four months, that the leaflet had emanated from the local health authority. Clothier concluded that the authorship of the leaflet should have been disclosed without delay. He understood that the councillor wished to know what Jove-like hand had sent the leaflet. His verdict on the leaflet itself was damning. It was a very poor production and far below the standard I would expect an Authority to achieve in communication with the public. The shame at producing the hopeless leaflet did not excuse the subsequent administrative ineptitudes, to which only Franz Kafka could do justice. The whole episode has been a very great waste of my time and everyone else's. One of the most serious cases investigated by Clothier concerned a complaint from a mother that her baby was born dead due to a catalogue of failures in maternity care at the hospital. Clothier decided for the first time since the establishment of the Office to hold a formal hearing and take evidence on oath. Clothier concluded that the midwives who gave evidence were untruthful. The complainant was shamefully neglected at her time of need and that records of routine checks had been falsified. Clothier concluded that it was difficult to imagine a more serious failure in the service as the health authority admitted that the baby could have survived if reasonable care had been given to the mother. Overview Clothier left the office in 1984, regretful that he was alone among national ombudsmen in the world in not having powers to investigate on his own initiative and that his jurisdiction was limited to not investigating personnel and contractual matters. He also had doubts about the requirement that complaints reach the office through members of Parliament and considered the viability of a mechanism where complainants could contact the Office directly if they were dissatisfied with the progress made by the Member of Parliament in attending to the grievance. Nevertheless, Clothier had been an effective Ombudsman: a man of achievement and integrity; he liked to get things done and was unafraid to upset people en route. He had worked to enhance public awareness of the Office and appeared in one cartoon as Superman. It had been important to Clothier to give the citizen a leg up against what must seem to him to be the impenetrable vastness of Whitehall. And although he was criticised for the slowness of his investigations, he retorted