How Journalism Led to the Death of Dr David Kelly

How Journalism Led to the Death of Dr David Kelly

Scandal Editorial

June 26, 202635 min read

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On the morning of July 18th 2003, a team of police climbed the gentle slope up onto Harrowdown Hill, in the English County of Oxfordshire.

The summer of 2003 would go down as one of the hottest on record. But recent rains had taken the edge off the temperatures, and the morning was cool and strangely calm as the searchers ascended the hill.

It was still early in their investigation. The 59-year-old scientist, Doctor David Kelly, had not yet been missing for ten hours. There was still hope.

Key Takeaways

The death of David Kelly, a prominent weapons expert, in 2003 sparked significant controversy and speculation.
Kelly’s involvement in the ‘sexed-up dossier’ led to intense scrutiny and public humiliation.
The Hutton Inquiry concluded that Kelly’s suicide was not foreseeable, but criticized the BBC’s handling of the situation.
Questions remain about the accuracy of the dossier and the government’s role in its presentation.
Kelly’s tragic end highlighted the pressures faced by individuals caught in political and media crossfires.

But up there on Harrowdown Hill, those hopes were quickly dashed. In the tranquillity of the wood, lying lifeless beneath a tree, was a body. It was Doctor Kelly.

The Iraq War dominated the headlines that summer. In particular, the ‘sexed-up dossier’—the collection of allegedly ‘exaggerated’ claims that led British soldiers into combat.

And at the centre of the storm was one man: the MOD weapons inspector, turned mole for BBC journalists.

And now, that man was dead.

Kelly had ingested as many as 29 painkiller tablets, and he had slashed his left wrist so deeply that it severed his ulnar artery. It was a bitterly sad end to a celebrated career, and also to a human life. Doctor Kelly left behind a wife and three daughters.

But, while the discovery of David Kelly’s body on a hill in Oxfordshire brought a sombre conclusion to the man’s story, it opened up a process of speculation and controversy that would last for decades, and is still going on to this day.

So what really happened to David Kelly?

Did he let his conscience get the better of him, and end up biting off more than he could chew?

Had he simply become a pawn in an ugly game between the government and the BBC, a game in which he would be the fall guy?

Or, was it possible that Kelly’s death wasn’t a suicide at all? Was his demise actually the result of much darker forces at work?

In this article, we’re looking at how, for a brief moment in 2003, the worlds of global geopolitics, fundamentalist terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction, converged upon the calm tranquillity of Oxfordshire’s Harrowdown Hill, and how the tragic death of one man would send a shockwave to the heart of the BBC, and the British government.

From 9/11 to Iraq

Our story could start in many places and at many times, but one place, and one time in particular, stand out above the rest.

That place is the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan’s Lower West Side. And the time is 8:46 a.m., on the 11th of September 2001.

The events of that day have been discussed and re-discussed countless times, so I won’t go over them again here.

But what I will say is this: They set in motion a chain of events that would lead to British boots on foreign soil, and eventually to the death of Doctor David Kelly in a quiet copse of trees in Oxfordshire, almost two years later.

Back in the early 2000s, it didn’t matter that none of the September 11th hijackers were Iraqi. It didn’t matter that the country’s erratic dictator, Saddam Hussein, was not a backer of al-Qaeda, and that there were no fundamentalist training camps in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein had been an enemy of the West for more than a decade. He’d been ‘let off the hook’ in the First Gulf War in 1991, and he’d tried to kill President George W. Bush’s dad in Kuwait in 1993. The man was living on borrowed time.

British and American planes and missiles had hit Iraq plenty of times in the last decade, but now he was in the firing line for real. It was what the people wanted—some of the people at least.

One article from the New York Post sums up the mood perfectly. If you close your eyes, you can almost picture the vein of righteous fury throbbing at the journalist’s temple as they wrote these words:

“Kill the b*stards”, the article read, “[and] if Saddam Hussein makes so much as a peep, do him, too.”

And the US government was eager to give the people what they wanted. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said this in a memo:

“Best [get] info fast. Judge whether [intelligence is] good enough [to] hit Saddam Hussein at same time. Not only Osama bin Laden.”

But even all this war-hungry language and general appetite for destruction wasn’t going to be quite enough. Across the pond in the UK, Prime Minister Tony Blair was keen to help out his American allies, but he’d need to ‘sell it’ to the British people first.

There’s a commonly held idea of a “Special Relationship” between Britain and the USA. If we take this relationship as genuine, then it makes sense that the UK would be happy just to follow American troops wherever they went.

But this is a simplistic view, and is largely an outdated relic, left-over from 1945.

