An Inconvenient Death: How the Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Affair

237 Pages·2019·8.69 MB·English

by  Miles Goslett

AN INCONVENIENT DEATH
How the Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Affair

Miles Goslett
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About this Book
About the Author
Table of Contents
AN APOLLO BOOK
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About An Inconvenient Death
THE DEATH OF DR DAVID KELLY
In 2003 is one of the strangest events in recent British history. This scrupulous
scientist, an expert on weapons of mass destruction, was caught up in the rush to
war in Iraq. He felt under pressure from those around Tony Blair to provide
evidence that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction that
could be used to immediate and devastating effect. Kelly seemed to have tipped
into sudden depression when he was outed as a source for Andrew Gilligan.
Case closed, for Blair, Alastair Campbell and the intelligence agencies.
But the circumstances of his death are replete with disquieting questions – every
detail, from his motives to the method of his death, his body’s discovery and the
way in which the state investigated his demise, seems on close examination not
way in which the state investigated his demise, seems on close examination not
to make sense. There was never a full coroner’s inquest into his death, which
would have allowed medical and other evidence to be carefully interrogated.
In this painstaking and meticulous book, Miles Goslett shows why we should be
deeply sceptical of the official narrative and reminds us of the desperate
measures those in power resorted to in that feverish summer of 2003.
Contents
Welcome Page
About An Inconvenient Death
Introduction
Part 1: Life and Death
The £4.15 scoop
Campbell counterattacks
The unmasking of Dr Kelly
An early visitor
Pale and tired
Preparations
Fall guy?
Questions, questions
‘Many dark actors playing games’
Gilligan re-grilled
Ruth Absalom: last witness
The Disappearance
Turbulence for Blair
Searching and finding
‘Suspected suicide’
Bumpy landing in Tokyo
Dr Kanas and Dr Kelly
‘Most honourable of men’
Constructing the inquiry
Forensic findings
Post-mortem
The New York Times
Formal identification
Statements
‘Have you got blood on your hands, Prime Minister?’
Dr Kelly’s dental records
‘Did you assassinate him?’
Speculation
The Hutton Inquiry
Part 2: Concerns
How to side-step an inquest
Found wanting: the Kelly family’s evidence to the Hutton Inquiry
Weston-Super-Mare
Cornwall
Tea and sympathy
A curious lack of curiosity
A body disturbed
The third man
The body: a third recollection
Dr Malcolm Warner
ACC Page and the dental records
An unusual letter
Part 3: A Calling to Account
Key findings contested
Mai Pederson
Blood and pills
The doctors versus the Attorney General
Conclusion
Postscript
Plate Section
Appendix 1: Hutton Inquiry witnesses and the dates on which they were called
Appendix 2: Key witnesses who did not appear at the Hutton Inquiry and the
reasons they should have done so
Acknowledgements
Index
About Miles Goslett
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Introduction
Shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday, 17 July 2003, Dr David Kelly left his house in
the Oxfordshire village of Southmoor to go for one of his regular short walks.
He had changed into a pair of jeans, put his house key in his pocket, and tucked
his mobile telephone into a pouch on his belt – the routine actions of a man
preparing to do something he had done many times before.
His wife, Janice, had retired to bed two hours earlier because she felt unwell.
He didn’t say goodbye to her or leave a note.
Within fifteen minutes of setting off, he bumped into a neighbour who was
walking her dog. They exchanged a few pleasant, unremarkable words. She then
saw him stroll down the road as she turned for home. She was the last person
known to have seen Dr Kelly alive.
Back at the house, Mrs Kelly had recovered sufficiently to go downstairs.
When her husband failed to return after a couple of hours she began to feel some
unease, but she did not try to ring his mobile phone. Instead, she waited until she
was able to share her growing concerns regarding his whereabouts with her
youngest daughter, Rachel, who had arranged to meet her father that evening so
that they could go for a walk together.
On hearing the news, Rachel decided the situation warranted some kind of
action. First on foot and then in her car, she began tracing the routes that she
knew Dr Kelly habitually took. She also contacted her sisters, one of whom was
prompted by Rachel’s call to drive seventy miles from her house in Hampshire
to join in what was still just a family search. Despite hours of looking, neither
daughter found him.
At 11 p.m. the two women went back to their parents’ house and, with their
mother, debated what to do next. Shortly before midnight, they decided they
must contact the police to report him missing. By this point, Dr Kelly had not
been seen for almost nine hours.
This was the relatively low-key start to an overnight hunt that would involve
more than forty police officers, a police dog, a police helicopter, plus some
volunteer searchers, with a mounted police unit and an underwater police search
team also being called upon. In the early hours, Metropolitan Police officers
from Special Branch were told to search Dr Kelly’s London office, and senior
figures in Whitehall were alerted to his disappearance.
Such an operation, launched so quickly, might have been expected for a top
