Editor's note: We have now been informed by Ms Penny Mellor that she did not, in 2005, take up the position of family advocacy co-ordinator for the organisation Justice For Families set up by John Hemming MP. We are happy to clarify this point.
Spare a thought for Christine Hemming, wife of the Birmingham MP John Hemming and mother to four of his five children. Last Thursday, as Hemming continued his extraordinary one-man crusade against the nation's social workers (or, as he prefers to call them, "baby stealers"), she felt obliged to post a qualifying online footnote to a series of articles and comments provoked by her husband in Community Care.
Hemming, she noted, had said that he had "experienced 'lies from social workers in his private life'. I would like to make it clear," she said, "that this was in relation to child protection action relating to a local councillor and her child and not in any way to our family."
In an article published last month in the Mail on Sunday, Hemming had claimed that social workers were "literally snatching newborn babies and children from good, stable, loving homes" for no better reason than to rake in millions of pounds of money offered as an incentive for hitting government adoption targets.