THE man lots of people love to hate is, in fact, an extremely nice fella. He is officially one of the top people in the country at his job and he runs a huge operation of vital importance to Craven and elsewhere.

Yet Bob Allen gets more flak than one of Saddam Hussein's palaces.

As Chief Executive of the Airedale NHS Hospital Trust, he is in ultimate charge of Airedale General Hospital at Steeton - just voted runner up as the very best hospital for clinical excellence in England - a job which gives him a great deal of satisfaction.

But he is also boss of several other hospitals - including Skipton General and Castleberg at Giggleswick - which he is under great pressure from above to close. And that has made him very unpopular indeed, not only in Craven but also in Ilkley and Bingley, where similar units are under threat.

So when we sat in his small but elegant office at Airedale, it was bound to be a discussion about very mixed blessings.

Airedale has just been short-listed next to one of London's top teaching hospitals - with almost three times the number of doctors per bed - in a survey to find the best hospital treatment in England. A great talking point.

But to have avoided the huge controversy over the possible closure of Skipton General and Castleberg would have been an act of cowardice - as well as a failure of duty towards our readers.

He shook his head, already sporting a well groomed head of pure, white hair although he is only 56, and said patiently: "I don't go out of my way to court unpopularity but certain things have to be said - and I'm the man who is paid to say them.

"The fact of the matter is that when Airedale was opened back in 1970, it was supposed to replace most of the smaller hospitals which are the subject of the present public concern.

"That never happened at the time - which, incidentally, was well before I took over - so they have already had more than 30 years of their planned life span.

"Today, things have changed. This Government is putting a lot of extra money into the NHS and it expects better health care in return.

" We have proved that we can do that here - but our budget gets tighter and tighter every year. If we are to keep our place as one of the leading hospitals in the country, some things have got to change."

He paused, took a deep breath and added carefully: "I just hope that people will understand that I am out there batting for Airedale. If we don't make major savings somewhere, there is a danger that the entire trust will become unviable and we could be absorbed by our neighbours."

Now Bob, who began his working life handing out dole money as a management trainee at Britain's biggest labour exchange, is also something of a diplomat. He declines to elaborate on this statement but its implications are not hard to guess.

Airedale Hospital, now officially one of the second best in England, could be sucked into Bradford. And Craven folk should view that prospect with considerable gloom: ask the good burghers of Ilkley what has happened to them since they were dragged kicking and screaming into Bradford Met.

Although, somewhat ironically, Bradford Royal Infirmary is also one of the seven hospitals on the runners-up shortlist, there are no others in Yorkshire. And any management expert will tell you that, in all large organisations, precious resources are always dragged towards the centre - to HQ rather than the branch offices.

This could be a severe threat to Airedale's outstanding achievement in hitting hugely difficult targets. For instance, in the survey carried out by the Dr Foster healthcare think tank into clinical success, Airedale achieved 100 per cent targets of treating cancer cases within two weeks of their discovery.

It is also in the top ten of English hospitals when it comes to mortality rates which, bluntly, is a measure of how many people come out of its doors alive after treatment.

Perhaps the most remarkable of all these statistics is that these results are achieved with a staff of just 28 doctors per 100 beds, one of the lowest ratios in the country.

The winning hospital, St Mary's, Paddington, London, has no fewer than 80!

"We can do this because we quickly established a reputation for high clinical standards soon after we opened 30 years ago," says Bob, Liverpool born and bred, but who spent years making his way up the NHS ladder in various parts of the country before arriving here in 1990.

"We have been able to maintain that level of excellence because bright young medical professionals want to work in a lovely part of the world in a hospital well known for its high standards.

"We also have excellent back-up from local primary care trusts and the social services: this is very much a team effort.

"Despite all this, our budgets are very over-stretched. Modern medical technology is extremely expensive. People trained to use it rightly deserve good rates of pay.

"I think that we can prove we spend our money wisely by winning this national accolade despite the fact that we have such a low ratio of doctors to beds. But you can only stretch things so far."

He stops again. He is not a man given to threats, just to challenges. He took up jogging only a few years ago and has since completed two London marathons: "I was advised by a colleague that physical effort can help relieve the stress of the job."

I have known Bob Allen for some time and have often marvelled how calm and patient he can be when he is being vilified as a bureaucratic ogre determined to chew up much loved local institutions.

In fact, he is an extremely nice, even gentle, fellow faced with choices which most of us would hate to make. At the same time, he is boss to 2,500 highly skilled workers at Airedale, which makes it one of the district's major employers.

That's quite a load to carry, quite a race to win. Coming up, I suspect, is the toughest marathon he has ever run.