All hail the whistleblowers, our beloved contemporary heroes! How we admire the courage, the risk, the selflessness as these Davids topple the ruthless Goliaths; how we laud their sacrifice as they expose the cheats of Enron or the tyrannies of Abu Ghraib or the secret movement of nuclear weapons.

And so it has been with Nevres Kemal, described as tormented, ever since blowing the whistle for the sake of the children in Haringey in a letter to government officials that was ignored even though, six months later, Baby P was to die in the same rotten borough.

It is entirely possible that Ms Kemal will be vindicated. What is troubling, however, is that, although the content of her letter is still unknown, the unchallenged presumption is that she is the white sheep of the social service family.

The media have interviewed her and her lawyer without a single awkward question and none concerning the fact that her written complaint came after her dismissal while shadow ministers, among others, railed that her alert should have been heeded, when what they meant was that her allegation should have been investigated. A tiny point, but it matters.

Fourteen years ago another social worker, dismissed from another London borough, also blew the whistle. In her case, she told her tale to the agenda-propelled filmmaker Ken Loach who turned it into Ladybird, Ladybird. He also chose to consider her material an alert rather than an allegation; certainly, he told me, he did not approach the social services department as demonised by his whistleblower for its side of the case, even though, having run solely with her side of it, he tagged the film as based on a true story.

In my reporting guise, it was left to me to check how true. Slowly I pieced together the real-life case, talked to those whom Loach had not and to the chief whistleblower herself. Suffice to say, I came away confident that the social workers were not the bad guys and that there was good reason why Mrs Whistleblower had been sacked.

Again, I stress there is no reason to assume other than the purest of motive and action on the part of Ms Kemal. Equally, there is no reason not to ask, even if tough questions fly in the face of a romantic leniency that lends benefit of doubt to whistleblowers one and all.

Ken Loach knew that by leaving out such questions he would have a more gripping drama; today's media and politicians know that, too. Nonetheless, it would be nice to think that, when this hideous case is finally unravelled, we shall be left with something more meticulous than based on a true story.

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