UFO Info Week-End

People like to be able to smile their way through their problems

People like to be able to smile their way through their problems.”Coleman’s journalism and medical books are characterised by absolute moral certainty about the pointlessness and cruelty of animal experiments, the cravenness of the medical profession in the face of drugs industry manipulation, the cancer-causing properties of meat, and various other aspects of modern life, from people in uniform (“snotty, patronising bastards”, The People, 1996) to the Advertising Standards Authority (which recently upheld a complaint against one of his mail-order advertisements). “I’ve written at least one weekly column since I was 18,” he says. He can’t remember now where these columns appeared, despite the fact that to be a columnist at the tender age of 18, anywhere, is an extraordinary feat. I have this masochistic capacity for getting into trouble, making things worse by refusing to do what everybody says is the sensible and easy thing to do.”All the time he was practising as a GP he was also writing. But rather than do as other doctors did, and write something anodyne like “viral infection”, Coleman confronted the issue and simply squiggled on his forms.Wouldn’t it have been easier, I ask – and who knows, perhaps even more effective – to have fudged the issue, and meanwhile taken it up through the proper channels? “Yes, it would have been easier, but I’ve never been able to take the easier course. He had a legitimate reason for this: depressed people, for example, didn’t necessarily want their employers to know why they were taking time off A couple of years later, the rules were changed.

Almost inevitably, he ran into trouble with the local bureaucracy, primarily over his refusal to write diagnoses on sick note forms. We blame an unseen `them’, but we live in comfort and contentment – slumped in front of the TV, deaf to injustices.”Coleman practised as a GP for 10 years in Leamington Spa, for eight years of which he was married to a nurse. All his tales tend towards the building up of an image of a lone rebel against the establishment, standing up for the little people against conspiratorial combines.This self-image is explicit in the column, sometimes – such is his rage – almost incoherently so. “We applaud fat businessmen who cheat the world’s poor,” he railed recently. “We kneel before the representatives of evil, and pledge allegiance to mediocrity And yet we claim to be innocent. I turned up in a school blazer and tie when I first met these kids, because I didn’t think you could go anywhere without wearing a school blazer and tie. By the time I got to med school with a pile of other kids who’d just left school, I was gone; I was a rebel.”No doubt in the mid-Sixties 18-year-olds really did wear school blazers three months after they’d left school, but this story has about it a Don Quixote quality, which feeds his recollections time and again.

My job was to get the kids there to do voluntary work, and I only got away with it because I was too naive to realise how stupid it was. When I left, the kids in the gang made me an honorary member of the gang. And I was prouder of that, and I still am, than of getting my medical degree. The honorary doctorate and the professorship both derive from the same awarding body, the International Open University, which was founded in the Soviet Union, moved to the Netherlands and is now based in Sri Lanka.

“At the time every bus coming back to Kirkby from Liverpool was followed by a police car, because of the violence. I don’t know why they gave it to me.”Before Coleman went to Birmingham university, he spent a year as a community service volunteer in Kirkby, an experience to which he now ascribes revelatory importance. The royal physician tag, he explains when I inquire, means he is doctor “to someone who’s actually dead Some king who died. The confusion about his qualifications may arise partly because he has removed his name from the General Medical Register to preserve the secrecy of his address, and partly because of his habit of including obscure honorary degrees and appointments in his promotional literature. If you send off for one of his mail order books, you will receive a leaflet informing you that Coleman is an honorary DSc, a Professor of Holistic Medicine, and Royal Physician in Sri Lanka. His only recollection is of wearing his blue school mac over his combined cadet force khaki uniform one rainy day on the parade ground and being thrown out of the CCF. “Even then I was getting into trouble without really meaning to.”He studied medicine at Birmingham, a fact his opponents have sought to dispute, though the university confirms that he graduated, bachelor of medicine and bachelor of surgery, on 18 December 1970.

His father was an electrical engineer, his mother a housewife, and Vernon an only child They were comfortably middle class. Vernon attended Queen Mary’s Grammar School For Boys, and cannot remember what he thought about it. Vernon Coleman was born in 1946, in Walsall, then in Staffordshire, now in the West Midlands. They just happen” – leave the curious impression of interviewing someone’s image of himself.THE KNOWN facts are as follows. If anybody changes a word I get terribly uppity and hysterical.”"It was only November You must remember.”"No I can’t remember I have rows every week. I can’t remember what the specific row was about.”(Interviewer pauses, nonplussed.) “My contract expires in November. So we’re talking.”"So this is a ploy to get more money?”"No, not really.”Certain things, of course, he does remember: that he was right about the addictive properties of tranquillisers 15 years before anyone else, and about BSE, and about Aids not representing a major threat to heterosexuals; the sales figures of his books; the numbers of people who have called his advice lines over the years; that he has “always only ever written books that I wanted to write.” But the mist of vagueness that swirls over his account of himself, combined with the flourishes of romanticised self- importance – “I’ve never touted for a job in my life I’m far too shy to tout.