DISGRACED gynaecologist Richard Neale has finally apologised to his victims - and launched a defence of his career.

Neale, 52, from Langthorpe, near Boroughbridge, wept as he blamed two former patients and the media for waging a campaign against him.

Neale, who worked at the Friarage Hospital, Northallerton, between 1985 and 1995 before leaving with £100,000 severance pay, said he was sorry for his mistakes in the treatment and diagnosis of some patients.

The General Medical Council found him guilty of a catalogue of errors stretching over two decades and including performing operations without consent, conducting sub-standard surgery and failing to inform patients' GPs of complications resulting from his incompetence.

"I sincerely regret some of the clinical judgements, decisions I made which have been shown in the cold light of retrospective analysis to be clearly erroneous," he said.

"I can only say that they were made with the best of intentions."

The consultant then complained of the "ordeal" he and his family had been through as he read a rambling 55-minute statement.

Neale, who was found to have 34 out of 35 allegations proven against him, told the professional conduct committee, sitting in London, he was a "flawed and very humbled gynaecologist".

But he said: "What do I think about my performance? Well, it is difficult to be objective about your own performance at the best of times, let alone when one is demonised by the media.

"My feeling is that I was just an average surgeon, not good and not all bad.

"The battering I have received has been hard to bear and has knocked my own self confidence and I feel a great sense of injustice."

Some of his former patients in the public gallery gasped as he said: "I am angry with the media who have been so partisan, so consistently inaccurate in their reporting and so utterly lacking in objectivity.

"The media comments have been fuelled by the campaign against me personally by just two patients."

adam.nichols@ycp.co.uk