In fact, that “special relationship” had been frosty at various points over the previous decades.

Back in the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower had been a vocal opponent of British Intervention in Egypt during the Suez Crisis.

Ten years later, this may have contributed to Britain’s reluctance to support America with troops in Vietnam.

To quote the historian Alex von Tunzelmann:

“When the United States tried to bring Britain into Vietnam, and asked, ‘can you send us troops’? The answer that came back was: ‘no, we remember Suez’.”

But, while this ‘Special Relationship’ was largely a myth by 2001, no one had told Tony Blair this.

The British Prime Minister was good friends with President George W. Bush, and wanted to do whatever he could to help out in the so-called ‘War on Terror’.

This is fine, but it wasn’t going to wash with the British public. If Blair and his government were going to put British boots on Iraqi soil, and risk British lives in an ‘American’ war, they’d need a convincing reason.

So, from April to June 2002, they began putting that ‘reason’ together. They began compiling their dossier on Saddam’s fabled “weapons of mass destruction”. If the UK government could find irrefutable proof that Saddam could launch a strike on the West, then they’d have their case for war.

And to gain this irrefutable proof, they needed Doctor David Kelly.

The Man Behind the Dossier

The name ‘David Kelly’ wasn’t exactly tripping off everyone’s tongues in the spring of 2002.

Your average man or woman in the street could probably name every member of S-Club-7; they might even be able to name every player in Sven Goran Erikson’s latest England squad. But Ministry of Defence scientists didn’t enjoy quite the same level of celebrity as pop stars and footballers.

Which is a shame, because David Kelly was very good at what he did. He was a leading Ministry of Defence scientist, and was highly respected in his field.

Born in Glamorgan in Wales in 1944, Kelly gained his PHD in microbiology from Oxford in 1971, aged just 27. He joined the MOD in 1984, and headed the department’s Microbiology Division.

He was instrumental in developing the bio-weapon defence systems used in the First Gulf War. And, over the following years, he inspected biotechnology facilities in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

He also led ten inspection missions in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. In other words, he was the perfect candidate to advise Blair and his cabinet on Saddam Hussein’s biological weaponry. He was going to be key in building the government’s dossier on Iraqi WMDs.

It took a while for the dossier to surface. By September 2002, initial drafts were circulating around the Labour cabinet. It’s believed that Doctor Kelly saw one of these drafts as early as September 9th.

But even as the publication date grew ever nearer, there were real concerns about the dossier.

Some worried that it just wasn’t ‘explosive’ enough. There was plenty of detail, but there was no bite and venom, and certainly not enough to risk British lives in another Iraqi War, barely a decade after the last one.

Blair’s chief of staff said in an email on September 17th that there was no evidence of:

“An imminent threat.”

But Blair remained confident. For him, the Iraqi threat to the West – and in particular the UK – was “serious and current”. If only the dossier could get this point across.

At some point over the next week, the dossier changed. On September 24th 2002, Tony Blair presented the dossier to Parliament. And now, it contained two rather eye-catching claims.

The first was that Iraq was attempting to source uranium from Niger, to help them kickstart their nuclear weapons program.

President George W. Bush particularly liked this one, as he used it in his State of the Union address in January 2003, saying:

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

But for the British press, it was the second eye-catching claim that was the real attention-grabber. This was the claim that Iraq could launch a WMD strike with just forty-five minutes’ notice.

In the foreword to the dossier, one of the authors states:

“Military planning allows for some of the WMDs to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.”

This kind of claim actually poses more questions than it answers.

For example, what does “a WMD” mean, exactly? Are we talking about a chemical weapon, or a biological weapon?

Are we talking about a cruise missile that might kill dozens, or a nuclear strike that would kill thousands?

And where would this strike take place? Could Saddam hit a British base in the Mediterranean in 45 minutes, or could he hit Tottenham Court Road on a busy Saturday afternoon?

Though the wording in the dossier is unclear, the implication is actually that the “45-minute” claim refers to British bases in Cyprus. But even this claim sounded suspicious.

In late 2002, though, it didn’t matter that it sounded suspicious, because now the media had their soundbite, and they were going to run with it.

“45 Minutes from Attack”, bellowed the Evening Standard.

“He’s Got ‘Em… Let’s Get Him…” brayed The Sun.

The Sun devoted two-thirds of their front page to the story. Their exclusive on the Spice Girls reunion took up the remaining third.

For Britain’s newspaper readers, all this was certainly harrowing stuff.

But was it harrowing enough? Britain had already put troops into Afghanistan. As Afghanistan had direct links to the 9/11 attacks, deployment there was a fairly easy sell.

