When the British weapons inspector David Kelly was found dead in July 2003 in a wood near his home in Oxfordshire, it was rapidly concluded that he had committed suicide. But from the outset many were doubtful about the suicide verdict. Prominent among them was the maverick Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, whose eye-opening book, “The Strange Death of David Kelly”, has just been published in Britain.
Baker’s book appears at a time when the New Labour government of Gordon Brown is being rocked by a fresh scandal regarding party funding. The New Labour project, of which Brown and his predecessor Tony Blair were chief architects, made much of its ethical credentials. Yet by this stage it is in danger of becoming a byword for moral shabbiness, with the treatment of David Kelly at the hands of the Blair government remembered as especially discreditable.
What put Kelly’s name in the headlines was the discovery that he was the source of a BBC report on May 29, 2003 that the Blair government deliberately exaggerated the threat posed to Britain by Saddam Hussein when it warned that that the Iraqi dictator could deploy weapons of mass destruction against British forces within 45 minutes. Debarred as a civil servant from speaking publicly, Kelly disclosed his unease about what he regarded as an abuse of intelligence data in a briefing to the BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan.
Gilligan’s radiobroadcast alleging that the British government “sexed up” the case for attacking Iraq was to have cataclysmic consequences. It led to the disclosure, with government connivance, of Kelly’s identity as Gilligan’s source and to his being publicly interrogated by a parliamentary committee. The distress he suffered as a consequence was later portrayed as having precipitated his suicide. It was with the ostensible purpose of looking into the circumstances of Kelly’s death that Blair set up an official inquiry chaired by the eminent judge, Lord Hutton. In the event, the Hutton inquiry became a showdown between the BBC and the government, with Kelly’s death reduced to almost marginal significance. The Blair government’s position was that the BBC had betrayed its public service remit by broadcasting an unsubstantiated report that impugned the government’s integrity. Charged with adjudicating on the issue, Lord Hutton found in favor of the government and the BBC suffered the biggest setback in its history, losing its Chairman Gavyn Davies and its Director General Greg Dyke while also sustaining grave damage to its moral prestige.
Yet for Blair and his government Hutton’s favorable verdict was a hollow victory. Though Blair’s director of communications, Alastair Campbell, who had much to do with the preparation of the government dossier containing the disputed 45-minute claim, treated the verdict as a triumphant personal vindication, few others saw it as anything of the sort. What emerged in the course of the inquiry was widely taken as confirmation that the government’s handling of the case for attacking Iraq had been more than a little questionable. So little indeed did it seem to correspond with the compromising evidence presented at the inquiry that many greeted Hutton’s judgment with stunned disbelief.
Not only did Norman Baker share the prevailing incredulity about Hutton’s verdict, he was also highly skeptical about the assumption that Kelly committed suicide and resolved to conduct an investigation of his own. Now, four years after Kelly’s death, Baker has produced an ample book that, if hardly notable for its literary elegance, makes compelling reading, brimming as it does with startling revelations and insights. All too evocative of the decay of British democracy, The Strange Death of David Kelly is first and foremost a brilliant forensic performance that exposes all manner of anomalies in the received version of events. The book makes a powerful case that, not unlike British and US foreign policy with regard to Iraq, the Hutton enquiry was a cynical exercise in manipulating the facts in order to support a predetermined conclusion.
What strengthened Baker’s initial doubts about the suicide verdict was the discovery that they were shared by leading medical specialists. Kelly is said to have died as a result of slashing his ulnar artery and from taking an overdose of coproxamol tablets. Yet — as those specialists maintained in letters to the Guardian — the ulnar artery, which lies deep in the wrist, is matchstick thick, exceptionally hard to sever and apt to retract if cut; there was, moreover, remarkably little blood at the scene. It seems especially curious that Kelly is supposed to have used a blunt penknife (which, incidentally, proved to have been wiped clean). As for the 29 coproxamol tablets he supposedly ingested, medical tests revealed the presence of only a fifth of one tablet in his stomach. It seems in any case barely credible that a renowned expert on toxicology would have resorted to such a clumsy means of getting rid of himself when he would have been familiar with far more efficient methods.
Baker notes that two seasoned paramedics who attended the scene of Kelly’s death reported that what they witnessed simply did not square with their experience of suicides. He points out, too, that there was a cavalier official disregard for the normal procedures employed to determine whether a suspected suicide may be judged beyond reasonable doubt. The fact is there was no proper inquest into Kelly’s death. Instead, the Hutton inquiry served as both an inquest into his death and an investigation into the circumstances surrounding it. In truth, almost everything about the inquiry, and not least the almost indecent speed with which it was set up and completed, smacked of establishment obfuscation. Hutton himself was a very deliberate choice to chair the inquiry, having served as Lord Chief Justice in Northern Ireland where he was known for passing judgments congenial to the British government. Certainly Blair could feel confident that the judge possessed a “safe pair of hands”, though this did not stop the prime minister from appearing unusually ill at ease when he gave evidence to his enquiry.
Norman Baker is well aware that he will be scoffed at as a conspiracy theorist, but many of the details he has unearthed are nothing if not extraordinary. What are we to make, for example, of the fact that the police operation concerning Kelly’s death was recorded as having begun an hour before the scientist was reported missing? Kelly himself spoke of being stalked by “dark actors”. Baker’s inquiries have led him to various tentative conclusions as to who those dark actors may have been. He considers the possible complicity of the CIA but claims to have been told on good authority that the United States was not implicated in the scientist’s death. In the end, he inclines to the view that Kelly was murdered by a hit squad working on behalf of Iraqi dissidents who had hyped up the threat to the West posed by Saddam Hussein and who did not care for Kelly’s determination to tell the truth. However, Baker believes that while Kelly may have died at the hands of Iraqi assassins, the British government had advance warning of his assassination and arranged for his death to be made to look like suicide. Some may feel it is hardly necessary to look beyond Britain in order to identify people for whom David Kelly’s elimination would have been highly convenient, and it must be said that his conclusion seems somewhat less plausible than the rest of his account.
On the day David Kelly was found dead, Blair was in Washington receiving a Congressional Gold Medal as a reward for his services to the US. It seems an eloquent footnote to the whole episode that, three years later, Blair’s wife Cherie raised 400 pounds for the Labour Party by auctioning a copy of the Hutton report inscribed with her signature.
Challenged about this in the House of Commons, Blair declined to apologize for what many considered a breach of good taste.
“The Strange Death of David Kelly” records how an honorable public servant was cruelly used by a dishonorable government bent on diverting attention from the way it got Britain involved in an illegal war that the majority of British people opposed. It is devastating piece of work.
