Did the British Government Really Murder a Whistleblower?

There are political scandals, and then there are unmitigated, cataclysmic, and inexorable political disasters so large that they can be seen from space – the sorts that if not properly contained, have potential to not only oust a leader and their closest goons, but to see entire age-old political institutions and machines destroyed, and whole generations lose their faith in democracy itself.

For example, when I say ‘scandal,’ your mind likely immediately leaps to something like the Watergate affair, but that was, what, a bit of wiretapping and document pinching? Stuff like that is NOTHING compared to what we will be looking at today.

The scandal in question, which occurred in the United Kingdom during Tony Blair’s tenure as Prime Minister, saw him blatantly ignore THE largest protest movement that the nation has ever seen, in order to start an expeditionary war in Iraq, with the supposed justification that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s then leader, was building weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, and as a result posed a significant threat to international security.

But that’s only the beginning of it, because as the Iraq War, as it came to be known, was in its nascent stages, and the aforementioned protest movement was at the height of its momentum, a whistleblower, who had been speaking to the media about Iraq’s REAL WMD capabilities, turned up dead, and naturally, given timing like that, many were quick to suspect that he had in fact been assassinated… but was he actually?

Well, that’s what we’re going to be getting to the bottom of today; and I don’t want to give any spoilers… but, well, let’s just say there’s A LOT that doesn’t make sense in a first read of the official story – and you just might not need a tinfoil hat to entertain this one…

Oh, and fair warning before we begin, there’s a lot of mention and discussion of… ‘meetings one’s end by one’s own hand,’ if you get me, in today’s article – just letting you know so you can make an informed choice on whether or not you want to proceed!

And so, with that said, let’s begin!

Chapter 1: Dr Kelly

There can be no better way to start an episode like this, than by taking the time to fully get to grips with the full ins and outs of the man who some suspect was assassinated – so, let’s do exactly that!

David Kelly, or Dr David Christopher Kelly, Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, to give him his full name and title, was born on the 14th of May 1944 in Wales. He came from a VERY socially mobile family, with his father, the son of a coal miner, then serving in the Royal Airforce as a Signals Officer, and his mother, then employed as a teacher, being the daughter of a grave sculptor.

But while his family may have been socially on the up and up, it wasn’t exactly what you would call a stable one, as his parents, who had only gotten married in late 1940, eventually divorced not even two years after his birth. This was clearly something that left quite the negative mark on Dr Kelly, as while he remembered his grandmother, who took him and his mother in following the divorce, very fondly indeed, and couldn’t say enough positive words about her to anyone who would listen, he basically never spoke of his either his mother or his father, even as a schoolboy.

We can also be reasonably certain what caused the divorce, as while it isn’t explicitly stated anywhere, his father remarried not even two weeks after the divorce had been finalised… to a woman 10 years his junior. With her, he then went on to start a whole new family, settling in Kettering, where he became the Head Teacher at a local school, and having four children: three biologically, and one through adoption. Despite the obvious openness of that they had to bringing non-blood relatives into the family however, Dr Kelly was never once offered to join them.

He would go on to lose both of his parents at a reasonably young age, not young enough to make him an orphan mind you, but certainly young enough to cause plenty of damage, both to his mind and his situation, with his mother dying of a sleeping pill overdose in 1964, when Dr Kelly was merely 19 years old, and his father dying of lung cancer in 1981, when he was 36; one is clearly much worse than the other, but certainly, either age is far too young to lose a parent.

Faced with all of those difficulties, Dr Kelly chose to deal with it via basically the only productive avenue open to a young man in the late black and white days: hurling himself full pelt into his work.

First, he blitzed the entry exam into Pontypridd County Grammar School, where, in addition to knocking out some banging exam results, he also became Head Boy AND the darling of the school athletics team. With all of that making for one hell of a resume when he came to apply for further education, he then found himself at Leeds University studying for a bachelor’s degree in bacteriology. There, he would also meet his future wife, Janice, with the pair finally tying the not in 1967, when both had finished their undergraduate studies.

After Leeds, it was off to Birmingham University, where he scored himself a master’s degree in virology, which he in turn followed up with a doctorate in microbiology from Oxford University. While at Oxford, he also began his professional life, taking up a part time researcher role with the University’s Insect Pathology Unit, with him working their while completing his studies.

And with him receiving the highest possible grade in every single one of those degrees, a 1st, a distinction, and a pass respectively – its safe to say that brains didn’t come much more wrinkled than that of Dr Kelly.

This, naturally, put him in great stead when he finished his studies in 1971 and entered the full-time workforce, starting off as a post-doctoral researcher University of Warwick, before heading back to Oxford once again to work at the university’s Institute of Virology and Environmental Microbiology. There, he soon enough rose to become the Chief Scientific Officer, with his particular research area of interest being the spread and proliferation of insect viruses.

But even that was only small time compared to wait was looming in his near future, because, in 1984, he got THE big break of his life when he was taken on by the Ministry of Defence to serve as the head of the Defence Microbiology Division at Porton Down, and if you know anything about the British defence scene, you’ll know that Porton Down is a biiiiiiiiiiig deal.

Under his leadership, the department, which had only been a modest little thing previously, grew SIGNIFICANTLY, and undertook a huge pivot to focus near exclusively on defences against biological weapons. Thanks to this, those drugs I mentioned in my tangent were developed, or were at least set happily on their way to eventually being developed, and the British Military also found itself with truly world leading biological defence capabilities, which came in handy indeed during the Gulf of the 1990s – in which Saddam Hussein deploying such weapons was a MAJOR concern.

Dr Kelly’s new role also saw him get out of the lab and begin trying his hand at field work, with the decontamination of Gruinard Island, the uninhabited Scottish island I mentioned in my tangent, being completed under his watch, as well as repeated trips to newly independent Russia, as the leader of a joint US-UK effort to see old Soviet biological weapon caches and manufacturing facilities completely destroyed.

He did well at this too, and so would find himself sent to Iraq as well, where he oversaw the discovery, and subsequent destruction of many of the country’s bio-weapon programs and caches.

In fact, it’s a shame that I’m only able to give you the footnotes version of his history in this contextual chapter, because, between his lab work developing bio-weapon counter measures, and his field work seeking out and destroying existent caches and production facilities, I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that you’d struggle to find a single human being from the 20th century who did more to protect and safeguard the world than Dr Kelly. Sure, he may have worked for a place with a… ‘dodgy past,’ lets call it, but he himself, and the work he did there, that was incredible sh*t – and he was a bloody good egg.

So, where did it all go wrong then? How did this man most laudable come to meet an early end, and what was it about his untimely fate that caused so much controversy, and had some people speculating that he may in fact have been assassinated?

Well, to answer that, we need to REALLY zoom in on both the final act of his life, and the wider situation around it, as it is impossible to fully appreciate the situation without having a detailed understanding of both. So, let’s move on and do exactly that!

Chapter 2: The Political Sh*tstorm

Let me begin this chapter by saying two words that will unlock a core memory for every single Brit over the age of 40 in the audience: Dodgy Dossier.

For those of you younger than that however, or who hail from other lands, allow me to explain why those two words are so ingrained into the minds of those particular Brits.

You see, ‘Dodgy Dossier,’ as first coined by Spiked Magazine, and later made mainstream when Channel 4 stuck it on the telly, is the commonly accepted shorthand for the ever so snappily titled Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation; a report that was published by the UK government on the 3rd of February 2003.

Its purpose couldn’t have been more serious too, as it was published with the intention of bolstering the case for military action against Iraq, by outlining the countries supposed attempts to continue developing WMDs on the downlow, in spite of the UN led disarmament effort after the Gulf War.

Now, let me ask you something folks, if, say, you were working as an aide-de-camp under Tony Blair, or someone senior in his government, and were tasked with the indescribably important job of producing a document that was meant to make a whole country do an immediate 180, and turn an otherwise pacifistically inclined populace into a bunch of sabre rattlers ready and eager to go over to Iraq and give Old Saddam a right and proper shoeing, would you a), REALLY take your time on it to get it right; double and triple checking every source, fact, and figure you included so that it was absolutely watertight, and thus impervious to scrutiny, or, would you b), wing it, copy and paste a load of whatever b*llocks in there, and just assume that none of the public, or the DOZENS of journalists you personally handed a copy to would, you know, check it, and instead just blindly believe it.

Well, if you chose a), you should consider a career in politics let me tell you, because already, you have displayed far more competence than that actual political minion who compiled the real document, because, for some God only known reason, they chose b), and as a result, Our Tone ended up looking like a bit of a tit – to put it mildly.

It was almost comically sh*t in fact, because despite claiming in its opening paragraph that it “drew upon a number of sources, including intelligence material,” it was, in fact, largely copy and pasted from an article written by a graduate student by the name Ibrahim al-Marashi titled Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis. And when I say copy and pasted, that isn’t me being hyperbolic, I mean it was LITERALLY copy and pasted, as it repeated al-Marashi’s typographical errors verbatim.

They did manage to put their own spin on al-Marashi’s words here and there however, and weirdly, would you believe, said changes always just so happened to MASSIVELY overhype the information that was originally being presented – weird that! For example, “monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq” in the original article became “spying on foreign embassies in Iraq” in the Dodgy Dossier, and if you want another example, cop a butchers of this: “aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes” was changed to “supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes.”

See what I mean about it being almost comically sh*t? This was a document put out to legitimise starting a war that would go on to cause, according to some sources anyway, over a MILLION deaths, and it was done with all the care of a High School essay that had been left to the last minute.

As for who the minions were who actually put it together, that would be the ‘Coalition Information Centre.’ This was a unit that had been set up in 2001, and TECHNICALLY was part of the Foreign Office, but in reality, it answered to one man and one man alone: Alastair Campbell, a man who was neither a Minister, nor even an MP, and yet still held a prime position atop Tony Blair’s lap; for he was his Press Spokesman, Speechwriter, and Chief Strategist. He’d be remembered as a propagandist if he had a Soviet birth certificate, in my opinion, but since he was one of ours, he earned himself a much cuddlier and fluffier moniker to describe his many rolls in one fell swoop: ‘Spin Doctor.’

And although it was published without an ‘author’s’ name being attached to it, we also know EXACTLY who from the Centre was responsible for compiling the Dodgy Dossier, and that’d be a fella by the name of Paul Hamill, who, rather aptly, had the official title of ‘Head of Story Department.’

When it was first released, Blair was absolutely chuffed with the Dodgy Dossier, with him even going so far as to publicly praise it alongside US Secretary of State Colin Powell. But then, would you believe it, the second a journalist took the whole of 5 seconds to Google the contents, and thus uncover its origin, he backtracked immediately. Not that he admitted to lying and misrepresenting the truth however, oh no no, he simply released a statement stating that it was a “mistake” to not credit the author, and never mentioned the whole “making sh*t up because I want a war and won’t take no for an answer” business ever again.

Unfortunately for Tony however folks, he was basically the only person who never mentioned it, because when all of this came out, would you believe it, the public were FURIOUS.