But was this set of documents really enough to put more British lives in danger, over spurious links and hypothetical atrocities?

The March to War

Blair’s government almost didn’t need to worry about this. On November 8th, Britain successfully pushed the UN Security Council to pass a resolution against Iraq.

Resolution 1441 criticised Iraq for their failure to complete an independent weapons inventory, and issued a “final opportunity” to comply.

What would happen after this final opportunity was never made clear, but the words ‘final opportunity’ at least sound appropriately robust.

Resolution 1441 almost brought the weight of the UN down on Iraq. As Journalist Andy McSmith says:

“Getting that resolution passed unanimously was a triumph for British diplomacy, and the nearest Tony Blair came to getting the UN to authorise an invasion.”

Blair would keep calling for a second resolution, something that would actually punish Iraq for their missed deadlines and failure to comply. He never got this resolution. If he had done, then the dossier may have been forgotten, and we wouldn’t be making this article at all.

Instead, it became clear that America, Britain, and their allies, would be going it alone, without UN support.

As far as the British were concerned, the accuracy of the dossier was now critical. If the UN weren’t going to authorise a war, then Britain’s own intelligence had to be tip-top.

In mid-February, with war now looming, millions of people took to the streets of the UK, in what police called the biggest ever demonstration in British history.

Some demonstrators carried placards, bearing prosaic messages.

“No War On Iraq,” read one.

Others made attempts to play up their pithy Britishness, with slogans like:

“Make Tea, Not War.”

But all were united in one aim: to stop British intervention in the Middle East.

As one protestor, Francesca Morrison, said:

“I thought I needed to show that we were against the war, so the prime minister can’t say that he has the backing of his people.”

Blair didn’t necessarily have the backing of his MPs, either. In a dramatic night in the House of Commons on March 18th 2003, Blair fought off an amendment that opposed his government’s policy on Iraq.

One hundred and thirty-nine Labour MPs rebelled against their party leader. But they failed. At a parliamentary level at least, Blair won his backing for war.

Two days later, bombs were falling on Iraq. Britain was at war. Operation Iraqi Freedom, satirically named Operation Iraqi Liberation, or ‘O.I.L’ by some, was underway.

Over the next five weeks and four days, a coalition of US, UK, Australian and Polish forces, supported by Kurdish fighters and Iraqi rebels, swept through the country.

At least 196 coalition soldiers would die during the Iraqi campaign, including 33 British personnel. Between 11,000 and 45,000 Iraqi soldiers would lose their lives. The civilian death toll was somewhere between 3,200 and 7,400.

It was brutal, it was bloody, and British lives had been lost, but at least it was over quickly.

By April 9th, news outlets around the world were carrying images of Saddam’s statue, toppled in central Baghdad, as jubilant crowds chanted:

“Death to Saddam.”

For Donald Rumsfeld, whose memo had helped start this whole thing, it was “breathtaking”.

Three weeks later, on May 1st, President Bush stood on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California. Here, in front of a garish ‘Stars and Stripes’ banner emblazoned with the words “Mission Accomplished”, he delivered his victory speech.

“In the battle of Iraq,” he said, “the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

International Labour Day became a day of victory for Britain’s Labour Prime Minister too.

Blair been vindicated. British forces had stood with their American friends and achieved something great. All those naysayers who’d stood against him in the Commons in March, or who’d marched against him on the streets of London, Glasgow and Belfast back in February, could eat a hefty portion of humble pie.

But was he really vindicated? As Bush said in his triumphant oration on the USS Abraham Lincoln:

“We have begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.”

“We have BEGUN the search…”

“…sites that WILL be investigated.”

These are not the words of a man who has already found his smoking gun; these are not the words of a detective who has already found that all-important clue.

The BBC Takes Aim

So the world waited with bated breath. If Bush and Blair were correct, then surely the newly set up ‘Iraq Survey Group’, or ISG, would find them.

But for the press back in the UK, it wasn’t simply a case of waiting around and seeing whatever the ISG eventually reported back to them. Editors and journalists wanted to get on the front foot; they wanted to speak to people on the inside, people who had actually worked on the dossier.

And this meant speaking to David Kelly.

Susan Watts was the science editor for the BBC’s Newsnight program. She had direct access to David Kelly, as the pair had spoken to each other at various points since 2001. They had even met in person at a Foreign Office open day in November 2002.

In May of 2003, Watts and Kelly spoke on the phone three times.

During their conversations, Kelly cast doubt on some of the claims made in the dossier.

