A leak investigation has been launched at an embattled health board in Scotland after the highly embarrassing private thoughts of its newly appointed communications guru were made public.

Following a succession of damaging news stories about alleged bullying, intimidation and financial mismanagement, the Western Isles Health Board appointed John MacLeod, the multi-award-winning but highly controversial Daily Mail columnist, as its spin doctor.

But MacLeod, who once wrote an opinion piece arguing that Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman would not have died at Soham had their parents 'kept the Lord's day', has become embroiled in a fierce battle after only one week in the job, triggered after an astonishing 13-page strategy document, which was essentially his pitch for the job, was leaked to local newspapers.

In the document, MacLeod condemns pregnant women for having unrealistic expectations compared with their grandmothers. 'Ours is a day where a mother-to-be expects to be consulted and pandered to at every point of antenatal care and final confinement,' he states in the first page. 'Many expect the labour process to be pain-free and that, as of God-given right, the child will be born alive, immaculate and healthy.'

In contrast, he laments the 'much more religious, deferential and realistic' era of the last century when women expected childbirth to be 'arduous' and 'never entirely clear of risk'.

He appears to suggest that women should reassess their expectations in line with a time when it was not uncommon for them to die during childbirth. 'She [a woman of our grandmothers' era] accepted the risk of antenatal, perinatal or neonatal death and the possibility of hereditary and congenital deformity,' he writes. He also attacks general practitioners, saying the average GP has 'an ego the size of the Clisham' (the highest peak in the Outer Hebrides).

In a less than auspicious start to his new career as a spin doctor, MacLeod also insults the local media and politicians. The Stornoway Gazette, which is widely read throughout Lewis and Harris, is described as an 'incompetent newspaper, with half-trained staff, no sense of news priority, no editorial courage and no wit, style or character'.

Finally, he describes local Labour MSP Alasdair Morrison and Western Isles Councillor Angus Graham as 'widely disliked, despised and distrusted'.

The document was sent to five senior members of the health board before being quickly leaked to local newspapers and politicians.

In an opinion piece in the West Highland Free Press, former Labour MP Brian Wilson expressed disbelief that the health board had hired MacLeod as a press officer based on the document. 'John's considerable skills are those of a commentator and controversialist, which are conspicuously not the same as those required of a press officer,' he wrote, adding that, to any reasonable person, it would be abundantly clear that 'each of the 12 pages carried about 100 health warnings on why John MacLeod should not have been employed by the Western Isles NHS'.

Morrison said he had forwarded the report to the health department. 'My concerns are not so much the ludicrous contents of the document, but the fact that senior management read it and decided its author would be the perfect communications director. The medical director has been on radio saying it is a good, well-written document. I cannot imagine any other medical director, the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, who would come within 100 miles of thinking this is a good report.'

MacLeod said the problem at the Western Isles Health Board was 'fundamentally a management one and not a PR one'.