And it gets worse too, because the Dodgy Dossier was actually the SECOND nonsense document that the Blair administration had released to justify going to war with Iraq, as there was also Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, which was published in September 2002.

This one wasn’t quite as ineptly put together at least, but it was still an absolute shocking example of data collection, analysis, and presentation, as a shocking number of its claims went totally uncited. Initially, this was dismissed by saying that citations had been omitted to protect the sources, but, well, put it this well, after the Dodgy Dossier came out five months later, and as the absolute unmitigated clusterf*ck that was the Iraq War started to play out – you’d struggle to find many people willing to give the Government the benefit of the doubt on the matter.

Worse than just that, however, was the fact that two of its lynchpin claims were MAJORLY challenged – with many trustworthy and wrinkle brained sorts concluding that they were little but hokum.

The first of these was that Iraq was attempting to procure large quantities of uranium from Niger; a claim so large and consequential – that George Bush even referenced it in his 2003 State of the Union address while attempting to get the American public fired up and chomping at the bit for a lovely little bit of war.

Come March 2003, the documents supposedly used as the basis of this claim had made their way to the International Atomic Energy Agency… and they quickly concluded that they were sloppy and obvious fakes. They then went on to announce this publicly, doing so in a report to the United Nations Security Council on the 7th of that month.

Needless to say, this left Blair and his Government looking rather foolish, but it didn’t stop the sabre rattling, and instead, blags and moves were simply made to try to explain it away.

As for the second claim that was contested as being (allegedly) nonsense, that would be the so called ‘45 Minute Claim’ – which stated that Iraq was able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so. Although, it has to be said that the report, which I (sadly) took upon myself to read all 55 pages of, is REMARKABLY scant on specifics when it comes to exactly how this would be achieved, with it simply saying, quote:

”… intelligence indicates that as part of Iraq’s military planning Saddam is willing to use chemical and biological weapons, including against his own Shia population. Intelligence indicates that the Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so.

Now, I know what you’re all saying now folks: “George, this is all mighty interesting to be sure, but we’re nearly 14 hundred words into this chapter, and have yet to have even a single mention of the Good Doctor yet – what the f*ck are you doing?”

And to you fine and learned folks I say don’t worrrrrrry, we’re getting there, as not only is this vital wider context to Dr Kelly’s story, but he also comes storming straight into the proceedings VERY soon, because given what we know about him, do you suspect he might have had a thing or two to say about the cavalcade of absolute horse sh*t that was (allegedly) being trotted out about his expert field? You can be your bottom dollar he did!

Come the time that all of these claims were being made, Dr Kelly had been in and out Iraq for over 10 years, firstly as part of the United Nations Special Commission, and from 2000, as part of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, and in both capacities he was getting up to exactly what I said in the last chapter: finding Iraqi WMD caches and manufacturing facilities, documenting them, and ultimately, overseeing their destruction.

And given everything that he had seen, the words of both dossiers came as quite a shock to him. Sure, Saddam’s goons hadn’t exactly laid out the red carpet for him, frequently putting unnecessarily difficult hurdles in his way, and even formally barring him from the country between 1998 and 1999, but overall, they had begrudgingly played ball, seemingly anyway, a fact that he could attest to thanks to the sheer quantity of bioweapons that Dr Kelly had seen be destroyed with his own eyes.

But that’s not to say however, and I need to REALLY stress this point, because a lot of discussions about Dr Kelly completely get this wrong, that he DIDN’T think Iraq might be up to a little something something naughty on the side while trying to appear as though they were doing what was expected of them – because he absolutely was open to that possibility.

It’d be weird for him NOT to think that given the hurdles and obstructions from the Iraqi Government I just mentioned after all, and even further still, there was the fact that Saddam never came out and fully admitted to the extent of his WMD operations, hence Dr Kelly having to find many of the facilities and caches himself. He even put some hard figures down while pontificating on the matter, and highlighted some stocks he thought MIGHT still be out there, specifically:

• 8,500 litres of VX Nerve Agent.
• 2,160kg of bacterial growth media.
• 360 tonnes of bulk chemical warfare agent.
• 6,500 chemical bombs.
• And: 30,000 munitions capable of delivering bioweapons.

At the end of the day, he was just a man interested in the facts of the matter, which, as far as he could see them, simply were not being accurately portrayed by anyone at that time.

With that in mind, Kelly did the only thing he could do to try and set the record straight: speak to journalists about the reality as he saw it – off the record of course.

The first such conversation that we know about occurred in February 2003, after Colin Powell made an address to the United Nations Security Council in which he discussed supposed ‘mobile weapons laboratories,’ i.e., trucks and trains fitted with all the gubbins that one needed to make bioweapons, so that they could be scooted around the country as and when needed, always staying away from the ever watchful eyes of people like Dr Kelly. Powell also, quite eyebrow raisingly it has to be said, claimed that these mobile labs could produce the same quantity of bioweapons in a few months, as Iraq had possessed IN TOTAL prior to the Gulf War. I’m no bio engineer folks, but given the difference in scale between a giant dedicated lab, and a little thing bolted to the back of a train car… I’m nothing if not sceptical over the claim.

As for what Dr Kelly had to say on the matter, that would be this, which he said to Peter Beaumont from The Observer, quote:

They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were—facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.

Following this, word of Kelly’s expertise and willingness to speak to the press soon began to travel in the journalistic circle, and so more and more began approaching him for comment on a plethora of Iraqi WMD matters, with notable examples being Susan Watts, the science editor of the BBC’s Newsnight show. He shared a 20(ish) minute phone conversation with her, during which many things were discussed, including the now infamous ‘45 minute claim,’ in regards to which, Watts’ notes of the conversation say the following, quote:

”… a mistake to put in. Alastair Campbell seeing something in there, single source but not corroborated, sounded good.

But there was one journalist in particular who Dr Kelly would speak with that would REALLY cause some waves, and rustle many jimmies Westminster over, and that would be Andrew Gilligan, who back in those days was serving as the Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent for BBC Radio 4’s Today show.

The pair met up in person several times once the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, as, after all, the never ending clusterf*ck that was that conflict created no shortages of points to go over, but it would be their third meeting that would go on to be the REALLY significant one, for in it they would discuss the VERY controversial dossiers we went over earlier in the chapter.

We don’t know exactly what was said, but we do have the notes that Gilligan made, and they read as follows, quote:

Transformed week before publication to make it sexier. The classic was the 45 minutes. Most things in dossier were double source but that was single source. One source said it took 4 [that should be 45] minutes to set up a missile assembly, that was misinterpreted.

Most people in intelligence weren’t happy with it because it didn’t reflect the considered view they were putting forward. Campbell: real information but unreliable, included against our wishes. Not in original draft - dull, he asked if anything else could go in.

Gilligan also claimed to have drafted a full script not long after the meeting ended, based upon the aforementioned notes, and details that he remembered while things were still fresh in his mind, but that script was never published, and nor has it ever surfaced – with Gilligan claiming it had long since been lost by the time the interview became a news story in and of itself.

Come the 29th of May however, he was ready to do SOMETHING with his notes, and boy, was it going to have some fallout.

It began with him personally going onto the Today Show a little after 6am, where he announced that he was going to be discussing something most big later on in the show by saying the following, quote:

”… what we’ve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier was that, actually the government probably erm, knew that that forty five minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in. What this person says, is that a week before the publication date of the dossier, it was actually rather erm, a bland production. It didn’t, the, the draft prepared for Mr Blair by the Intelligence Agencies actually didn’t say very much more than was public knowledge already and erm, Downing Street, our source says, ordered a week before publication, ordered it to be sexed up, to be made more exciting and ordered more facts to be er, to be discovered.

Immediately, all underpants in Westminster turned a healthy shade of brown, explosively so in fact. If you’re wondering exactly why; you know how I’ve been implying that the Iraq War was RATHER unpopular in the UK – well, such soft language doesn’t actually do the true scale of the unpopularity justice. In reality, we’re talking more a single rally in London on the 15th of February attracting between 750,000 and 1.5 MILLION people unpopular, which, incidentally, is also THE biggest protest ever to take place on British soil – roughly equivalent to 20% of the capitals then population, or 2.5% of the WHOLE country’s population taking part if we use the larger estimate.

Unpopularity like that is the stuff of nightmares for a democratic government, and as a result of the Iraq War alone, it was now perfectly conceivable that Tony Blair and his whole New Labour movement could be heading for electoral oblivion the likes of which had never been seen on British soil before, with the big man himself earning a reviled place in the history books as one of the single worst leaders ever to grasp the British reigns of power; right up there with the likes of Richard III and Oliver Cromwell.

As for the Gilligan’s ACTUAL report later on in the show, it was essentially just a more hurdy-wordy version of his initial teaser statement, so we won’t stress too much about what he said specifically, but we will pick out a couple of details of note from among it all.

For starters, did anything strike you as peculiar about how he described Dr Kelly, specifically, as “one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier”? That’s just not correct, is it? We already know full well who drew it up, and it certainly wasn’t Dr Kelly; and yet, he’d just been, albeit anonymously, labelled as such in front of MILLIONS of listeners.

What also didn’t help things along was the fact that Gilligan, for some reason, rather than making sure to pick his words VERY carefully, as a journalist should obviously do when breaking such a sensitive story, instead went waaaaaaaaaay off script, resulting in a tirade that, frankly, had little resemblance to reality as Dr Kelly had described it; outright describing the 45 minute claim as being artificially and intentionally inserted into the dossier in order to manipulate a false perception of reality, rather than being the opinion of a single source that wasn’t doubly cited as per others, and that MAY have been intentionally inserted knowing it stood upon weaker foundations, but equally likely could have simply slipped under through the editorial net thanks to rose tinted enthusiasm for sabre rattling. It’s a small difference, sure, but a VERY important one when breaking a story like this.

The Government’s initial response came at 7:32am, not even two hours after Gilligan’s first remarks – the swiftness of which alone shows just how seriously they were taking it. As for what they said, they flatly denied the allegations, saying that, quote:

Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies”.

And while, in my opinion only of course, the double negative word soup that is that quote screams of Campbell-ian Newspeak, the quality of the quote, and the government’s denial, is ultimately neither here nor there for our discussion today.

What IS of interest to us, however, is the fact that Gilligan, after having had some time to think on the matter, not only chose to stick to his line, but also escalated the situation EVEN further, as in a subsequent article for the Mail on Sunday titled “I asked my intelligence source why Blair misled us all over Saddam’s weapons. His reply? One word … CAMPBELL.” He outright called Alastair Campbell out as a knowing and intentional liar – and Dr Kelly was his supposed source for it.

As for what Dr Kelly was doing during all of this, he hadn’t even realised at first that he was Gilligan’s supposed source, partly due to the description of him being “in charge of drawing up that dossier,” but also because the situation presented was so different to the one he had dictated; and can you blame him? Afterall, all he had said that was that Campbell had “asked if anything else could go in” because the information as presented was “dull” – absolutely nothing about lying or intentionally overexaggerating claims. Worst case, all Campbell could be accused of from Dr Kelly’s musings was that he had a particular line he wanted to sell, and by using truthful information, wanted to see it sold in as exciting a manner as possible.