In Watts own shorthand notes from their first two telephone calls that May, there are suggestions that pressure from Number 10 led to exaggerations in the dossier. During one of the phone calls, she noted down the name of the Downing Street Director of Communications and Strategy, Alastair Campbell.

Her notes also said:

“Single source but not corroborated, sounded good”.

Susan Watts would later say that she didn’t feel that Kelly’s suggestion of pressure from Campbell was “a revelation”. Instead, she took it as a “gossipy comment.”

“I felt it to be a glib statement. I was somewhat surprised that [Kelly] would use a name, and he appeared to be speculating in a way that he did not, generally.”

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How Journalism Led to the Death of Dr David Kelly

But Watts was not the only journalist interested in getting to the bottom of the ‘dodgy dossier’. On May 29th 2003, journalist Andrew Gilligan would appear on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Program, and introduce an exciting new phrase into the British parlance.

Speaking to host John Humphries, Gilligan made the following claim:

“[The dossier] was transformed in the week before it was published to make it sexier. The classic example was the claim that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes. That information was not in the original draft.”

Of course, if you cast your mind back to 2003, you may remember that “make it sexier” was not the phrase on everyone’s lips. Instead, the phrase was: “sexed-up dossier”. And it was this phrase that the press ran with, turning it into the new buzzword of that summer.

So, where had Gilligan’s information come from? Well, one possibility was David Kelly. Gilligan had met with Kelly in a central London hotel room a week earlier.

On the same day that he met with Gilligan, it seems that Kelly was trying to ensure that everything he was doing was above board.

He had nothing to hide, and so he spoke directly to Patrick Lamb at the Foreign Office. Kelly informed Lamb that he had met with BBC journalists.

Following the accusations on the Today programme, Watts decided she would speak with Kelly a third time. And this time, she was going to record their conversation.

On May 30th, Watts asked Kelly about the claim that Iraq could deploy a WMD in forty-five minutes. Kelly replied:

“It was a statement that was made, and it just got out of all proportion… they were desperate for information… that [statement] popped up and it was seized on.”

When Watts asked if Kelly had advised against publishing this claim, he answered:

“I can’t say that it was against my advice, [but] I was uneasy with it.”

During their conversation, Kelly also said that the dossier had been simplified, to the point that it was not always accurate. In Kelly’s words:

“In your heart of hearts, you must realise sometimes that’s not actually the right thing to say, but it’s the only way you can put it over, if you’ve got to get it over in two minutes or three minutes.”

The following day, Andrew Gilligan published his column in the Mail on Sunday. This time, he used the words everyone wanted to hear.

The dossier had been “sexed up”, and specifically, it had been ‘sexed up’ by Alastair Campbell.

Now there was a name to go along with the accusation, but there was still no name to the source that had made it.

The Storm Builds

Things were now moving quickly. A day later, on June 2nd, Susan Watts made her own report on Newsnight. She stated that the forty-five minute claim was “shaky”, but she did not name Alastair Campbell, and she did not name Kelly either.

Watching all this unfold from his Oxfordshire home, Kelly must have been feeling a little nervous. Perhaps he felt he’d gone too far by speaking to the press like this, or maybe he thought it was his moral duty.

After all, he was a scientist, not a politician. He was there to advise and offer his expertise. He was not there to manipulate the facts and bend the truth.

But he was also not meant to be in the public eye, so the growing media storm must have been difficult for him to deal with.

Understandably, Alastair Campbell was not best pleased to have been mentioned in Gilligan’s column. On June 6th, he offered his own response.

From Campbell’s perspective, the BBC was being weirdly non-committal. One of its employees was naming him as the ‘sexer-upper-in-chief’, while another was dancing around the issue, talking about unnamed sources and vague accusations.

He challenged the BBC: Either you stand by your original story, or you withdraw it and you apologise.

He did not come after David Kelly, though. This is likely to be because he did not yet suspect that David Kelly could be the source.

As Kelly had told Susan Watts, he had never actually met Alastair Campbell while he was working with the government. And the Foreign Office official Patrick Lamb had not yet gone to his superiors about what Kelly had told him.

But on June 17th 2003, that changed. Lamb went to the deputy head of defence intelligence, Martin Howard, and informed him that Kelly had spoken to the BBC. Now, senior government officials understood who the source was.

By now, the Foreign Affairs Committee, or FAC, was underway. The FAC sought to understand the truth behind the so-called ‘dodgy dossier’, or to give it its more fun, tabloid-y title, the ‘sexed-up dossier’.

On June 19th, Andrew Gilligan appeared before the committee. He refused to give up his source, instead claiming that he spoke with:

“…one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up the dossier”

On June 25th, it was Alastair Campbell’s turn to meet with the FAC. He remained obstinate in the face of the BBC’s claims against him, calling them:

“Completely and totally untrue… actually, a lie.”

