Though disenchanted, O’Donnell stayed on the council until 1996, coming top of the poll in every election. Three years later he told a meeting of medical writers why he hadn’t resigned.‘I was in a unique position because I was outside the medical career structure and uninterested in preferment. I didn’t have to maintain diplomatic silences or say things I didn’t believe in order to get a job, to defend the interests of an institution to which I belonged, or to be gifted one of the prize carrots available on the medical patronage network. I was, in short, the only member of the council free to call things as I saw them.’ He has often expressed his belief that ‘the only safe place for Authority in a free society is on the defensive’ and that one of his jobs as a writer ‘is to keep it there’