Eventually however, Dr Kelly began to suspect that he was in fact Gilligan’s supposed source, specifically after he had appeared before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the 19th June, and gave a recounting of a meeting with his source that sounded remarkably reminiscent of their March meeting, still however, Dr Kelly was convinced that their HAD to be more to the situation, and another source involved somehow; after all, the information as described was so unlike that which he had provided, it COULDN’T be him Gilligan was referencing – right?

Just to be safe however, when he started to have these suspicions, Dr Kelly did what he believed was the right thing, and told his employer, penning a detailed letter to them on the 30th of June, in which he laid out in full nitty gritty detail all of his interactions with Gilligan. And if you want to know what he said, I’ll spare you a giant extract, and instead sum it up for you with just the following line, quote:

The description of that meeting in small part matches my interaction with him especially my personal evaluation of Iraq’s capability but the overall character is quite different

This resulted in two meetings between Dr Kelly and his bosses on the 3rd and 7th of July to get to the bottom of the matter, and, to be fair to them, they were actually remarkably understanding and open minded about the whole affair, eventually deciding that there was a indeed every likelihood that Dr Kelly was the source that Gilligan couldn’t shut up about, but that even despite that, no action was to be taken against him, because, ultimately, he had approached the journalist in good faith, and hadn’t actually lied about anything, or pushed any kind of agenda. They did, however, make sure to tell Dr Kelly to prepare for his name to come out in the media, as ultimately, while they wouldn’t be running off to spill the beans, the matter of containing the situation was totally out of their hands now… and that warning was nothing if not prescient.

But as for how that happened, that ended up being a peculiar game of cat and mouse. Dr Kelly’s bosses had been true to their word and not told the media, but had told their superiors as per their professional obligations, so soon enough, Number 10 and everyone working within it were fully aware that Dr Kelly was the insider that Gilligan had been constantly referring to for the last few months, and equally, so too was much the media well aware, because it turns out that journalists just LOVE to gossip, and so Dr Kelly’s name soon enough jumped from water cooler to water cooler, until a choice number of them were fully aware of who he was.

But which camp would be the first to break the news? Was fate to have Dr Kelly’s name enter the public consciousness via a frontpage headline, or via a Downing Street press release?

Well, No.10 took a peculiar approach, as while they didn’t outright release the information to the press, they did, via the Ministry of Defence, announce that they MAY confirm it should the media guess it correctly.

Now, this is all just my opinion of course folks, which, in full disclosure, may be somewhat tainted by the fact that I don’t EXACTLY hold Tony Blair’s administration in the highest of regards (just in case you somehow hadn’t twigged that yet), but what I think happened was that the Government was DESPERATE to release Dr Kelly’s name, for no other reason than the fact they were consumed with pure and blinding rage at the fact that they were losing control of the Iraq War narrative, and thus, wanted to lash out at anyone and everyone who had come into their crosshairs as a speed bump on the road to regime change in Iraq.

But, while saying that, they were still rational enough to know that an all singing and dancing neon illuminated arrow pointing squarely at Dr Kelly wouldn’t exactly make for good optics. So, instead, they opted for a route that allowed them to claim plausible deniability when his name inevitably came out.

That’s just my opinion however, f*ck knows what the reality of the matter was.

Eventually, as per that self-imposed rule, the Ministry of Defence, and later Downing Street, would formally confirm Dr Kelly’s identity, specifically on the 9th of July.

Now, I’M not going to say that the Government was proactively nudging the still in the dark members of the media towards guessing Dr Kelly’s identity in the hopes of being able to release it, but I will tell you that someone else implied it very heavily, specifically David Charter, who was serving as The Times’ Chief Political Correspondent back in 2003, and he said it by saying the following in an article titled “Timeline: how David Kelly was named,” quote:

1530: Tom Kelly, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman, gives lobby journalists extra details about the official’s identity. 1600-1900: Using the extra details, newspaper journalists come up with names and Pam Teare, MoD head of news, confirms Dr Kelly’s name.

As for what Dr Kelly himself was doing during this time, he received a visit at his home from Nick Rufford, a journalist from The Sunday Times, and friend, whom he had known for five years, on the 8th of July, and SOMEHOW, despite the fact that strictly speaking, his name had been neither guessed nor confirmed yet, Rufford was quite adamant that Dr Kelly’s name was going to be published the following day, and that he and his wife should make themselves scarce before a pack of ravenous headline hungry vultures descended on his home to pick him apart. No sooner had he heeded this warning, than he received a call from the Ministry of Defence that carried both the exact same warning, and recommended course of action.

They were out the house in 15 minutes of Rufford’s initial warning, bound for Cornwall. He managed to find a total of three days of peace and escapism from the ever worsening political storm he sat at the eye of, before he was informed that he was being summoned to appear before the Intelligence and Security and Foreign Affairs select committees; select committees, for those not in the know, being a small group of parliamentarians appointed to investigate, scrutinize, and report on specific areas of government policy.

He appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee on the 15th of July, and spoke for a little over an hour, with his words being careful and considered, but also clearly anxious ones – as he spoke so quietly that the rooms air conditioning had to be shut off so that he could actually be heard. And just to add to his indignity even further, the whole spectacle was also televised, clips of which video viewers will hopefully be able to see on the screen now.

I’ll spare you extensive quotes of what was said, as we’re already well aware of most it; it was mostly just Dr Kelly standing his ground and affirming that he had NOT made said what Gilligan had claimed he had. Something that is worth paying heed to however, is his questioning regarding his interactions with Susan Watts, as he was asked if her quotes had come from their only face to face meeting in November 2002, to which he truthfully respond that “I cannot believe that on that occasion I made that statement” – as her comments had actually come from a phone discussion that had occurred only a couple of months earlier.

As for what he thought of being dragged before the committee, I believe that is best surmised by what he said of Andrew MacKinlay, the MP who put the bulk of the questions to him, as to his daughter, Kelly described him as a, quote:

Utter B*stard.

He then appeared the following day before the Intelligence and Security Committee. There he appeared much more composed and relaxed, and noticeably, towed the government line on things, as, for example, when asked to give his opinion on the quality of the September dossier, he said that, it was, quote:

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.

And with that done, Dr Kelly headed back home… for the last time…

Chapter 3: The Death

Dr Kelly’s lifeless remains were found amidst the bracken of Harrowdown Hill, a small outcrop that stood barely one mile from his home in Southmoor, Oxfordshire, at 9:20am on the 18th of July – two days after he had spoken before the Intelligence and Security Committee.

The alarm had first been sounded at 11:40pm the night before, when Dr Kelly had failed to return from a walk he had embarked upon at a little after 3pm. This itself followed a period of extensive searching by Dr Kelly’s family, as his youngest daughter had taken it upon herself to investigate herself at 6pm, beginning with checking out all of his usual walking routes on foot, and eventually taking to her car to search a wider area no later than 6:30pm, and she was eventually joined by Dr Kelly’s eldest daughter and wife.

When the police were eventually called however, they wasted no time in attending the scene, as three officers arrived within 15 minutes, and immediately conducted an initial search of Dr Kelly’s home and garden. Finding no sign of him, they called in for support and began fanning out; eventually being joined by a search and rescue helicopter, one that was decked out with the latest and greatest thermal imaging equipment, around 1am.

This would then be supplemented by volunteer search times as time went on, as the modest resources the police had on the books simply proved incapable of searching the vast countryside that surrounded Southmoor at anything like an agreeable pace – and it would be one of those that would eventually find him.

Notably, however, accounts of the position in which he was found differ person to person, with the two that actually discovered him claiming that he was both “at the base of the tree with almost his head and his shoulders just slumped back against the tree” and “sitting with his back up against a tree.” There is no clarity to be found in the opinions of the professionals who attended the scene either, as one of the first officers to do so claimed that he was “was laying on its back—the body was laying on its back by a large tree, the head towards the trunk of the tree,” and the pathologist who was called to conduct a thorough examination of the scene, a man Nicholas Hunt, who we will be meeting again in the coming chapters, reporting that “his head was quite close to branches and so forth, but not actually over the tree.”

But just how did he die? THAT, is the burning question; and, what would you know, his death turned out to be such a big deal, that the Government dedicated a whole inquiry to getting to the bottom of the matter – so let’s bring this chapter to a close, move on, and have a look at the facts as they saw them.

Chapter 4: The Official Narrative

We have a LOT of Public Inquiries in the UK, which is to say official reviews or investigations conducted by a government-appointed panel to examine specific events, issues, or incidents of significant public concern – the specific one of interest to us however is the Hutton Inquiry, which, because we’re REALLY inventive when it comes to naming stuff, took its name from the fella who led it. Incidentally, he also had the most unfortunate tongue twister of a name and title combination ever recorded in human history, that being Brian Hutton, Baron Hutton.

He got the job because he was then serving as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, which, translated from Downtown Abbey English into actual English, just meant he was one of the most up there judges in the land.

The enquiry ran from August 2003 through to January 2004 and surmised its findings in the 337-page Hutton Report, which, because I hate myself, I have read all of.

As for what it ended up concluding, here it is straight from the horse’s mouth, quote:

In the light of the evidence which I have heard I am satisfied that Dr Kelly took his own life in the wood at Harrowdown Hill at a time between 4.15pm on 17 July and 1.15am on 18 July 2003 and that the principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds to the left wrist which Dr Kelly inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body. It is probable that the ingestion of an excess amount of Coproxamol tablets coupled with apparently clinically silent coronary artery disease would both have played a part in bringing about death more certainly and more rapidly than would have otherwise been the case. Accordingly the causes of death are: 1a Haemorrhage 1b Incised wounds to the left wrist 2 Coproxamol ingestion and coronary artery atherosclerosis.

Keen to just not have us take its word for it however, the report also outlines the evidence that was used to reach that conclusion. For example, on the matter of the wrist wound, it says the following, quote:

The orientation and arrangement of the wounds over the left wrist are typical of self-inflicted injury. Also typical of this was the presence of small so-called tentative or hesitation marks. The fact that his watch appeared to have been removed deliberately in order to facilitate access to the wrist. The removal of the watch in that way and indeed the removal of the spectacles are features pointing towards this being an act of self-harm

It also gives information on the knife used to do it, quote:

Lying next to that was a pruning knife or gardener’s knife… The make was a Sandvig knife. It was one with a little hook or lip towards the tip of the blade. It is a fairly standard gardeners’ type knife. There were bloodstains on that knife, over both the handle and the blade.

It also definitively links it to Dr Kelly, quote:

The knife found beside the body was a knife which Dr Kelly had owned since boyhood and which he kept in a desk in his study, but which was found to be missing from his desk after his death.