As June wound down, and the new month of July beckoned, Doctor David Kelly probably didn’t notice. He had other things on his mind.

His name had not yet come up at the FAC. But officials and journalists alike all knew his name, and it was only a matter of time until one of them mentioned it.

The Naming of David Kelly

On June 4th, the Ministry of Defence issued a statement. But, yet again, it declined to name Doctor Kelly. Instead, it refered to an “unnamed official”.

The storm now went all the way to the top. That same day, Blair met with his advisers to discuss what they were going to do.

Over at the BBC, plans were also being made. On July 6th, the BBC decided to take a stand. They would back Gilligan, and stand by his story.

At the same time, the government drafted its own plan of action. Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon began pressuring Blair to release Kelly’s name to the FAC.

But perhaps Hoon had a crisis of confidence, or maybe he just needed to be sure. As the days went by, still the government did not release Kelly’s name.

By this point, the government knew that David Kelly had spoken to the BBC. On July 8th, the MoD put out their own statement saying that “a middle-ranking official” had come forward and admitted speaking to the BBC. This ‘middle-ranking’ official was a slightly belittling way to refer to David Kelly, who was in fact a leader in his own field.

Behind the scenes, the MoD held a meeting, and agreed that the name of David Kelly should be given out to any journalist who asked for it. MoD under-secretary Kevin Tebbit said that Blair himself had chaired this meeting.

Geoff Hoon was now looking for confirmation, he wanted to hear directly from the BBC that Kelly was the mole.

On July 9th, Hoon reached out directly to BBC chairman Gavyn Davies, but Davies refused to play ball, and did not give Hoon the confirmation he needed.

This didn’t matter, though. By now, journalists from other publishers were hounding the MoD for a name, and the MoD handed this name over. It’s believed that Chris Adams of The Financial Times was among the first to receive this information. Adams was given Kelly’s name at 5:30 pm on July 9th.

Later that evening, Nick Rufford of the Sunday Times visited Kelly’s Oxfordshire home, and told him the news. He was about to be publicly named.

Journalists have a habit of acting swiftly. In the race to be the first to break the story that David Kelly had been the source of the leak, The Times, The Guardian, and the Financial Times were tied in first place.

On the morning of July 10th, they each published their own story, and they each named David Kelly.

Now that David Kelly’s name was in the public domain, it would be remiss of the FAC not to speak to him first-hand.

And so, on July 15th 2003, after two months of stress and worry over if, when, and in what manner, his name was going to come up, David Kelly finally faced the FAC.

Before the Committee

MOD undersecretary Kevin Tebbit did not want Kelly to face the FAC. Tebbit would later say that this was an attempt to “shield” David Kelly, and keep him away from figures like Alastair Campbell and Geoff Hoon who were out for his blood.

Geoff Hoon disagreed. He was adamant that Kelly should be subjected to the committee.

In fact, it’s possible that Tebbit was more concerned with what Kelly was going to say, rather than what people were going to say to Kelly.

A note from July 14th reveals that the government was certainly worried about further revelations:

“The Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence is to brief Kelly this afternoon for his appearance tomorrow before the FAC and ISC, and will strongly recommend that Kelly is not drawn on his assessment of the dossier.”

On July 15th, Kelly’s first meeting with the FAC took place. Kelly spoke quietly at first, and was asked to speak up so that people at the back of the room could hear.

On several occasions, Kelly said he had not led anyone to believe that the dossier had been ‘sexed-up’. Kelly also said it was unlikely that he was the source for Gilligan’s accusation against Alastair Campbell.

The committee’s Fabian Hamilton then asked the following:

“Just for the record, can you tell me absolutely whether you named or otherwise identified Alastair Campbell or did you say anything which Mr Gilligan might reasonably have interpreted as identifying Mr Alastair Campbell as wanting to change the dossier or ‘sex it up’ in any way, or make undue reference to the 45 minute claim?”

Kelly replied:

“I cannot recall, but that does not mean to say, of course, that such a statement was not made. But I really cannot recall it. It does not sound like the sort of thing I would say.”

At various points over the course of Kelly’s appearance, the tone and mood of the meeting turned hostile and unpleasant.

One committee member, Andrew Mackinlay, was particularly aggressive:

Mackinlay said:

“I reckon you are chaff; you have been thrown up to divert our probing. Have you ever felt like a fall guy? You have been set up, have you not?”

After the hearing, David Kelly would mention Mackinlay to his daughter, calling him an: “utter b*stard”.

