Brian Rutherford
Brian Rutherford was a politician who replaced Sir Richard Stevenson as minister of the department responsible for P.R.O.B.E.
Biography
In 1995, Rutherford replaced Sir Richard Stevenson as minister. He saw himself as a more modern man than Sir Richard and, unlike him, believed that P.R.O.B.E. was called out far too rarely to be worth continued funding. He transferred Louise Bayliss whilst Liz Shaw was taking compassionate leave following her father's death as his first step to closing it down.
When Liz returned to duty, Rutherford had D.I. Burke summon Liz to Whitehall, where he informed her that she would have to prove P.R.O.B.E.'s usefulness in the days to come in order to ensure its continued existence. He was unable to shut the organisation down without Patsy Haggard's agreement and attempted to get her to agree with him by subtly threatening her career progress. She wrote a report on the events at Winterborne School which persuaded him to keep P.R.O.B.E. alive. (HOMEVID: The Devil of Winterborne)
Some time later, Rutherford took a more personal involvement in one of PROBE's cases — the deaths surrounding Julius Quilter's "BEAGLE" project. Rutherford revealed that he and Quilter had been friends once, and Rutherford had been involved in closing down the original project in 1975. After Quilter's death while under questioning, Rutherford called at the home of Quilter to pay his respects, unaware that Quilter's assistant, Alfred Emerson, was in fact a product of that same experiment. Emerson held Rutherford captive while he revived the body of Quilter, perhaps intending to harvest Rutherford's organs to help the process. Only the intervention of Liz and Col. Ackroyd saved the life of Rutherford and killed Emerson. Rutherford resigned his position shortly after. (HOMEVID: Unnatural Selection)
