He was also depressed by ‘the habit of some senior GMC members to work to an agenda significantly different from that allegedly being discussed’ and described how ‘… when I was appointed to a working party set up ostensibly to recommend change, it soon became clear that certain members were so determined to prevent us recommending anything useful that, like caricature bureaucrats, we spent all of our first meeting (out of eight), and most of our second, debating what our title should be. And when we eventually produced our sadly emasculated recommendations, the GMC’s reaction - I kid you not - was to set up yet another working group’. The petty politicking and the oversized council, he claimed, meant an inevitable ceding of power to a burgeoning bureaucracy.