At other points, the committee chairman, Donald Anderson, would say that Kelly had been “used”. Another committee member, John Stanley, said he’d been “thrown to the wolves.”

It would have been a humbling experience for Kelly, who would have been left wondering who his friends were in this whole affair.

The following day, on July 16th, Kelly met with the Intelligence and Security Committee, or ISC. At this meeting, it seemed his tone had changed a little. He now described how he had met with Andrew Gilligan in an “unauthorised” manner.

When asked whether the MoD expects employees to use their judgement on this kind of issue, Kelly answered in the negative:

“I think in practice there is an absolute prohibition.”

However, he suggested that this prohibition was not always applied. He said:

“This is the first time I’ve got into any trouble”

… and then clarified:

“this is the first time [that speaking to the press] has been a problem.”

He also seemed to row back on his earlier claims about the September dossier. He described it as:

“…an accurate document, I think it is a fair reflection of the intelligence that was available and it’s presented in a very sober and factual way.”

Kelly’s name was now the talk of the town in Westminster. Kevin Tebbit of the MOD seemed particularly keen to discuss the weapons expert.

At a dinner party on July 16th, Tebbit would allegedly describe Kelly as “a bit weird and rather eccentric”, and also that he was “a bit of a show off”.

Tebbit would later claim that his words were taken out of context, but the implication was clear. Kelly was becoming the butt of the joke, as he was torn down and humiliated before the government’s very eyes.

But the worst was yet to come. And Kelly had now entered his last 24 hours on earth.

On July 17th, Andrew Gilligan was back up in front of the FAC. Anyone who felt like he might name his own source during this meeting was sorely mistaken.

The FAC offered the following conclusion on Gilligan’s evidence:

“We conclude that it is unsatisfactory that a witness who enjoys the full protection of Parliamentary privilege should be free to make an allegation against a third party, however serious, without revealing the source for that allegation.”

So, the general public who were watching the procedure eagerly were denied their big payoff.

The committee hearings had become real popcorn moments for anyone interested in extraordinary political process, and viewers were keen to know who Gilligan’s sources were. They wanted to know if anyone else was going to be made the fall guy, along with poor old Doctor David Kelly.

But, despite all the voyeurism, let’s not forget that the entire process was born out of tragedy: the bloody, controversial, and destabilising, Iraq War.

This had been forgotten in the heady, ‘public humiliation’ territory that the FAC had veered into. But things were about to change, and another tragedy was about to occur.

The Final Hours

When Kelly returned home to Oxfordshire after speaking to the FAC and ISC, he was drained and exhausted. His brush with celebrity was taking its toll. Despite this, he seemed to be handling the whole thing well.

On the morning of July 17th, Kelly’s friend and colleague, Wing Commander John Clark, spoke to the scientist. Clark said he was:

“very tired, but in good spirits”.

We cannot know whether David Kelly was hiding his true feelings from his friend John, or whether something changed in his mind over the next few hours. The final thoughts of David Kelly unfortunately died with him.

It’s now 3 pm, on Thursday July 17th, 2003.

Everything has come to a head now. Doctor Kelly’s face is in newspapers and magazines across the country. He has been torn down by the FAC, and brought close to humiliation. They have insinuated that he’s been used, and that he is the fall guy. At times, they haven’t ‘insinuated’ at all, they’ve just come right out and said it.

Is this what he’d expected when he met with Andrew Gilligan two months ago, or when he’d spoken with Susan Watts? Is this what he’d wanted?

At some time after three, he tells his wife, Janice, that he is going for a walk. It will do him good. It will clear his head.

Janice agrees. In fact, there’s nothing unusual about this. Kelly takes these kinds of walks all the time. It’s been raining, and it’s likely to rain again, but his thick blue jacket, hiking boots and jeans should do just fine.

So Kelly leaves his pretty stone cottage in the village of Southmoor, southwest of Oxford, and heads out into the world.

He walks first towards the ‘Wagon and Horses’ pub. He’s not going for a drink, though. Instead, he skirts the pub’s car park and joins the bridlepath leading out of the village.

The path takes Kelly north. It’s a path that’s familiar to him. Just a couple of months earlier, the 59-year-old weapons expert had walked this path with one of his daughters, Rachel. They’d seen a newborn foal up here, born to one of the horses in the fields.

In fact, Rachel is due to come back this very evening. Father and daughter have arranged another mission up here, to find that little foal, and to see how it’s doing.

This opportunity is important to Rachel. In just a few days, her father will be on his way back to Iraq, for another round of inspection and analysis.