Similarly, the report also similarly fleshes out its explanation of Dr Kelly’s… ‘excessive taking’ of Coproxamol, for example, quote:

He was wearing a green Barbour type wax jacket and the zip and the buttons at the front had been undone. Within the bellows pocket on the lower part of the jacket there was a mobile telephone and a pair of bi-focal spectacles. There was a key fob and, perhaps more significantly, a total of three blister packs of a drug called Coproxamol. Each of those packs would originally have contained 10 tablets, a total of 30 potentially available. And how many tablets were left in those packs? There was one left.

From there, it then goes on to evidence that he had ACTUALLY taken them by saying the following, quote:

His face appeared, firstly, rather pale but there was also what looked like vomit running from the right corner of the mouth and also from the left corner of the mouth and streaking the face… It suggested that he had tried to vomit whilst he was lying on his back and it had trickled down. … Given the finding of blister packs of Coproxamol tablets within the coat pocket and the vomitus around the ground, it is an entirely reasonable supposition that he may have consumed a quantity of these tablets either on the way to or at the scene itself.

That just leaves the heart condition as the final contributor to Dr Kelly’s death, in regard to which it says the following, quote:

It was noted that he has a significant degree of coronary artery disease and this may have played some small part in the rapidity of death but not the major part in the cause of death.

As for who was to blame for it all, the report wastes no time in making its opinions on the matter perfectly clear, saying the following in Chapter 1, quote:

I also consider it to be important to state … that … none of those persons was at fault in not contemplating that Dr Kelly might take his own life. Whatever pressures and strains Dr Kelly was subjected to by the decisions and actions taken in the weeks before his death, I am satisfied that no one realised or should have realised that those pressures and strains might drive him to take his own life or contribute to his decision to do so.

In other words, no one was to blame besides Dr Kelly himself as far as the report believes. Despite that however, the report does not try to pretend as though he was not subjected to the most stressing of pressures from various government agencies, as, for example, it says the following about the Ministry of Defence in Chapter 9, quote:

I consider that once the decision had been taken on 8 July to issue the statement, the MoD was at fault and is to be criticised for not informing Dr Kelly that its press office would confirm his name if a journalist suggested it… it must have been a great shock and very upsetting for him.

Also called out is Downing Street, as again in Chapter 9, the following is said, quote:

Did the Government behave in a way which was dishonourable or underhand or duplicitous in revealing Dr Kelly’s name to the media(?)… I conclude that the Government did not behave in a way which was dishonourable or underhand or duplicitous in revealing Dr Kelly’s name to the media. … the Government was (also) at fault in not having set up a procedure whereby Dr Kelly would be informed immediately his name had been confirmed to the press… However, I do not find that this fault contributed directly to Dr Kelly’s death.

And then, that’s pretty much it; Dr Kelly was overcome with stress as a result of his unwanted place in the media spot light, and while overcome by that stress, deemed that the only path to finding peace lay in removing himself from our mortal plane; an end which he brought about primarily via a knife, and secondarily with an ungodly large dosage of Coproxamol – with the whole process receiving a helping nudge along from a latent heart condition.

And at face value then, we have no reason to doubt the Hutton Report do we, folks? I mean after all, he was found with a knife wound, besides a knife that was provably his no less, and not only was he found with a sufficiently large amount of Coproxamol blisters, but he also had vomit stains on his beard to match. So, what’s the problem?

Well, all I can say in answer to that folks, is strap in, because in the next chapter we are going to pick apart all the holes in that version of events, and it gets WILD.

Chapter 5: Something’s Not Right…

To say that the British media received Dr Kelly’s death rather badly would be quite the understatement, as in the days following his death, headlines such as the following were printed up and down the land:

“Time to pack your bags, Mr Campbell,” which was plastered on the front of the Wolverhampton Express and Star.

“Shaken Blair faces calls to quit over ‘spin’ (self-ending),” from the Sunday Independent.

And: “Blair must resign over Kelly death,” which was printed by the Shropshire Star.

But angry though these headlines were, they were ones penned very much in the immediate aftermath of his death, before the journalistic class had really had time to sit down and think events over, and the more time rolled ever on, and they did exactly that, some REALLY uncomfortable questions and notions started to appear on the front covers, questions like:

“Was Kelly Murdered?” From the London Evening Standard on the 27th of January 2004.

And: “Our doubts about Dr Kelly’s (self-ending),” from the Guardian on the same date.

Such headlines, while certainly not universal across all publications, or even all of the journalists from within the outlets that sent them to print, were indicative of a growing sentiment within the wider populace of the UK; that being that the official narrative of Kelly’s death was in fact complete hokum.

From both of those headlines, which I chose very specifically, we also see the range of opinions of the doubters. For example, on the softer end of things, we have the Guardian headline, which merely suggests that SOMETHING wasn’t right with the official story, and doesn’t explicitly ascribe it to foul play, and then, on the firmer side, we have the London Evening Standard headline, which while it doesn’t come outright and say “yeah, he was killed I reckon,” floats the notion that he was as something that should be properly explored and considered.

You may be surprised to hear too, that the Brits that were starting to entertain this notion in sufficient quantity as to make it a profitable angle for the papers to run with, weren’t all just tinfoil hat enjoyers hiding in the deepest darkest corners of the nascent World Wide Web. Make no mistake, those sorts absolutely did exist, but they were far from unique in their belief, because, actually, a lot of SERIOUS people came out and publicly questioned the official narrative.

There was, for example, Drs David Halpin, Stephen Frost, and Searle Sennett, who were all incredibly experienced medical professionals, specialising in trauma and orthopaedic surgery, diagnostic radiology, and anaesthesiology respectively. It had actually been them who had sparked that Guardian article, as they had penned a letter to the newspaper that read as follows, quote:

As specialist medical professionals, we do not consider the evidence given at the Hutton inquiry has demonstrated that Dr David Kelly committed (self-inflicted death). … We dispute that Dr Kelly could have died from haemorrhage or from Co-Proxamol ingestion or from both. The coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, has spoken recently of resuming the inquest into his death. If it re-opens, as in our opinion it should, a clear need exists to scrutinise more closely Dr Hunt’s conclusions as to the cause of death.

And they were just the tip of the spear, because as 2004 rolled on, evermore letters from legit medical big brains would find their way too, and subsequently be publish in, the Guardian, with other examples including “Questions over Kelly,” which was penned in December by a cohort that included Drs Chris Burns-Cox and John Scurr, both of them specialists in vascular surgery. It read as follows, quote:

Dr David Kelly is the first British citizen whose sudden, unexpected and violent death has been denied an inquest. Three weeks after Dr Kelly’s body was found, Lord Falconer ordered that the inquest into his death be adjourned indefinitely and subsumed into a public inquiry by invoking section 17a of the Coroner’s Act 1988. … The law requires a verdict of (self-ending) to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Why should Dr Kelly’s death receive less scrutiny than any other sudden, unexpected and violent death?

As things stand, (him doing it himself) has not been proved, and we still do not know how he died.

Come the close of 2004, 11 of these legit wrinkle brains had come together to form the Kelly Investigation Group, a loose formal association that lobbied for exactly what it said on its tin – a, as they saw it, PROPER investigation into the true fate of Dr Kelly. 10 of them were medical experts, with that surplus digit coming from someone most interesting: Dr Michael Powers QC, who had a particular expertise in all matter coronial.

After they founded the group, these 11 people and their insights were ALL that the media could talk about for a while, hence the second batch of more openly doubtful and suspicious articles I mentioned earlier on.

So, now that we’ve established that some REALLY qualified sorts endorsed the idea that all was not as it seemed with Dr Kelly’s death, let’s start diving into the REAL meat of this chapter; the actual evidence for such claims – beyond the little bit I’ve already mentioned in passing anyway anyway.

And to begin, let’s circle back to Halpin, Frost, and Sennett’s article from the Guardian, “Our doubts about Dr Kelly’s (self-ending).” In it, sandwiched in the middle of the extract we looked at earlier, is the following, quote:

”… the forensic pathologist at the Hutton inquiry concluded that Dr Kelly bled to death from a self-inflicted wound to his left wrist. We view this as highly improbable. Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness and severing them does not lead to life-threatening blood loss. Dr Hunt stated that the only artery that had been cut - the ulnar artery - had been completely transected. Complete transection causes the artery to quickly retract and close down, and this promotes clotting of the blood.

Straight away then, in their collective expert opinion anyway, Dr Kelly’s sole external wound was beyond unlikely to cause death… INTERESTING.

These claims are further supported by British Government statistics, which say that death through such methods is rare indeed. Exactly how rare, you ask? Well, according to Karen Dunnell, the former Head of the Government Statistical Service, a grand total of six people died from injury to the ulnar artery between 1997 and 2004. Simon didn’t miss speak there either; not 600, not 60 – SIX.

And those six weren’t even all… ‘intentional’ either, with the number being made up of three… ‘intentional’ acts, two accidents, and one in which intent couldn’t be determined.

Further still, while the notion is tragically prolific, I would argue largely thanks to the media, successfully… ‘self-ending’ via cutting is actually a remarkably rare way to successfully do such things. For example, in 2003 alone, there were 4,659 instances of… ‘that,’ including “injuries of undetermined intent,” and of that number, a whole 126 of them were done… ‘with sharp things just off the hand.’

We can also consider a 1998 report penned by Geoffry McKee titled Lethal versus Nonlethal(… ‘Attempts’) in Jail – and do note, I have altered the title because it contains THAT word that YouTube REALLY don’t like.

In it, McKee analysed… ‘self-ending’ attempts from all jails in South Carolina between the years 1985 and 1994, and discovered that, exactly in line with what we saw from the British Government statistics, the way that Dr Kelly supposedly did it was, again, both rare and VERY unsuccessful, with 28.7% of the attempts being with that method, and from the 275 attempts that were successful overall, only one of them was done that way.

With all of that then we have the first arrow in our argumentative quiver: that Dr Kelly supposedly died from a wound that is not only unlikely to be inflicted on oneself in the first place, but that is even less likely to be fatal when it is.

But that in and of itself would be a pretty sh*t argument, as, after all, something being highly improbable or beyond unlikely does not mean that it is not possible period, and so the chance would always persist that he simply succumbed to statistical improbability at the worst possible time for the Government. We need MORE if we are to really progress our speculation, and what would you know – we still have plenty of other evidence to consider.

For example, there is also the matter of his blood loss, or rather, a lack thereof. Halpin, Frost, and Sennett sum this up nicely for us in the letter that they penned to the Guardian, quote:

The ambulance team reported that the quantity of blood at the scene was minimal and surprisingly small. It is extremely difficult to lose significant amounts of blood at a pressure below 50-60 systolic in a subject who is compensating by vasoconstricting. To have died from haemorrhage, Dr Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood - it is unlikely that he would have lost more than a pint.

But while they were just making (informed) guesstimates when they posited that claim, as they hadn’t actually seen the scene of his death, we don’t have too, because the responding paramedics have actually come out to speak about the scene that they were met with over the years, and yeah, he definitely didn’t lose five pints that’s for sure.

