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Whistleblowers provide an antidote to corruption and abuse of power. But they are often reviled, says Alison Taylor, and suffer a fate worse than those they bring to justice.

As a consultant cardiologist at Leeds Infirmary pointed out recently in The Times, in the wake of the Kennedy report on the Bristol Royal Infirmary scandal, the term whistleblower carries derogatory connotations and should be rendered obsolete.

The 2000 edition of the Oxford University Press thesaurus lists whistleblower alongside sneak, informer, tell-tale, grass, snitch: a deliberate troublemaker with highly dubious motives. While whistleblowers might personally feel virtuous for allowing conscience to triumph over expediency, fear or indoctrination, others judge them contemptible spoilsports deserving, at the very least, of the cold shoulder.

Outer darkness is, however, their more usual fate. Dr Stephen Bolsin, the anaesthetist who triggered the Bristol inquiry, told that he had made himself unemployable in the NHS, and was forced to move to Australia. It is ironic in the extreme that only in the country to which Britain once transported its worst criminals is the medical establishment sufficiently enlightened to welcome him. He never received praise from any official body in Britain, and garnered only a grudging tribute from the Kennedy inquiry, which merely said he had been "right". Bolsin told The Times that the head of the General Medical Council had, in confidence, praised him, but instructed him "to keep it secret because it could jeopardise his position". Arguably, with that disclosure, Bolsin has now also snitched on the head of the GMC.

The recently convicted Lord Archer is a casualty of whistleblowing. His one-time friend Ted Francis revealed details of the false alibi they concocted for Archer's very profitable libel action against the Daily Star because, Francis said, he could not allow someone of Archer's dubious moral character to stand for election as mayor of London.

Long before Francis's attack of conscience, however, someone else had tried to be the sun to Archer's Icarus-like flight in the realms of fame and fortune. For 10 years, Baroness Nicholson, MEP for the south east region, has been questioning the whereabouts of funds Archer raised for Kurdish refugees, but, as she wrote in The Times last month: "Unfortunately, in the days when he was being hailed as a munificent benefactor and fundraiser, the leading politicians and opinion-formers had no interest in my concern. Only now, following his downfall, is my case being taken seriously" (the Metropolitan Police have launched a full-scale investigation).

There is, as usual, a deeply unpleasant subtext to this story: it is inconceivable that none of those leading politicians and opinion-formers ever felt uneasy about Archer and his activities, but no one, Baroness Nicholson excepted, appears to have had the courage to comment.

It was left to someone far more lowly, someone expendable, to do the dirty work, for which Francis reaped the reward of finding himself with Archer in the Old Bailey dock. Similarly, in Gwynedd, several people much higher than myself in the council's hierarchy knew that children in care were gravely at risk, but preferred not to sacrifice themselves.

The Old Bailey jury acquitted Francis of all charges. The North Wales tribunal report into the abuse of children in care "acquitted" me, but that did not deter publication, in a journal owned by a former senior politician, of an article about me so contentious that I have begun libel proceedings. Reactions to whistleblowers veer between extremes, and seem very much to depend on the social position of the onlooker.

The awards I received all came from the general public, as did support for me between my dismissal and the tribunal. But in the eyes of the powerful, people who show themselves to have no stomach for corruption are a serious menace. Bolsin was told he had made himself unemployable: in other words, he, not those whose conduct he found unacceptable, must bear sole blame for his troubles, which says much about the conflicting attitudes to morality and probity that bedevil Britain today. In one sense, whistleblowers are a necessary evil to ensure society's health: an occasional dose of unpleasant purgative that flushes out the toxins.

If the act of whistleblowing is ultimately a virtue, then there is much truth in the old saying that virtue's only reward is itself, for whistleblowers lose everything apart from their personal integrity. I managed to carve out a new career as a writer, to rebuild some financial stability after coming close to destitution, but my world feels very fragile, very vulnerable to attack, and I know that my reputation - that most important social asset - is already permanently tarnished.

As well, I am first in the firing line for those wishing to argue that many abuse allegations are false and malicious. I expected the North Wales tribunal report would draw a line under the worst period of my life, but it seems the rest of my days will be dogged by that act of whistleblowing. I hope Dr Bolsin, and those who are sure to follow him, fare better.

Alison Taylor is a novelist and the winner of the 1996 Commuity Care Readers’ Award.