At the turn of the new millennium, weapons inspectors are in high demand. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got plans with your family, or if you’re at the centre of a FAC investigation, your expertise is needed in Iraq.

But Rachel and her father won’t be making that trip. And Kelly won’t be returning to Iraq either.

The sun is still high in the sky to his left as Doctor Kelly heads north. He passes the village of Longworth, and continues into the flat countryside beyond.

It’s likely he’s already made up his mind. He is certainly carrying the equipment he will use to complete his task. In his jacket pocket, there are blister packs of the painkiller co-proxamol, and the pruning knife he has owned since he was a young man. These items weigh heavily on him as he walks.

And there’s something else that weighs heavily upon him too. It’s the cassette tape he carries. On that tape, is a recording of his conversation with Susan Watts on May 30th.

These are the items that Doctor Kelly carries with him, as he follows the well-worn trail towards the gentle rise of Harrowdown Hill.

Aftermath and Inquiry

The death of Doctor David Kelly in July 2003 was, of course, a devastating blow to his family. It also forced the general public to take a long, hard look at themselves.

In the dry and detail-obsessed world of select committees and public investigations, the explosive interrogation of David Kelly had provided something a little more fun. The public watched eagerly to find out what the outcome would be, but they hadn’t expected it would be this.

For the government, the death was a tragedy, but it was also a political embarrassment. The news media honed in on the treatment that Kelly had received, and the way in which investigators, journalists, and government officials, had seemingly let him take the fall.

There was more public outrage that August, when Number 10 spokesman Tom Kelly, no relation, referred to Doctor Kelly as “a Walter Mitty-type fantasist”.

The reference left many people scratching their head. References to American short stories from the late 1930s aren’t exactly part of the common lexicon in Britain.

But once the public got the gist, the insinuation became clear. This was an unpleasant and callous thing to say about a man who had recently lost his life.

Tom Kelly swiftly apologised, but the incident suggested that the government were saying all kinds of nasty things behind closed doors. Combined with Kevin Tebbit’s comments about Kelly being “weird and eccentric”, it wasn’t exactly a good look for the government.

That September, Lord Hutton led a judicial inquiry into the death of David Kelly, and the controversial circumstances which led to it.

Both the government and the BBC, found themselves under scrutiny, as Hutton sought to disentangle the web of conjecture and rumour surrounding Kelly’s suicide.

In January 2004, the Hutton Inquiry finally released its report.

Firstly, it concluded that no one could have anticipated that Doctor Kelly would take his own life. There was no evidence of systematic bullying or harassment that led to this tragic event.

From the government’s perspective, the findings were positive. It was ruled that there had been “no underhand [government] strategy” to name Kelly and make him the fall guy.

The inquiry also said that the dossier had not been “sexed up”. Instead, it aligned with the intelligence that was available at the time, and any influence from the government was merely “subconscious”.

It was decided that the MOD had been at fault, however, as they had not informed their employee that their strategy would involve releasing his name.

But it was the BBC who received the greatest criticism. The inquiry decided that Gilligan’s accusations were “unfounded”, and the BBC were told that their editorial and management processes were “defective”.

BBC chairman Gavyn Davies resigned that same day. The rival news organisation, ITN, called January 28th “one of the worst days in the BBC’s history”, and presumably quite enjoyed the fallout.

Gilligan also resigned. But not before firing off his own parting shot at the inquiry:

“This report casts a chill over all journalism, not just the BBC’s. It seeks to hold reporters, with all the difficulties they face, to a standard that it does not appear to demand of, for instance, Government dossiers.”

Gilligan wasn’t the only one who criticised how the report had seemingly exonerated the government, while hammering the press.

Many questioned why certain pieces of evidence had seemingly been ignored. For example, the evidence that the dossier had been altered to “present the strongest possible case for war”, and that some of these alterations were the suggestion of high-ranking figures like Alastair Campbell.

Even though he was now under scrutiny, Prime Minister Tony Blair would stand by the actions that led Britain to war:

“The allegation that I or anyone else lied to this House or deliberately misled the country by falsifying intelligence on WMD is itself the real lie. And I simply ask that those that made it, and those who have repeated it over all these months, now withdraw it, fully, openly and clearly.”

Legacy and Unanswered Questions

As the years went by following the death of David Kelly, the controversy around the Hutton report did not go away.

BBC director general Greg Dyke has always stood by Andrew Gilligan’s reporting. In 2016, he said:

“Ten years on, it is very difficult to find anyone who believes they did not ‘sex up’ that document.”

Others have gone further in their criticism of the Hutton Report. Both the former Conservative leader Michael Howard and the Lib Dem MP Norman Baker have said that they do not believe Kelly committed suicide. Instead, they have said that the scientist was murdered by someone who believed he knew too much.