As for what they did see, here it is straight from the mouth Vanessa Hunt, one of the aforementioned paramedics, taken from an interview she gave to The Observer in December 2004, quote:

There wasn’t a puddle of blood around … There was a little bit of blood on the nettles to the left of his left arm. But there was no real blood on the body or the shirt. The only other bit of blood I saw was on his clothing. It was the size of a 50p piece above the right knee on his trousers… When somebody cuts an artery, whether accidentally or intentionally, the blood pumps everywhere.

I just think it is incredibly unlikely that he died from the wrist wound we saw. … I (also) didn’t see any blood on his right hand.

And just in case you suspect Ms Hunt might be misremembering the situation, which no doubt was incredibly stressful for her, her testimony was corroborated by Dave Bartlett, the other paramedic, who also attended that interview, and again, reported no blood stains on Dr Kelly’s clothes save for a small one-inch stain over his right knee… doesn’t exactly sound like five pints worth does it?

The whole ‘quantity of blood not being right thing’ was also backed up by Dr Bill McQuillan, a retired consultant at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary, who headed a clinic on peripheral nerve injury for over 20 years. He said the following when speaking to the Daily Express on the matter, quote:

Arterial bleeding is quite dramatic. In surgery, you have to divide small arteries from time to time, and blood sprays out like a kid’s water pistol. What you see is a pump action with each beat of the heart and I have known it hit the ceiling. If the bleeding was as small as alleged, that is astonishing.

The blood situation gets weirder still however, because Roy Green, a forensic biologist who testified at the Hutton Inquiry and DIDN’T doubt the official narrative, suggested that Dr Kelly might have suffered what he dubbed as “arterial rain,” i.e. blood escaping the body so quickly that it just shoots off and lands amidst the surrounding environment, thus not leaving too great a stain on the clothing.

There is a glaring problem with this idea, however: where was the blood then? Because while the police did record some stains around Dr Kelly’s remains, and notably failed to give us any indications on exactly how much that was, Vanessa Hunt SPECIFICALLY said that there were no signs of “spray” or “pumps everywhere.”

So you can get you head around what the scene SHOULD have looked like, allow me to once again give you the words of Ms Hunt, because she spoke on the matter during her and Dave’s interview with the observer. Specifically, after noting that she had attended dozens of… ‘self-ending’ attempts over the years, she went on to say the following, quote:

That was like a slaughterhouse. Just think what it would be like with five or six pints of milk splashed everywhere.

So, not only did he have an injury that one wouldn’t normally expect to go squirty, even if he had, by some accursed miracle, managed to wound himself in a manner that would bring about such a bodily response, it appears that there just wasn’t the blood about to suggest that that had happened… INTERESTING.

What certainly doesn’t help to clear the situation up, at all, is the testimony of Nicholas Hunt, the Inquiries go-to pathologist, as he testified that he believed that the injuries to Dr Kelly’s wrist had been inflicted mere minutes before his death; specifically citing what he dubbed a “well-developed vital reaction” – i.e. the bodies response to physical damage, which in Dr Kelly’s instance would be reddening and swelling all around the injured wrist.

The issue there is with the word minutes; don’t forget, we know from Halpin, Frost, and Sennett that the fatal amount of blood to lose is give or take five pints… in a few minutes… from a small wound to the ulnar artery. That’s a LOT of blood leaving via a small wound in not a lot of time…

But don’t worry, this isn’t just a repeat of the ‘where is the blood’ argument, instead, to fully understand why this claim is problematic, we must turn to Halpin, because when later speaking with a researcher on the matter of this claim, he said that even if you were to severe the most effective artery in the body, i.e. the one that will allow the greatest quantity of blood to escape in the fastest amount of time, which, incidentally, is around the groin, it would still take over 30 minutes to die, and Hunt was suggesting that Dr Kelly died in mere minutes?

Halpin wasn’t having it. He flatly believed Hunt’s claim was a big old load of b*llocks and went straight for the proverbial jugular with his rebuttal, saying that, quote:

Surgeons know rather more about arteries than pathologists do.

A scathing comment indeed from Halpin, although I can’t help be a bit disappointed that he didn’t go for the obvious jab of rhyming Hunt’s name with a certain other word.

The implications of this are quite ominous then, because, using the logic presented by the nay-sayers, either Dr Kelly didn’t lose that much blood, which would be consistent with his cut to the ulnar artery, and thus must have died by another means, or, he DID lose the amount of blood… somewhere else, with his body later being moved to where it was found.

Either way, the implication remains the same – another party was involved.

Oh, and another little thing to tell you about the knife. It didn’t have his fingerprints on, I repeat, did NOT have his fingerprints on. And if you’ve leapt to the logical assumption of assuming that Dr Kelly must have been wearing gloves when he supposedly did… ‘the act,’ such assumptions, while certainly understandable, are ultimately incorrect, because not only were Dr Kelly’s remains not wearing gloves, but NONE were recovered from the scene, at all.

And speaking of things that didn’t have fingerprints on, let’s move on to talk about the 29 co-proxamol tablets he supposedly took, because, yep, you’ve guessed it, the blister packs that were once a-briming with tablets, didn’t have a single trace of his fingerprints on them either.

But there’s more peculiarities to take note of when it comes to the tablets, and to begin explaining it properly, let me turn, once again, with the words of Halpin, Frost, and Sennett, because in their letter to the Guardian they said the following, quote:

”… (They) could not show that Dr Kelly had ingested the 29 tablets said to be missing from the packets found. Only a fifth of one tablet was found in his stomach. Although levels of Co-Proxamol in the blood were higher than therapeutic levels … the blood level of each of the drug’s two components was less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose.

Interesting claims indeed, because as per the Hutton Inquiry, if you recall, what is MEANT to have happened is that Dr Kelly took thee blister packs of co-proxamol from his home, inside of each was 10 tablets, with active ingredients of 325 milligrams of paracetamol and 32.5 milligrams of dextropropoxyphene incidentally, and then taken up to 29 of them before he did what he did with the knife, as that is how many blisters had been opened and ‘popped,’ as it were.

At face value, this seems above board, because the police uncovered that the tablets found on Dr Kelly’s body came from the same batch as the ones that his wife had at home for treating her arthritis; although – it does have to be said that 1.6 MILLION boxes were produced as part of this batch, so the claim that he took them from home is arguably built on shaky grounds nonetheless.

Where things start to get peculiar however, is with the fact that empty blister packs were found in Dr Kelly’s jacket pocket… having been neatly put back into their box. While certainly handy for drawing up quick and expedient “yeah he probably took these didn’t he, thanks for leaving one we can chemically test at the lab Doc,” type conclusions, isn’t it weird that he’d go to such lengths to be neat and tidy given… ‘what he was about to supposedly do?’

Of course, there is a myriad of reasons why this could be the case. He could have simply been habitually neat and tidy, and so even with the gravity of his intentions, muscle memory and/or a base level sense of dignity made him neatly return them to his pocket to give just one example, but, you have to admit, given the fact that his blood had less than a third of the lethal overdose level of co-proxamol in it… it certainly looks peculiar doesn’t it.

Then there’s the fact that his stomach only contained the equivalent of 20% of a tablet in it during his autopsy… even considering the fact that some of the tablets will have been digested and metabolised… this just isn’t adding up; I mean – 28 and a half tablets gone from his stomach in the half an hour it would have taken him to bleed out according to Halpin? Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

To be fair though, as we mentioned in the last chapter, some vomit stains were indeed noted as being around his face when he was discovered… IF ONLY THE POLICE HAD THOUGHT TO TEST THIS VOMIT AND NOT JUST NOTE IT, WIPE IT OFF, AND THEN NEVER QUESTION IT OR BRING IT UP EVER AGAIN.

And if that brief mention of their being some vomit has going you all breathing a big sigh of relief as you remove you tin foil hat, and say to yourself “Oh thank God there’s the answer, he must have just vomited it all out,” allow me to firmly ram it back on your head with the following bit of information: the fact that Alexander Allan, the Hutton Inquiry’s go-to forensic toxicologist, said that although the levels of coproxamol in Dr Kelly’s blood were indeed higher than normal therapeutic levels, it is generally accepted that the concentrations of a drug in the blood can increase by as much as 10 times after death, so, actually, its perfectly possible that he may have only taken 3.3% of the of the lethal dosage.

Just in case you aren’t mind f*cked enough yet, here’s something else to consider: Mai Pederson, a US Army veteran who had been among Dr Kelly’s closest friends and confidants since 1999, has said in press interviews that he HATED taking tablets, and would typically only ever do so if it was something, really, REALLY important; and even then he had to pucker himself up and force himself. And yet, despite this, the official story posits that he took the time to put 29 of them down his throat before doing… ‘what he did,’ and thus willingly submitted himself to yet another grossly unpleasant act on his way out? Again, totally possible, because, after all, people don’t exactly tend to be level-headed and straight thinking when doing… ‘that,’ but I certainly don’t think its unwarranted to say that a sense of scepticism is deserved.

And in making my next point folks, let me begin by asking you a question: how much water do you think one would consume in the process of downing 29 tablets?

If you don’t have a clue, worry not, I did some (rough) science myself, and figured out that it takes me a minimum of 50 ml of water to get a standard issue supermarket ibuprofen tablet down my throat. So, by that logic, it would take me, and it stands to reason basically anyone else for that matter, just shy of 1.5 litres of water to take 29 tablets; and they’re little sips, both by the evidence of my own eyes and according to Google, so a more accurate number could be greater still.

And if I take little sips, boy, Dr Kelly must have swallowed but a pipette full of water when taking his tablets, because the only bottle found anywhere near his remains was 500ml in sized… and it was barely half finished.

Oh, and remember when I said there was “some” vomit stains around his mouth when he was found? Well, according to a journal article I flicked through titled Co-proxamol and … Preventing the Continuing Toll of Overdose Deaths, again, title altered to make it YouTube friendly, it takes “a few hours” for vomiting to begin, and when it begins, there is a LOT of it…. This just isn’t adding up, either in timeframe or in the amount of vomit, unless, of course, the vomiting JUST began as he drew his last mortal breath… never say never, I guess!

Then we have the matter of Dr Kelly’s supposed heart condition. This doesn’t raise eyebrows quite as furiously as the questions over the (lack of) blood, or the co-proxamol peculiarities, but its certainly still of note.

The doubt first comes when you heed the testimony of Dr Malcom Warner, Dr Kelly’s own GP, who was summoned to give evidence at the Hutton Inquiry. While there, he was asked a simple question, namely: “Were you aware of any serious medical condition from which Dr Kelly suffered?”

To this, he simply answered: “No.”

Do note however, that Dr Kelly hadn’t actually been to see Warner since 1999, a whole four years before his death. This can be taken two ways, firstly, that the heart condition must have simply developed after then, and thus never found its way to both Warner’s attention, and his medical records, and secondly, that said heart condition may never have existed, or at least been grossly overexaggerated, because why WOULDN’T he go to see his doctor over it if it existed and was in any way bad?

And here’s a little extra titbit of information that may coax you towards the second interpretation: the fact that on the 8th of July 2003, not even 10 days before his death, he had undergone a Ministry of Defence medical in preparation for another work trip out to Iraq, and this medical revealed no heart problems of any kind, and greenlit him to go, and further to that, said that his general state of health was “good.”

