Overview
On the morning of 18 July 2003 David Kelly told his wife he was going for a walk. He was found later that day on Harrowdown Hill, in woodland about a mile from his house in Oxfordshire, with a wound to his left wrist. He was 59.
He was not an obscure civil servant. Kelly was the Ministry of Defence's senior adviser on biological warfare, a former United Nations weapons inspector who had made dozens of trips into Iraq through the 1990s, and one of the small number of Westerners who genuinely knew what Saddam Hussein's programmes had and had not contained. He had been appointed CMG. He was also, by the week of his death, the most exposed man in Britain.
How He Got There
On 29 May 2003 the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan reported that the government's September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons had been, in the word that defined the affair, "sexed up" — that the claim Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within forty-five minutes had been inserted knowing it was questionable. The source was unnamed.
Kelly had spoken to Gilligan, and to other BBC journalists, in the informal way a technical expert speaks to reporters who cover his field. When the government began hunting the source, he told his line manager he had met Gilligan. What followed was a process that has been criticised in almost every subsequent account: the Ministry of Defence issued a statement describing an unnamed official who had come forward, then confirmed the name to journalists who guessed it correctly. Kelly was called before the Foreign Affairs Committee on 15 July and questioned in public, visibly uncomfortable, in a room where he could barely be heard.
Three days later he was dead.
The Hutton Inquiry
Tony Blair's government appointed Lord Hutton, a senior judge, to inquire into the circumstances. He reported on 28 January 2004. The finding on the death itself was that Kelly had taken his own life by cutting his left wrist, with an overdose of co-proxamol and underlying coronary artery disease as contributing factors.
The rest of the report landed very differently from what most observers expected. It was severe on the BBC — on Gilligan's reporting and on the corporation's editorial processes — and comparatively gentle on the government. The BBC's chairman and director-general both resigned within days. To a substantial part of the British press and public, an inquiry set up to examine how a weapons expert came to die in a wood had concluded principally that a broadcaster had been careless.
The Procedural Gap
The feature that has kept the case open is not medical but legal. A coroner's inquest into Kelly's death was opened and then adjourned, and under the Inquiries Act arrangements the Hutton Inquiry was designated to fulfil its function. It was never resumed. That means the death was never examined by the ordinary process — an inquest, with a coroner, with witnesses on oath subject to cross-examination and a formal verdict.
Hutton also ordered that the post-mortem report, the toxicology findings and photographs of the body be withheld for seventy years, a period that would run to 2073. The order attracted sustained criticism partly because its legal basis was never clearly explained.
In October 2010, under pressure, Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke published the post-mortem and toxicology reports. The pathologist's conclusion was consistent with the Hutton finding: the wrist wound was self-inflicted. Clarke said the unusual step was taken to maintain public confidence.
The Doctors
The most durable challenge has come from a group of medical professionals, among them the trauma surgeon David Halpin and the epidemiologist Andrew Rouse, who have argued from the beginning that the stated mechanism is improbable. Their central objection concerns the ulnar artery: a small vessel, difficult to bleed from fatally in the open, particularly given the volume of blood described at the scene. They have also pointed to the level of co-proxamol found, which was well below what is normally fatal.
In 2010 the group petitioned for a fresh inquest. In June 2011 the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, declined to apply for one, saying the evidence that Kelly took his own life was overwhelming and rejecting the suggestion of a cover-up. Successive requests since have not succeeded.
What Is Left
The suspicion attached to the case does not require anyone to allege a murder. It rests on a narrower and more awkward set of facts: that a man who could have contradicted the government's public case for a war died in the middle of the row about it; that the death was examined by a judicial inquiry rather than by a coroner; that the medical file was ordered shut for seventy years and then, seven years later, opened after all; and that the inquiry which followed was widely read as having gone easier on the government than on its critics.
Each of those has an administrative explanation. Together they have proved sufficient to keep the file open for two decades.