Several doctors agree with them. Doctor Stephen Frost, for example, said this:

“We have lots of evidence … No coroner in the land would reach a verdict of suicide as Lord Hutton did.”

Despite this, none of the alternative theories around Kelly’s death have ever been proven. Kelly’s family have appealed for calm and privacy around the death. In 2007, Kelly’s brother-in-law, Michael Pape, said:

“It is just raking over old bones. I can’t speak for the whole family, but I’ve read it all [Norman Baker’s theories], every word, and I don’t believe it.”

The idea that David Kelly was murdered by a government agent seems fanciful. Kelly had already offered his views on the dossier, and murdering him in cold blood was hardly likely to take the heat off the government.

Instead, the truth is likely to be simpler, but no less sad. Doctor David Kelly had built a respected career as one of Britain’s leading biological weapons experts, and he, like many others, felt uncomfortable with the way his expertise was being used for political ends.

So, he spoke out. But, in speaking out, he found himself caught in a tug of war between the press and the government.

This tug of war fascinated the public. In the media furore and public outrage of the summer of 2003, the welfare and well-being of people like Doctor David Kelly were simply forgotten about. Forgotten about, until it was too late.

Key Takeaways

The death of David Kelly, a prominent weapons expert, in 2003 sparked significant controversy and speculation.
Kelly’s involvement in the ‘sexed-up dossier’ led to intense scrutiny and public humiliation.
The Hutton Inquiry concluded that Kelly’s suicide was not foreseeable, but criticized the BBC’s handling of the situation.
Questions remain about the accuracy of the dossier and the government’s role in its presentation.
Kelly’s tragic end highlighted the pressures faced by individuals caught in political and media crossfires.

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The Scandal editorial team researches, verifies, and structures investigative stories across the Power, Fame, Money, and Cover-Ups desks.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was David Kelly’s role in the Iraq War?

David Kelly was a leading Ministry of Defence scientist and weapons inspector who was highly respected in his field. He was instrumental in developing bio-weapon defence systems and led inspection missions in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He was key in building the government’s dossier on Iraqi WMDs.

What was the ‘sexed-up dossier’?

The ‘sexed-up dossier’ refers to the collection of allegedly ‘exaggerated’ claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that led British soldiers into combat. The dossier included claims such as Iraq’s ability to launch a WMD strike within 45 minutes and attempts to source uranium from Niger.

What was the ‘45-minute claim’?

The ‘45-minute claim’ was a statement in the dossier that Iraq could launch a WMD strike with just 45 minutes’ notice. This claim was used to justify the urgency of military action against Iraq.

What was the role of the BBC in the David Kelly controversy?

The BBC played a significant role in the controversy through journalists Andrew Gilligan and Susan Watts. Gilligan claimed on the BBC’s Today Program that the dossier had been ‘sexed up’ and named Alastair Campbell as the person responsible. Watts also spoke with Kelly and reported on his concerns about the dossier.

What was the Hutton Inquiry?

The Hutton Inquiry was a judicial inquiry led by Lord Hutton into the death of David Kelly and the circumstances leading up to it. The inquiry concluded that Kelly’s death was a suicide and that there was no evidence of systematic bullying or harassment. It also criticized the BBC’s editorial processes.

What was the public and media reaction to David Kelly’s death?

The public and media reaction to David Kelly’s death was one of outrage and speculation. Many questioned the treatment Kelly received from the government and the media, and there were calls for greater transparency and accountability. The Hutton Inquiry’s findings were criticized by some who believed it exonerated the government while criticizing the BBC.

What were the alternative theories surrounding David Kelly’s death?

Some alternative theories suggested that David Kelly was murdered by someone who believed he knew too much. Former Conservative leader Michael Howard and Lib Dem MP Norman Baker, along with several doctors, have expressed doubts about the suicide verdict. However, these theories have not been proven, and Kelly’s family has appealed for privacy.

What was the impact of the Iraq War on David Kelly?

The Iraq War put David Kelly in a difficult position. As a weapons inspector, he felt uncomfortable with the way his expertise was being used for political ends. His decision to speak out to the BBC led to intense public scrutiny and ultimately contributed to his tragic death.

What was the significance of the ‘Special Relationship’ between the UK and the USA?

The ‘Special Relationship’ between the UK and the USA was often cited as a reason for British involvement in the Iraq War. However, this relationship was largely a myth by 2001, and Britain’s decision to support the US was driven more by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s personal relationship with President George W. Bush than by any genuine strategic alliance.

Sources

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