And again, while this isn’t exactly smoking gun evidence, that fact that his supposed heart condition managed to evade the attention of both his GP and the Ministry of Defence med team is yet another WEIRD thing to note that doesn’t quite seem right.

Some also raised concerns over the choice of Nicholas Hunt as the go-to pathologist, as back when Dr Kelly met his untimely end, there were a total of 43 people on the Home Office Register of Forensic Pathologists; in other words – the people that the state had deemed to be sufficiently experienced and wrinkled in brain to be able to act as proper arbiters in cases of unknown or violent death. He was also one of the newest additions to this list, having only been added to it in 2001.

This meant that, while Hunt was without doubt a hell of a pathologist to be sure, there were, ultimately, FAR more experienced ones than he, with some of them even having been on the register since 1978. And it’s this detail that some say makes the situation peculiar, because for a death as highprofile, and, let’s be frank, catastrophically disastrous public relations wise as Dr Kelly’s, why wouldn’t they want the best of the best on it, and why only one of them? Lest the final report be full of whoopsie daisies that say, oh, I don’t know, led to shtloads of people believing Dr Kelly had been murdered? Interesting indeed, but as a side note, I’d like to bring up the fact that, regardless of whether or not Hunt was involved in some kind of State murder/cover up conspiracy, I happen to think that he’s a colossal helmet, and that’d because of two articles I discovered while researching: one from the Daily Mail titled “Kelly doctor cautioned for breaking (General Medical Council) rules: New cloud over pathologist,” and another in the Western Mail & Echo, now Wales Online, titled “Pictures of mutilated servicemen shown to travel agents.” In short, Hunt was the pathologist who conducted the autopsies when said dead soldiers were returned to the UK, and he then decided to flash pictures of what was left of them after both he, and the Iraqi insurgency, had gotten their knives onto them, about as part of some seminar or something; all without the consent and knowledge of their surviving family. As for who they were, because I think they deserve a mention and an actually dignified picture being put on screen, sorry audio listeners, that’d be Lance Corporal Tom Keys, Corporal Simon Miller, and Sergeant Simon Hamilton- Jewell. With that, allow me to close off this tangent by gleefully typing out the slight that Halpin passed on earlier: Dr Hunt? More like Dr Cnt. Back to the matter at hand however, because it wasn’t just the choice to utilise Hunt as the sole pathologist that raised some eyebrows, but also how he conducted himself while acting as such. For example, many say he dallied to a peculiar degree, not arriving on the scene at all until two and a half hours after Dr Kelly’s remains were first discovered, and then, somehow, taking 25 minutes to pronounce him dead. Then, an hour and a half later, supposedly due to how long it took the police to complete a fingertip search and erect a scene tent, he began his proper investigation. Now I’m no doctor, far from it in fact, but I’ll be damned if I don’t hear the charge that he was intentionally dallying and don’t just happen to find it amenable – as that strikes me as a hell of a delay. Consider this too: according to various sources I consulted, if one wishes to get an accurate time of death, it is the done thing to take the rectal temperature of the remains as soon as possible; the natural waning of the remains’ temperature to that of the ambient environment providing a clear indicator of exactly how long they have been sat lifeless for. So, with that in mind, when you suppose that Hunt took said temperature, given that he began his proper investigation at around 2pm? 7:15pm would be the answer to that folks, which also happened to be a mere four minutes before he packed up and left the scene. This naturally begs the question: why? Why did he leave something so vital, that HAD to be done with all due haste to the absolute last minute? As I see it, only two possibilities exist, either a), he was acting with abject incompetence, which, make no mistake, I am only too happy to assume from Dr Cnt, or, b), it was done intentionally… FOR SOME REASON. As a result of this delay, when all was said and done on the day, Hunt ended up having to essentially eyeball the estimated time of death, which he put down as being between 18 and 27 hours before he took Dr Kelly’s rectal temperature. He had an explanation for this however, as he told the Hutton Inquiry that he was attempting to retrieve as much evidence from the scene as possible, with specific points of interesting being looking for clothing fibres or trying to find DNA contamination from a third party. It’s interesting too that he claimed such an interest in DNA retrieval, because he also claimed to have found a SLIGHT area of blood staining to the left of Dr Kelly’s remains… which he, nor anyone else for that fact, ever bothered to have DNA tested… BIT WEIRD INIT. Some more peculiarity can be found from Dr Kelly’s autopsy too, because, again, according to sources I looked up, because I am NOT a doctor, livor mortis is a cracking way of determining the time of someone’s death. Essentially, when a heart stops pumping, the blood begins to make its way down to the lower parts of the body courtesy of gravity, which creates a purple-esque discolouration to the skin. As for why and how this is useful in determining the time of death, livor mortis begins between 20 minutes and three hours after one’s death, takes four to five hours to congeal in the capillaries, and reaches its maximum extent within six to 12 hours; from how far along it is in the process then – a time of death can begin to be deduced. As for how it gets weird, that’d be because Hunt told the Hutton Inquiry that Dr Kelly’s remains had BIG TIME livor-mortis-ised. And that’s an interesting claim, because how was that the case… WHEN DR KELLY IS MEANT TO HAVE LOST FIVE PINTS OF BLOOD? And that’s pretty much all I have to tell you about in this chapter folks, and you have to admit, sceptical though most of you no doubt were half-an-hour-ish ago… the idea that Dr Kelly was murdered suddenly doesn’t look so outlandish now does it? Because while we might not be able to say what DID happen with any degree of certainty, between the endorsement by legit big brain types, the peculiarities with his chosen method, the weirdness with his blood, the situation with the tablets, the heart condition that everyone somehow missed prior to his death, and everything going on with the pathologist… something feel WEIRD here dunnit. But whatever did happen with Dr Kelly, even if it was foul play, at least it was just a one off, right? I mean, it’s not like there was a trend at the time of scientists in his sphere dropping dead in violent and mysterious circumstances at an eyebrow raising rate, right? Well, that’s certainly what some Dr Kelly commentators have suggested. So now, let’s move on to a new chapter, and see if there is anything to such claims. Chapter 6: A Series of Suspicious Deaths A question to get your noggins’ joggin’ folks: how many deaths among a connected group have to occur before you don your tinfoil hat, and start to wonder if foul play might be afoot? That’s exactly the question my lynchpin source for to today had to contend with, because while he was investigating Dr Kelly’s death, many, MANY people came forward to suggest that his death was but one amidst a far larger pattern of sudden and unexplainable deaths among military and military-adjacent civilian scientists. Oh, and don’t worry, I’m not intentionally being harsh by not naming my go-to source for the video yet, I’m just saving his name for later on so that we can fawn over him and his efforts with the deserved depth and detail, rather than just sprinkling it in here and there to get swallowed up and lost among the absolute barrage of facts I’ve been throwing at you – but I digress. A total of 96 names were put to him, and sensing that he may end up chasing shadows were he to investigate the lot, he applied a proverbial filter to distil his list down to just those who had some degree of vocational overlap with Dr Kelly, as well as seemingly weird circumstances around their death. Following this, he was left with seven names, which were: Benito Que, aged 52. He had been a leading expert in infectious diseases, and was found unresponsive on the 12th of November 2001, before eventually passing away on the 6th of December. Dr Don Wiley, aged 58. He had been a Professor of Biochemistry, and was reported missing on the 16th of November 2001, with it eventually being deemed that he had fallen off of a bridge Memphis. Vladimir Pasechnik, aged 64. He was a microbiologist who had a sudden fatal stroke seemingly out of nowhere, passing away on the 21st of November 2001. Then there was Dr Robert Schwartz, aged 57. His death was ascribed to murder, with his remains being found in his home in Virgina on the 8th of December 2001. Next it was Set Van Nguyen, aged 44. He was found dead in an airlock at an Australian laboratory on the 14th of December 2001 – with no clear reason ever having been publicly provided to explain his death. Penultimately, we also have Ian Langford, aged 40. Environmental risk was his forte, and he was found dead under a chair at his home in Norfolk, England, on the 11th of February 2002. Finally, there was also Paul Norman, aged 52. He also happened to have been Dr Kelly’s successor at Porton Down, and died in a plane crash on the 27th of June 2004. But did any of these deaths, when investigated, actually have the same aura of weirdness around them as Dr Kelly’s? Well, let’s find out, starting with Benito Que. At the time of his death, Que was a cell biologist in the employ of the University of Miami’s School of Medicine, and as far as we can tell, he did not actually work with biological weapons, nor even with infectious diseases in a curative way, with his manager, one Dr Bach Ardalan, outright denying such accusations. This did not stop the Florida Papers from speculating to the contrary however, as they REALLY ran with the angle that this was some kind of deep-state hit job after he died. Instead, what ACTUALLY happened to him was that he was physically really not well, with a stroke waiting to pounce upon him at any moment, as evidenced by a nurse at his workplace taking his blood pressure the day that he died, and finding it to be so high that she wanted to immediately admit him to hospital. He refused however, and instead insisted that he was just going to go home, and unfortunately for him, he always parked his rather nice car in a REALLY bad part of town, specifically Northwest 10th Avenue, should any Miami natives in the audience be interested in knowing exactly where, and while getting into his car, he was accosted by yobbos who set about him baseball bats, stole his car and his wallet, and then left him battered and bruised at the side of the road. Said battering then triggered the looming stroke, and he passed away several weeks later in hospital. And it’s all provable with a solid paper trail. So, an undoubtedly tragic end for him to be sure, but not a conspiratorial one. Let us keep looking and see if any of the other deaths look dodgy. When it comes to Dr Don Wiley, he had been working as a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Harvard University when he went missing, and while from what we can tell at least, none of his work was utilised by the defence sector, he DID work with viruses such as HIV and Ebola, specifically in trying to deduce how they evolved and spread to other organisms – so you can certainly see how his name made it to my sources list, because those developing biological weapons and counters to them would ABSOLUTELY be interested in his work. As for his ultimate fate, we know that when he went missing, he left an evening social appointment in Memphis, and at 4am, his car was found just five minutes away on a bridge over the Mississippi River; with the keys still being in the ignition, and the petrol tank basically full. His remains however, they would be found VERY far away on the 20th of December, specifically 300 miles downstream, after they snagged on a tree. Trying to get to the bottom of what the hell had happened to him, the County Medical Examiner noted that there were paint marks on the side of his car that matched the paint of temporary road signs on the bridge, and the car also had a missing hub cap. Further to that, he then noted that Wiley had been on the ales that night, and also suffered from a balance affecting seizure disorder. Then there was the final piece of evidence recovered, that being forensic evidence that showed that he had hit the supporting beam of the bridge after he went over the side, as these stuck out three feet beyond the pedestrian walkway, as a result, it was deemed unlikely that he… ‘did it intentionally’ – because who would throw themselves off of that? Piecing all of that together, it was ruled that he had hit the road signs thanks to his ever so light beer arm, gotten out to inspect the damage, and then fallen over the side as a combination of booze and seizure made him tumble and loose his balance. But hold your horse’s folks, because there just MAY be more to this one. For example, how did it take four hours for his car to be found? Are they REALLY trying to say that not a soul drove over the bridge in that time and thought to report it – highly unlikely, many would say. Then there was the fact that not one of the witnesses from his evening occasion reported him as either having drunk anything, or having acted in any way even tipsy, never mind properly drunk. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg my friends, because further to that, Wiley had been staying with his father in the suburb of German Town, which was in the other direction… away from the bridge, so just why the hell was he driving over it? Oh, and you know the missing hubcap, yeah, it was nowhere to be found on the bridge, very much implying it had come off at an earlier date. Clearly, something isn’t adding up here, and just to REALLY throw some fuel onto the mental bonfire you are (hopefully) now building, how’s this for a twist: the medical examiner that ruled on his death was charged with possession of unlicensed explosives and perjury in 2004… CURIOUS INIT. So, while Que’s death very much appeared to be legit and above board, with Wiley’s… I think its fair to say some scepticism would certainly be warranted. Will this be the start of a trend that leaves us with unfathomable ramifications for our evaluation of Dr Kelly’s death, or just a peculiar fluke of fate? Let’s press on and find out! Next we have Vladimir Pasechnik, a Russian microbiologist, and while both Que and Wiley may have had either no, or verrrrry loose links to the defence sector, we absolutely can NOT say the same of Pasechnik, as before his defection to the West in 1989, he was THE top bioweaponeer in the Soviet Union, with his work including, among other things, the creation of a variant of the plague resistant to antibiotics, and the development of modified cruise missiles to deploy it. His defection to the west also revealed that the Soviet biological weapon program had been 10 times larger than imagined by Western Intelligence Services. With a resume like that, he naturally found gainful employment at Porton Down following his defection, at which point, he regularly crossed paths with Dr Kelly, with their interactions including everything from helping him find local lodging when he first started at Porton Down, all the way to sharing information prior to Dr Kelly’s many trips to post-Soviet Russia as part of international bio-weapon destruction efforts. He was found dead in his bed on the 21st of November 2001, a mere 10 days after he had been in the US to discuss, in a non-military context, DNA sequencing with Don Wiley. The police were most bemused by this, describing his death as “inexplicable,” with the pathologist who ruled over the subsequent inquest ruling that he had died as a result of a stroke. Further to that, consider the words of journalist Gordon Thomas, who, while quoting Dr Leonard Horowitz, an American expert in poisons, pointed out that, quote: ”… there are a number of nerve agents that can mimic a stroke and leave no traces.” Are those two facts concrete evidence that he was killed? Absolutely not. Are they reasons to remain sceptical? I’d say so. Next up is Dr Robert Schwartz, an expert in DNA sequencing who also a founding member of the Virginia Biotechnology Association – he just so happened to die while he was working on the first online database of DNA sequencing information. His body was found at his home in Virgina on the 10th of December 2001, with the police ruling that he had been stabbed, multiple times. The blame for his death, however, was eventually laid at the door of Satanism of all things, as a group of four suspects were quickly identified and charged with his murder. The group, among which was Schwart’s own daughter, were VERY into occult-ish things, even going so far as drinking blood and self… ‘hurting.’ The murder went just beyond a simple frenzied stabbing too, as they had actually done it with a sword, and then gone on to carve an ‘x’ into the back of Schwartz’s neck. So extreme was it in fact, that the prosecutor outright called the killing a, quote: “planned assassination.” But when it comes to the matter of whether it was a planned assassination that occurred exactly as described, or whether that was all but a ruse to cover for a greater machination… I don’t think so to be honest. A conspiracy with four patsies, one of whom was a blood relative? Nah, such a thing would just be to difficult to pull off and keep under wraps – so I don’t view Schwartz’s death as suspicious at all. Weird? Fck yes, but not suspicious. As for Set Van Nguyen, he is another one that while lacking explicit defence sector connections, was certainly VERY much adjacent to it, as he worked in a lab that produced and experimented on pathogens such as mousepox; which, apparently, is a handy dandy substitute for smallpox oft used by researchers. His death on the 14th of December 2001 apparently occurred when he became trapped in a nitrogen-filled airlock at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, where he worked. Naturally then, suffocation was listed as his cause of death. We can probably rule this one out as suspicious however, peculiar though it certainly first appears, and this is primarily due to the fact that he was a lab technician, NOT a full-blown scientist… so what is the conceivable motive for wanting to take him out? None, as I see it anyway. When it comes to Ian Langford however, that one certainly does look a bit peculiar. He was a scientist at the University of East Anglia, and was described by one of his colleagues as “one of Europe’s leading experts on environmental risk,” and if you happen to be wondered what that even means, as I certainly had to look it up myself, it basically means that he looked at how human activities impact the environment and public health. When he was found dead at his home on the 11th of February 2002, police noted that the walls were blood splattered, in addition to the home appearing to have been ransacked. As for his body, that was found naked from the waist down, wedged underneath a chair, and bearing many visible wounds. Despite this, however, the police concluded that his death was not suspicious, but made no comment on whether or not they believed them to be self-inflicted, however. And very much in keeping with that, his post-mortem also was unable to conclude how he had actually died. I think its fair to say, this one looks a bit weird, doesn’t it? I mean, come on, a ransacked home, the authorities just so happening to be remarkably blindsided to a conclusion, I think even the most sceptical among us would be open minded to the idea that this one was a bit dodgy. There could be a perfectly normal explanation of course, but should it exist, the authorities certainly aren’t helping to bring it to our attention. And for what its worth, John Eldridge, the then editor of Jane’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defence, a rather well-respected periodical dedicated to all things end-of-the-world-y, commented at the time that, in regard to Langford’s death, quote: “If I was a microbiologist, I would be worried.” An interesting note on that comment too: we have no idea if he still stands by it today, because when the author of the bible of all things Dr Kelly contacted him for a follow up remark, he slammed the phone down on him – make of that what you will. Then we get to our last tragically deceased scientist of interest, Paul Norman. As we have already said, he was actually Dr Kelly’s successor at Porton Down, but further to just that, he was also a long-term close colleague, and also travelled the world, sharing his wisdom and doing his part to help destroy WMDs. As for his specific job role at the time of his death, that’d be Porton Down’s Chief Scientist for chemical and biological weapons research. In a perhaps unexpected turn however, despite his close proximity to Dr Kelly, Norman’s death is one of the ones that’s totally above board and beyond suspicion… or at least appears that way. His plane crash, which occurred on the 27th of June 2004 lest we forget, happened when the Cessna 206 he was behind the stick of began to lose power and was unable to maintain altitude. With little other option, he then attempted an emergency landing in a farmer’s field, but was unable to find one sufficiently large and sufficiently flat to do the job, and so he ended up clipping the tops of the trees, which sent him hurtling down into the ground – where he met his end. His pilot credentials check out too, as he had 628 flying hours logged on his PPL, and 172 of those were completed behind the stick of a 206, so certainly, he knew what he was doing. There’s also the fact the 206 he went down in, which was rented, had had quite a few mechanical problems leading up to the crash, for example, on an earlier flight the same day, the alternator warning light had come on, a problem that, if not handled soon enough, could have resulted it the total loss of electrical power on board, fortunately, however, that pilot managed to land safely, with the aircraft then being given a once over by maintenance crews and being signed off as safe to fly again. Then, a week earlier, it suffered from a temporarily unresponsive throttle and started to run poorly. Following this, the pilot managed to make it back to the airfield without incident, and the aircraft was thrown in for maintenance to see the problem fixed, and given the fact that it was reported by groundside witnesses as “coughing and spluttering” before it impacted the trees; I think we’ve found our answer here: Norman’s death was caused by the fact that whoever was doing maintenance at that airfield was a fcking idiot. Unless of course… men in black sabotaged the aircraft so that this very situation would happen… is what I would say anyway, if it wasn’t for the fact that the 206 was rented. How would they ever have been able to ensure it was Norman who got behind the stick, and not just some other poor unfortunate sod, who would unknowingly be flying off to meet their end in his place? So then, now that we’ve picked apart all of the supposedly suspicious deaths of scientists, have we seen pattern enough to be able to start drawing some preliminary conclusions about Dr Kelly’s death being part of a wider purge of military and military adjacent scientists in the early 2,000s… Personally, no, I don’t think that at all. Make no mistake, I am VERY suspicious of a few of them, and think that a greater and more expansive investigation is certainly needed to get to the bottom of what ACTUALLY happened to them, in particular I’m thinking of Don Wiley, Vladimir Pasechnik, and Ian Langford; but they are a mere three from a list of seven, which themselves were the ‘most likely to be dodgy’ from an original list of 96. Or, to put it another way, 3.13% of the names originally identified as having died in suspicious circumstances actually did, and I hardly think such a small percentage of anything can be considered a trend at all. In fact, I’d be willing to go a step further and say that if you took 96 deaths from anywhere, at any time, odds are that three of them likely died in weird or hard to discern circumstances. Having said that however, I am TOTALLY open to the idea that people from within the aerospace/defence sector might get done in by the men in black when they start to make a nuisance of themselves for either the state or their employer. As evidence for this, I present the whistleblowers from THAT aerospace company that keep on dying, and I’m not naming the company in question, because I’m not a fcking idiot, but I’m sure most of you know EXACTLY which one I am alluding too. So then, as we bring this chapter to a close, where do we stand on the matter of Dr Kelly? Well, we know that he died in bloody weird circumstances, and that the official explanation as given at the time is full of so many holes that it may as well be made from Swiss cheese, but, we also know that IF, and it’s a mighty big if make no mistake, he WAS murdered, that it was likely a one off killing done as a specific response to him uniquely, and not part of some wider purge of scientists from his sector. Chapter 7: THE Answer And so, folks, here we are: 17,500 words into today’s script, and finally at the point where I reveal what REALLY happened to Dr Kelly, and let me tell you, it was nothing if not a rollercoaster getting to this point. Indeed, I spent way, WAY longer settling upon an explanation than a man whose paid by the word ought to if being prudent, and now, having read whole books cover to cover, dived through two decades worth of old newspaper archives, and read what must have been close to a thousand pages worth of inquests and other miscellaneous primary documentation, I have THE answer; and its one that, sadly, may disappoint you and leave you wanting, because would you believe it, it turns out that the Hutton Inquiry was absolutely correct. Yep, you heard me right folks, the Hutton Inquiry, and the explanation it gives of the end that befell Dr Kelly, is 1,000% accurate, cast-iron, infallible, and not up for debate – it turns out. It sounds bizarre, but its true! Remember all of those claims that didn’t stack up: the peculiarities with his wound, the lack of traces of co-proxamol in his system, the bizarrely bungled crime scene investigation? Me neither, so there’s absolutely no need to fret over them any longer! And further to that folks, it’s funny, but for absolutely no reason at all, I feel myself with a sudden compulsion to go off on a tangent all about how I have absolutely no health problems at all, either physical or mental, absolutely no financial issues or debt problems looming on the horizon, have just had my car brakes fully inspected and serviced not even two months ago, and also just so happen to have absolutely no issues with any of my personal relationships; being surrounded by nothing but loving and fulfilling sorts no matter where I turn! And you know what folks, it’s the darndest thing, but I was feeling so chipper after thinking about how much I absolutely love life and how happy I am, that I wanted to share it with those nearest and dearest to me. But the darndest thing happened after I had this thought; all of my IRL friends were busy, so I ended up having to share the wonderful news with all of the contacts I made during my younger self’s dabbling into the world of journalism. They’re a good set of lads and lasses to be fair, so can you blame me for telling them; the solid kind of salt of the earth sorts who could no doubt put stories about just how happy and contented I have been feeling of late on the front of newspapers and keep them there for many months. They’re a diverse bunch too you know, so we’d be able to read all about it from Washington DC to Wuhan, and Lord only knows how many places in between! And with that totally unrelated to anything we’ve talked about today tangent out of the way, I think we can consider this unknown thoroughly decoded – God I love the Government and how it literally never does anything wrong, ever. Conclusion I’ll let you all decide for yourselves just how ironic and hyperbolic the last chapter was: me deflecting from the fact that we simply just don’t have an answer for what really happened to Dr Kelly, and thus it just being me sparing you all from having to sit through several thousand words of ultimately unverifiable speculation pulled straight out of my rectum, a tacit admission that I uncovered SOMETHING while searching for an answer that I really was not comfortable discussing, or maybe even a bit of both – the choice is yours. But regardless of how you assess my own willingness, or rather a lack there of to speculate on what may have happened to Dr Kelly, the fact of the matter remains that ultimately, we simply just don’t know. No matter how much you dig, no matter what you read, and no matter how much you dedicate your time to the matter, there’s just no answers or explanations that tie up all of the loose ends. In real terms, the matter was essentially closed with the publishing of the Hutton Report all the way back in 2004. Sure, this didn’t stamp out the memory of Dr Kelly from the public consciousness, and for a time, lots of people remained equi-parts angry and curious over the situation, but with time, their anger lessened from a raging inferno, into little but barely lit embers, as other, shinier and more recent scandals came that pushed Dr Kelly ever deeper into the furthest and most infrequently accessed recesses of their thoughts. Thus stands the situation today, where Dr Kelly has all but disappeared from people’s minds, his whole memory and former being having been reduced to little but a verbal weapon to whip out when a public figure wishes to take a jab at Tony Blair or Alastair Campbell. And if you want an example of this, consider the following from the very month I wrote this script, August 2024, when the author and political commentator Douglas Murray tweeted out the following in response to Alastair Campbell, after he had tried to bring the Metropolitan Police’s attention to some… ‘comments’ Murray made in response to the Southport Stabbings from a month prior, quote: “Alastair Campbell is just a very sick man. By his own admission. Probably guilt over the death of David Kelly. As I said before - to his face - most people want to hear him talk about truth and politics as much as we’d want to hear Jeffrey Epstein talk about the age of consent.” That’s all well and good, but what has Murray ACTUALLY done with his power and platform to attempt to right the wrong he claims to believe as having been wrought upon Dr Kelly? The answer: bugger all, and that’s exactly my point – I don’t even believe he even put out a single tweet mentioning him prior to August, but I am a bit of a luddite with technology, so don’t quote me on that detail! Others, however, have made actual efforts to search for either answers regarding, or justice for Dr Kelly, depending upon their interpretation of the situation, and that segways ways us nicely to me giving a DIRELY owed shoutout, because this script today just would not have been possible with the efforts of a former Liberal Democrat MP named Norman Baker, as he published The Strange Death of David Kelly all the way back in 2007, and it extensively, and in a very easily digestible format, compiles and explains all of the peculiarities surrounding his death. I did try to reach out to him, both to thank him for his work, and to offer him the chance to get involved with production of the script, but alas, Our Norm is an absolute phantom of a man nowadays, seemingly having largely removed himself from social media following his leaving politics in 2015, and further still, both the phone numbers and email addresses on his old parliamentary website now seem to be dead lines – and so I totally failed to get hold of him. If you are somehow watching this though Norman: big love Boss Man, and I owe you a pint next time you are Yorkshire-bound – this script would have been utter w*nk, and of had all of the depth of a kiddie’s paddling pool were it not for your tireless research. And then, with that said, there is just one more man we need to give thought to before we end the podcast, and that, of course, is Dr Kelly himself. For while he is tragically doomed to go down in common memory as naught but the subject of a potential conspiracy theory, we know that there was far, far more to the man than just that. He was a man who found unparalleled professional success despite starting out life amidst the most adverse of circumstances, a man who, while riding high at the peak of his career, made the world immeasurably safer by not only destroying vast quantities of WMDs, but also by creating cheap and easy to mass-produce countermeasures against them, and above all else, he was a man who was a loving and deeply revered family patriarch; whose death left an immeasurably large, and ultimately unfillable hole in his families heart. In fact, with a legacy like that, I don’t think its hyperbolic to consider Dr Kelly one of THE greatest Men who has ever lived. Indeed, should I leave this mortal plane having had but a fraction of the positive impact on the world as he, I’ll be meeting St Peter with a smile on my face. And that, I think, is how we should all remember him; after all, let’s be frank – its not like we’re ever going to be told what REALLY happened on Harrowdown Hill back in 2003, is it? Key Takeaways Dr. David Kelly, a renowned expert in biological weapons, was found dead in 2003 after speaking out about the UK’s Iraq War dossier. Kelly’s death was officially ruled as suicide, but numerous inconsistencies and unanswered questions have fueled speculation. Key discrepancies include the nature of his wrist wound, the lack of significant blood at the scene, and the peculiarities surrounding his ingestion of coproxamol tablets. Several medical experts have publicly questioned the official narrative, highlighting the improbability of his death by self-inflicted wrist wound. Despite extensive investigations, no definitive answers have emerged, leaving Kelly’s death shrouded in mystery and controversy. Frequently Asked Questions Who was David Kelly?David Kelly, or Dr David Christopher Kelly, Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, was a British scientist and expert in biological warfare. He was born on the 14th of May 1944 in Wales and had a distinguished career in microbiology and virology, working for the Ministry of Defence at Porton Down. What was the ‘Dodgy Dossier’?The ‘Dodgy Dossier’ was a report titled ‘Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation,’ published by the UK government on the 3rd of February 2003. It was intended to bolster the case for military action against Iraq by outlining Iraq’s supposed attempts to continue developing WMDs secretly. What role did David Kelly play in the Iraq War controversy?David Kelly was a whistleblower who spoke to journalists about Iraq’s real WMD capabilities. He had extensive knowledge of Iraq’s WMD programs from his work with the United Nations and was critical of the UK government’s claims about Iraq’s WMDs. What was the ‘45-minute claim’?The ‘45-minute claim’ stated that Iraq was able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so. This claim was part of the UK government’s dossier on Iraq’s WMD capabilities and was highly controversial. What was the Hutton Inquiry?The Hutton Inquiry was a public inquiry conducted by Lord Hutton to examine the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly. It concluded that Kelly took his own life in the wood at Harrowdown Hill. What were some of the controversies surrounding David Kelly’s death?There were several controversies surrounding David Kelly’s death, including the method of his supposed suicide, the lack of blood at the scene, the presence of Coproxamol tablets, and the handling of the investigation by authorities. Many experts and the public questioned the official narrative. What was the ‘Kelly Investigation Group’?The Kelly Investigation Group was a loose formal association of medical experts and legal professionals who lobbied for a proper investigation into the true fate of David Kelly. They questioned the official narrative of his death and sought to scrutinize the Hutton Inquiry’s findings. What was the significance of the ‘series of suspicious deaths’ mentioned in the article?The article mentioned a series of suspicious deaths among military and military-adjacent civilian scientists around the time of David Kelly’s death. Some of these deaths were investigated, but the article concluded that there was no clear pattern or evidence of a wider purge. What was the author’s final conclusion about David Kelly’s death?The author concluded that there is no definitive answer to what really happened to David Kelly. The official narrative provided by the Hutton Inquiry is full of inconsistencies, but no alternative explanation ties up all the loose ends. Who was Norman Baker and what was his contribution to the David Kelly case?Norman Baker was a former Liberal Democrat MP who published ‘The Strange Death of David Kelly’ in 2007. His book compiled and explained the peculiarities surrounding David Kelly’s death, providing a comprehensive overview of the case.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was David Kelly?

