Leslie Turnberg’s new book is a political thriller

Leslie Turnberg describes himself on the inside cover of his new book as a “retired physician”. That’s perhaps akin to Tony Blair calling himself a retired barrister.

For in fact the 91-year-old is Baron Turnberg of Cheadle, and not merely a retired physician, but the former president of the Royal College of Physicians, created a life peer in 2000 for his services to medicine, and author of numerous books and papers on medical and health issues. His most recent commonsense offering in that field is 2024’s Patients First: How to Save the NHS, which sounds as though it should be mandatory reading for Health Secretary Wes Streeting.

Turnberg is also a passionate Zionist with four grandchildren living in Israel. He has written in depth about a little-known early Zionist pioneer, Pinchas Rutenberg, the founder of Israel’s pre-state electrical network and Palestine Airways, the forerunner of El Al; about the Balfour Declaration; and about the Jewish state’s founder politician, David Ben-Gurion.

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So he doesn’t come new to the writing game. But his latest book, The Accidental Hero, is a serious departure for the baron. It is his first venture into fiction and follows the somewhat scary journey of his (non-Jewish) protagonist George Templeton, whom we meet after someone has apparently tried to kill him by pushing him in front of a tube train.

“I like writing and I’ve thought for some time that maybe I should try a novel”, he says. “So I thought I’d better start, somehow. I started writing about a person, because I like people — and the plot evolved as I wrote, which was strange to me. It was my first shot at fiction, and I suppose it was very much hit and miss.”

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George, we learn, is an AI and cyber specialist, but for all his smarts he has few social skills and has, in fact, just been thrown out by his wife at the beginning of the novel. Readers are advised to keep tabs on the helpful who’s who provided by Turnberg in the opening pages, because there is a huge cast of characters, from shadowy British civil servants and staff from GCHQ to an equally intriguing set of Mossad agents. “GCHQ stands for Government Communication Headquarters, which is a very strange name, since it doesn’t communicate anything — it keeps everything very secret.”

The men and women involved in the twisty spy plot have an unnerving habit of meeting on benches in London parks and disappearing very quickly. When they’re not doing that, they are being dispatched by mysterious unseen hands through high-rise windows. I wonder if we should be worried about the hidden inclination to violence of this charming medical professional.

He’s not altogether satisfied with The Accidental Hero, though. It took him a year to write but he believes he could have done better.

Instead, he’s well into the writing of his next book: “It is much more interesting to me. I left the fate of George Templeton open at the end of The Accidental Hero — maybe the Israeli embassy or Mossad will want him to work for them. But my new book is different: it’s written in the first person and is the [fictional] life and memories of a serial killer.” This last piece of information is delivered with a huge grin.

Turnberg goes on to explain: “He’s 91, like me, and he was brought across from Germany on the Kindertransport”. This is where the similarities end. “The book opens with him being interrogated for a double murder — which he didn’t commit”. His protagonist, Turnberg says, has been knighted and is now known as Sir Henry Wilson, though his real name is Hyman Weinberg.

Wilson/Weinberg first gets into killing people at university, when a contemporary behaves badly to him — and is murdered for his pains. But Turnberg says he plans to call this novel A Killing on the Market, as after several physical murders, he makes his character a force to be reckoned with on the stock market, ruining people where he can and destroying them through the manipulation of stocks and shares.

Turnberg couldn’t be more different (one hopes) from his fictional creations. Softly spoken, with what sounds like a genuine bedside manner, he was born in Manchester and qualified as a doctor in 1957, the first member of his family to go to university. “I had no background knowledge of what it was like to be a doctor. In fact, I was going to go into pharmacy, because the local pharmacist was a Jewish fellow and he seemed to be doing quite well. But then a friend of mine in my year at school said he was going to do medicine. And I thought, right, if he can do it, maybe I can.”

He was told at the time that no Jews were allowed in the main teaching hospitals. But he spent his first year after qualification working in a hospital “and I loved it. I thought, well, that was a wise choice…I was very lucky that it worked out. I stayed in hospital work and I began doing research. And by the time we got to the 1960s it all opened up for Jews and so I was able to carry on.” Now, he jokes, it’s almost impossible to be a consultant at London’s Royal Free or UCH unless you’re Jewish, so the wheel has really turned.

He became a professor with a specialist interest in gastroenterology and spent two stints abroad, once in Dallas and a four month sabbatical in Israel, researching. He was offered the post of dean at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem but turned it down in favour of resuming work with his teams in the UK.

He and his wife Edna have, sadly, outlived both their children, Daniel and Helen. Daniel died in a plane crash in 2007, while their daughter Helen, who lived in Israel, died of cancer in 2023.Turnberg set up the Daniel Turnberg Travel Fellowships in the name of his son, who was himself a highly talented doctor and researcher.

Now the Turnbergs live in London and are members of South Hampstead Synagogue. Turnberg is a trustee of the Wolfson Foundation, involved in the Labour Friends of Israel, and “speaks about Israel in the House of Lords – that’s my thing”.

Perhaps it’s not too fanciful to suggest that if ever there were an accidental hero, it’s Baron Turnberg of Cheadle.

The Accidental Hero, written and published by Leslie Turnberg, is available on Amazon.