public figure, but Dr Kelly was – officially, at least – a mere civil servant.
Just after 9 a.m. on Friday, 18 July, two volunteer searchers helping the
police found a body matching the description of David Kelly in a wood at
Harrowdown Hill, about two miles from his house.
At the time the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was on a plane travelling between
Washington DC and Tokyo. The Lord Chancellor, Charles Falconer, who was in
London, rang Blair on the aircraft’s phone within minutes of the body being
found and in a surprisingly brief call was instructed to set in motion a full-blown
public inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death.
Falconer established this inquiry several hours before any exact cause of Dr
Kelly’s death had been determined officially – and, indeed, before the body
found that morning had even been formally identified.
What could possibly have led Falconer and Blair, the two most senior
political figures of the day, to take this unusual step on the basis of what,
according to contemporaneous police reports, appeared to be a tragic case of a
professional man ending his own life? Why were they even involved at such an
early stage in what was essentially an incident that was local to Oxfordshire?
What was it about the death of David Kelly that had disturbed Falconer and
Blair so much that they went on to interrupt and ultimately to derail the
coroner’s inquest, which had been opened routinely? And why were they content
to replace that inquest with a less rigorous form of investigation into Dr Kelly’s
death?
These questions preoccupied me, as a journalist, for years. They pointed to
powerful forces working against the proper investigation of an unexpected event
– in this case, a death mired in mystery.
Then, on 5 November 2014, I heard that a senior civil servant working in the
Ministry of Justice had written an extraordinary letter to a man called Gerrard
Jonas, a garage owner from Oxfordshire, urging him to stay away from Dr
Kelly’s grave. The letter noted that Mr Jonas had been visiting the grave at St
Mary’s churchyard in the nearby village of Longworth and, in a thinly veiled
threat, advised him to ‘carefully consider’ whether this ‘programme is
appropriate and lawful’. It went on to say that a surveillance ‘watch’ had been
put on the grave as a result of Mr Jonas’s visits, though this point was worded
ambiguously enough for it to remain unclear who had ordered the watch and
how it was being policed. The letter was signed Barrie Thurlow, of the Ministry
of Justice Coroners, Burial, Cremation and Inquiries Policy Team.
The tone of the letter certainly supported the idea that a Whitehall department
and, maybe, others in officialdom still felt great sensitivity about Dr Kelly’s
death, which had occurred more than eleven years previously. Its clear inference
was that Dr Kelly’s grave was being monitored, perhaps by an arm of the State.
Mr Jonas – whom I did not know – sent me a copy of it and, being aware of
my interest in the Kelly case, later rang me to explain the background to it. He
said he had never met or spoken to Dr Kelly or his family; he had simply
believed for many years that for reasons of public interest there should be a full
coroner’s inquest into Dr Kelly’s death to establish how, where and when he had
died – something which successive governments have refused to allow.
To that end he had set up a group, Justice For Kelly, and on behalf of its
members had written to the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, asking her to
consider ordering an inquest. Mrs May had passed Mr Jonas’s letter on to the
Ministry of Justice. Its representative, Barrie Thurlow, had replied to Mr Jonas
because it was felt that the matter in question fell under his department’s remit.
In his original letter to the Home Secretary, Mr Jonas had mentioned his self-
appointed role as the maintainer of Dr Kelly’s grave, which he believed had
fallen into rather a sorry condition. In mid-2014 he had begun to weed it and to
leave flowers on it occasionally. The result of Mr Jonas’s declaration to the
Home Secretary about his grave-tending activities was the Ministry of Justice’s
faintly menacing reply.
The ministry’s letter also claimed that Dr Kelly’s family had complained of
‘interference’ at the grave. Mr Jonas told me that he had erected a placard near it
to mark the eleventh anniversary of Dr Kelly’s death in July 2014. If Dr Kelly’s
family found out about this particular incident at the time, presumably it had
upset them, for understandable reasons: most people would not be happy for a
relative’s resting place to become a site of protest. At about the same time, some
flowers Mr Jonas had left on Dr Kelly’s grave were removed. In their place was
an anonymous note requesting that Mr Jonas stop tending it. He replied to the
individual who left him the note in what he now admits was an inappropriately
flippant way – by leaving a bottle of champagne on the grave and telling
whoever had left the note that he hoped they might ‘choke’ on it for having
removed the flowers. In his defence, Mr Jonas made no attempt to conceal his
identity: he left his name and telephone number on his note and was deliberately
provocative, precisely because he wanted to speak to whomever had objected to
his grave-tending. Needless to say, the champagne disappeared, but nobody ever
rang him.
And so Mr Jonas continued at intervals to look after the grave as an act of, in
his words, ‘civic duty’ – even though officers from Thames Valley Police have
made their presence felt in his life periodically, once calling on him at home