David Kelly, or Dr David Christopher Kelly, Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, was a British scientist and expert in biological warfare. He was born on the 14th of May 1944 in Wales and had a distinguished career in microbiology and virology, working for the Ministry of Defence at Porton Down.

What was the ‘Dodgy Dossier’?

The ‘Dodgy Dossier’ was a report titled ‘Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation,’ published by the UK government on the 3rd of February 2003. It was intended to bolster the case for military action against Iraq by outlining Iraq’s supposed attempts to continue developing WMDs secretly.

What role did David Kelly play in the Iraq War controversy?

David Kelly was a whistleblower who spoke to journalists about Iraq’s real WMD capabilities. He had extensive knowledge of Iraq’s WMD programs from his work with the United Nations and was critical of the UK government’s claims about Iraq’s WMDs.

What was the ‘45-minute claim’?

The ‘45-minute claim’ stated that Iraq was able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so. This claim was part of the UK government’s dossier on Iraq’s WMD capabilities and was highly controversial.

What was the Hutton Inquiry?

The Hutton Inquiry was a public inquiry conducted by Lord Hutton to examine the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly. It concluded that Kelly took his own life in the wood at Harrowdown Hill.

What were some of the controversies surrounding David Kelly’s death?

There were several controversies surrounding David Kelly’s death, including the method of his supposed suicide, the lack of blood at the scene, the presence of Coproxamol tablets, and the handling of the investigation by authorities. Many experts and the public questioned the official narrative.

What was the ‘Kelly Investigation Group’?

The Kelly Investigation Group was a loose formal association of medical experts and legal professionals who lobbied for a proper investigation into the true fate of David Kelly. They questioned the official narrative of his death and sought to scrutinize the Hutton Inquiry’s findings.

What was the significance of the ‘series of suspicious deaths’ mentioned in the article?

The article mentioned a series of suspicious deaths among military and military-adjacent civilian scientists around the time of David Kelly’s death. Some of these deaths were investigated, but the article concluded that there was no clear pattern or evidence of a wider purge.

What was the author’s final conclusion about David Kelly’s death?

The author concluded that there is no definitive answer to what really happened to David Kelly. The official narrative provided by the Hutton Inquiry is full of inconsistencies, but no alternative explanation ties up all the loose ends.

Who was Norman Baker and what was his contribution to the David Kelly case?

Norman Baker was a former Liberal Democrat MP who published ‘The Strange Death of David Kelly’ in 2007. His book compiled and explained the peculiarities surrounding David Kelly’s death, providing a comprehensive overview of the case.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Did the British Government Really Murder a Whistleblower?
• Hero image source by mutovkin / openverse, by.