The Strange Death of David Kelly
by Norman Baker
Methuen, £9.99
THIS would be an easy book to mock – written by a slightly obsessive Liberal Democrat MP and containing all sorts of wild conspiracies. But to mock it, I think, would be a mistake.
First, because it is surprisingly well written, given the speed with which it was put together; but, second, because among some of the wilder flights of fancy – and Baker partially acknowledges them as such – it does contain some disturbing revelations.
I have a natural resistance to conspiracy theories – that is not to say that there aren’t real conspiracies out there – because, in most cases, the explanation for disquieting events usually turns out to be pretty mundane. However, in this case, Baker raises a number of questions, the answers to which are not obvious.
There are questions about the discovery of the body. There seem to be contradictions in the positioning of the body between the first sighting and the subsequent forensic reports.
There are contradictions about what route Dr Kelly might have taken for his walk, he being “sighted” in a number of locations that don’t make sense in the context of a man out for a walk.
There is the fact that the file on Operation Mason – the name given to the investigation into Kelly’s death – was opened two hours before the death occurred. This is the sort of thing that, in isolation, can be dismissed as human error (which remains the most likely explanation) but when set alongside all the other inconsistencies tends to lead to eyebrows shooting up, at the very least.
Then there are questions about the death itself. Baker quotes a number of highly authentic-sounding medical sources who maintain that the absence of significant amounts of blood on and around a body of someone who had, allegedly, slashed his own wrists, lies somewhere between puzzling and downright suspicious.
Then there is the means of suicide. For someone with a great knowledge of the workings of the human body (as Kelly had as a result of his expertise in chemical and biological warfare) he chose an extraordinarily painful, and unreliable, means of killing himself.
There are also questions about the conduct of the Hutton Inquiry. Why, for example, was Mai Pederson – described as an Arab-American linguist who was an officer in the United States army – never called as a witness? She was clearly very close to Kelly. She had introduced him to the Bahá’í faith and they shared three separate addresses in the US. She disappeared from sight immediately following Dr Kelly’s death and has not surfaced since. There were a number of other people who had close connections to Kelly who were also not called.
So, finally, “whodunnit”? Having investigated the possible involvement of the British, American and Israeli secret services, various Iraqi elements and others, Baker concludes that the most likely assassins were… well, that would be giving it away. Anyone wanting to know more about the strange death of David Kelly would be well-advised to get hold of a copy of Norman Baker’s book.
Whether any of Baker’s revelations get taken up and investigated more fully remains, of course, an open question. But I would hazard to guess that if the Secret Service files on David Kelly and his “suicide” are ever opened to public gaze we will find that, even if Baker’s theories are mostly wide of the mark, his account will be seen to throw a great deal more light on what really happened than can be found in the voluminous, but unenlightening, pages of the now discredited Hutton report.
Ivor Gaber
