against the laity’, and Frederic Ogden Nash ‘Professional men, they have no cares; whatever happens, they get theirs.’ But no; the hands that clapped during the pandemic seem to have morphed, as the NHS crumbles around us, into pointing fingers.

What does ‘professionalism’ mean to a doctor? Recent decades have produced a flurry of working parties and documents, their executive summaries larded with words like ‘care’ and ‘duty’ and ‘altruism’ and ‘respect’ and ‘partnership’. The grand- daddy of them all was — still is — the General Medical Council’s Good Medical Practice.2 Periodically updated since 1995, it remains an excellent thesaurus of synonyms for moral probity. In 2005, the Royal College of Physicians chipped in with its report, Doctors in Society: Medical Professionalism in a Changing World, which defined medical professionalism as ‘a set of values, behaviours, and relationships that underpin the trust the public has in doctors’.3 I reckon that about nails it. Trust is of the essence; professionalism is doing whatever it takes to be trustworthy. The catchphrase ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’ ought to carry no whiff of irony or cynicism.

But the message — that doctors in general and GPs in particular are trustworthy — isn’t getting through; …