Nick Rufford reviews Nor­man Baker’s book The Strange Death of David Kelly and in dis­miss­ing Baker so reminds us of the like­li­est explan­a­tion for Kelly’s death [my ital­ics]:

…Baker is offer­ing an even shakier explan­a­tion than sui­cide. The most likely sequence of events is one Baker him­self admits is “plausible”.

On the morn­ing of July 17, Kelly received a num­ber of calls from the Min­istry of Defence that unsettled him. At his ini­tial inter­view with his MoD bosses 10 days pre­vi­ously, he had been told no action would be taken against him over his con­tact with journ­al­ists, but that might change if fur­ther inform­a­tion came to light. Since then, Kelly had given evid­ence in pub­lic to the For­eign Affairs Com­mit­tee, try­ing to bal­ance hon­esty with an attempt not to incrim­in­ate him­self. “It was a jug­gling act that proved too dif­fi­cult,” observes Baker. Dur­ing the hear­ing, a com­mit­tee mem­ber read part of a tran­script of an inter­view Kelly had given to Susan Watts, a BBC News­night journ­al­ist. Kelly did not know at that stage that the con­ver­sa­tion had been taped. He denied say­ing the words and, in doing so, misled a par­lia­ment­ary committee.

Kelly was asked again about his con­tact with Watts in the July 17 calls from the MoD. Baker describes the fol­low­ing scen­ario: “Kelly, hav­ing thought the worst was over, sud­denly real­ised that his care­ful attempt to pick his way through the mine­field had blown up in his face. He real­ised that the game was up. Moreover, he would be exposed as hav­ing been less than truth­ful, some­thing that went strongly against his per­sonal ethic.” Baker con­cludes: “This is cer­tainly a plaus­ible explan­a­tion for sui­cide, if that is what it was. Indeed it is the most plaus­ible.” As a reader you’re forced to agree and then won­der, why look for a more com­plic­ated explanation?

Kelly took his own life and he shouldn’t have lied to the com­mit­tee, but in Rufford’s explan­a­tion lies my issue with Andrew Gil­ligan, set­ting up his source by send­ing the com­mit­tee that transcript.

One of Gilligan’s cham­pi­ons remains John Humphrys. Did Humphrys play any part in prompt­ing Gilligan’s story? Gil­ligan always main­tained that he met with Kelly to com­pare notes, and that he ini­ti­ated the meet­ing. Indeed, both Gil­ligan and Kelly said the meet­ing was to dis­cuss Gilligan’s Iraq exper­i­ences.

But four days before Gilligan’s broad­cast (and three days after his meet­ing with Kelly at the Char­ing Cross Hotel), Humphrys began his Sunday Times column like this:

Indulge me, if you will, in a small exper­i­ment. Read the four words I am about to put into quo­ta­tion marks and then glance away from the page for a moment. The words are: “Weapons of mass destruction.”

Now, what came into your mind? Let me guess. It was irrit­a­tion at my return­ing to some­thing you are bored with. Surely that brief chapter in our his­tory is behind us. We’ve had a war, for whatever reason, and we have won it with the min­imum of casualties.

You may even think I am obsessed with the sub­ject — not just me but my col­leagues on Today, too. The cab­inet min­is­ter John Reid thinks it. He said so when we asked him for the second time in a week about the fact that not a single WMD has yet been found in Iraq. We’d asked the same ques­tion in the same week of Jack Straw, the for­eign sec­ret­ary. Proof, indeed, of an obsession.

…Here’s what Blair said in the House of Com­mons last Septem­ber about Sad­dam Hussein’s WMD pro­gramme: “It is act­ive, detailed and grow­ing … It is up and run­ning now.” It could, he said, “be activ­ated within 45 minutes.”

Humphrys appeared, for all intents and pur­poses, to be against the Iraq war. Peter Pre­ston called his oppos­i­tion “mani­fest.” Would such oppos­i­tion have led Humphrys to give an uncrit­ical hear­ing to a spook look­ing to deflect cri­ti­cism by rais­ing an eye­brow in the dir­ec­tion of Down­ing Street?

He was not called for cross-examination by Hut­ton (neither, of course, was Kevin Marsh).

In 2003, the Intel­li­gence agen­cies had come out of the Iraq war with their repu­ta­tion look­ing pretty ragged. Richard Norton-Taylor had raised ques­tions about intel­li­gence in the Guard­ian in April 2003:

…ques­tions should be asked about the inform­a­tion Blair and his min­is­ters were given by the intel­li­gence agen­cies, includ­ing about what mil­it­ary com­mand­ers were told to expect when they invaded Iraq. (One said he anti­cip­ated the Repub­lican Guard com­ing over to help Brit­ish and US forces to keep law and order.)

Yet Norton-Taylor had ended by point­ing the fin­ger not at the agen­cies, but at politi­cians:

But as import­ant, per­haps more so, is what min­is­ters did with the inform­a­tion. There is suf­fi­cient evid­ence that they and their polit­ical advisers doctored it for the con­sump­tion of MPs and the pub­lic to war­rant a par­lia­ment­ary investigation.

Sir Richard Dear­love is happy now to cri­ti­cise politi­cians pub­licly over the use of intel­li­gence to jus­tify the inva­sion of Iraq, was he as happy to lam­bast them privately to journ­al­ists like Humphrys back in 2004? Someone had obvi­ously told Humphrys some­thing, as he told John Reid:

I myself have spoken to senior people in the intel­li­gence ser­vices who have said things, that the gov­ern­ment have exag­ger­ated the threat from Sad­dam Hus­sein and his weapons of mass destruction…

The journ­al­ists and politi­cians have had their secrets pored over pub­licly. We have to trust chaps like Sir Richard, and now Sir John, to ensure that the Secret Intel­li­gence Ser­vice can look after itself in private.

Humphrys ended his column by out­lining a pos­i­tion that is hard to dis­agree with:

If other reas­ons had been given for the war, we could and would have debated them. That is what hap­pens in a demo­cracy. Some might even have argued that the money spent on the war would have been bet­ter spent on schools and hos­pit­als in this country…

But we did not have that debate. It was over­whelmed by the gov­ern­ment insist­ing that we were all threatened by those ter­rible weapons of mass destruc­tion. Blair told us that we would have to take “ele­ments of this on the good faith of our intel­li­gence services.”

Ah yes, this is what hap­pens in a demo­cracy, but should it hap­pen entirely through the media? And should the Secret Intel­li­gence Ser­vice — doubt­less an organ­isa­tion whose own interests are merely reflec­tions of the greater national interest — be free to pur­sue those interests over lunch with selec­ted journalists?

Remem­ber the words of Andrew McKin­ley MP: “I want to pur­sue … the ques­tion of the MI6 chief allegedly talk­ing to John Humphrys. I’m delighted he talks to John Humphrys — he doesn’t talk to me or my colleagues.”