The third episode looks at the police investigation into Dr Kelly’s disappearance and how, when his body was discovered, the government kicked into gear to make sure any further investigation would be done on their terms.
The third episode looks at the police investigation into Dr Kelly’s disappearance and how, when his body was discovered, the government kicked into gear to make sure any further investigation would be done on their terms.
SAM - Welcome back to the series examining the mysterious death of Dr David Kelly with me, Sam Eastall, and journalist and author Miles Goslett.
SAM - On July the 17th 2003 Dr Kelly, a leading chemical weapons expert who’d very publicly got on the wrong side of the british Government, failed to return home having gone for an afternoon stroll at about 3 o’clock. Almost nine hours later, after searching the local area with neighbours, his family called the police to report him missing. We rejoin the story shortly after midnight on Friday the 18th of July when three police officers arrived at the Kellys home in Oxfordshire.
SAM - At exactly the same time, three-and-a-half thousand miles away in Washington DC, Tony Blair and his wife Cherie were having an early supper with President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura. Miles what was Blair doing in Washington? Blair was in Washington to receive the Congressional Gold Medal and that afternoon he had addressed the US Congress.
ARCHIVE – Blair addresses congress
SAM - Blair was in an ecstatic mood and would later boast that he received a total of 35 standing ovations during his speech, in which he cemented his commitment to helping the US rid the world of terror.
ARCHIVE – Blair addresses congress
SAM - He was about to embark on a short visit of Japan and South Korea before taking a summer holiday at the Barbados house of the singer Cliff Richard.
Having said goodbye to the Bushes, the Blairs were driven to Andrews Air Force base on the outskirts of Washington and at about 8pm local time – 1am in the UK – boarded a flight bound for Tokyo. Accompanying the prime minister, but seated at the other end of the plane to him, was a pack of national newspaper and broadcast journalists.
SAM – Blairs entourage and the press were in for a bumpy ride. Those on the flight remember it being hit by severe turbulence at frequent intervals, bouncing the plane around in a most alarming way even for experienced flyers
But for Blair, that sort of temporary discomfort was soon to be the least of his worries. So Miles, tell us how as the prime minister was battling turbulence over the Pacific news of dr kelly's disappearance reached him.
MILES - Roughly six hours into the flight, an emergency message came through from Downing Street to the travelling duty clerk via an on-board satellite phone. Blair was woken up and told that Dr Kelly was missing.
SAM – And this was only a few hours after the police had been called by the Kelly family is that right?
MILES – Yes. This was proof, if it were needed, of the importance of Dr Kelly to the government at the time. Far from being some minor civil servant his name was of the highest importance to Tony Blair. Needless to say, not a word of this was passed on to the group of reporters sleeping at the other end of the plane.
SAM- So back in Britain, it was 7am, and over the previous seven hours there had been a frenzy of activity in the normally quiet corner of south Oxfordshire where Dr Kelly had last been seen. Miles I know you've been through the events of this period in forensic detail Miles, what had been going on in these first few hours?
MILES – Well, Sgt Simon Morris was on duty at Abingdon Police Station on the night of 17 July and into the morning of 18 July. Of the three officers who turned up at the Kellys’ house that night, Morris took the lead. He spent the first three hours of his inquiries establishing Dr Kelly’s previous whereabouts, co-ordinating a search of the Kellys’ house and its outbuildings and half-acre of garden by torchlight and liaising with the Kelly family. Having done so, he judged Dr Kelly to be a “medium risk” missing person, indicating the possibility that Dr Kelly might be a danger or threat to himself.
SAM – So the police risk assess missing persons cases either low, medium or high risk - high risk meaning they're a direct danger to themselves or to others, they've maybe left a suicide note or something like that and the level of risk the police decide on determines the amount of resources allocated to the response.
MILES – that's right
SAM – But as you said, in this case they initially classified Dr Kelly as medium risk.
MILES – Yes, this status would have been given after considering whether his disappearance was out of character and whether he was known to have problems in his personal or professional life.
SAM – And presumably none of the Kelly family who the police had spoken to had mentioned they were worried that he could be suicidal and they hadn't found a note when they searched the house.
MILES – That's right.
SAM - So the risk was kept at medium but the response from police was on a large scale straight away.
MILES - Events certainly moved quickly and dramatically considering there was no direct evidence – such as a note of intent written by Dr Kelly – to lead any police officer of any rank to believe that something fatal, tragic or conclusive had occurred or was about to occur. Indeed, the police have confirmed that no note written by Dr Kelly was ever recovered from anywhere in connection with his death.
SAM – Which I don't think is that unusual in itself but we'll see later on how it fits into the jigsaw surrounding the circumstances of his death.
MILES – We will.
SAM - But what you're saying about the lack of a note at this point is the police had discovered no direct evidence on the night he went missing that would usually trigger a search for a high risk missing person and yet substantial resources were deployed.
MILES – Yes, proving that Thames Valley Police took Dr Kelly’s disappearance extremely seriously from the start – and perhaps reacting more vigorously than his “medium risk” status warranted – Morris then organised for a police search helicopter to be scrambled. At the time its crew was in the St Albans area of Hertfordshire responding to a fatal road accident. After finishing this task at 2.50am they flew across to south Oxfordshire, briefed to scour the fields and woods from the air with the aid of specialist thermal imaging equipment.
SAM – with no success?
MILES – With no success.
SAM – and they flew over Harrowdown Hill?
MILES – They did. As a further result of Morris’s “medium risk” assessment, a senior officer – Chief Superintendent Katherine Govier, the area commander – was informed of the situation, as protocol demanded. Govier knew of Dr Kelly via the previous 10 days’ media coverage and quickly rang Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page, who was told just after 3am about Dr Kelly’s puzzling disappearance. Both senior officers went to Abingdon Police Station immediately.
SAM – And knowing how famous Dr Kelly's name had become so soon before his disappearance I suppose the extra police response is understandable.
MILES - Conceivably, Dr Kelly’s professionally high-ranking status guaranteed that the police responded more quickly and in greater numbers than they might otherwise have done. After all, it was found after his death that his Ministry of Defence security clearance was distinctive in that it gave him access to material of UK and US origin marked “Top Secret” for a period of seven years, until 2007. In the eyes of the State, Dr Kelly was a very important man.
SAM – But aside from his notoriety and his professional status, is it fair to say there was no cause, from the initial few hours of investigation, to leap to the conclusion that he'd gone off that afternoon with the intention of killing himself?
MILES – Well, as well as the absence of a note of intent, there had been no special words when he left his house. He hadn’t even said goodbye to his wife. Furthermore, when he left he had a Yale house key and a Renault car key with him. This suggested that he wanted to be able let himself into the house on his return, owing to Mrs Kelly having been sick that afternoon. Had he not bothered to take a house key with him, he would have put his unwell, arthritic wife to the trouble of having to get up to open the front door to him. What husband would want to do that? Likewise, carrying his car key showed he may have planned to drive somewhere at some future point.
SAM – But as more senior officers come to the case in the middle of the night, the status of the case was elevated?
MILES - Records show that at 3.44am Dr Kelly’s disappearance was upgraded to a “critical incident”. His wife had not seen or heard from him for just over 12 hours at that point.
Two portable communications masts were put up around the Kellys’ property during the early hours of Friday 18 July, apparently because the area was in a communications black spot, potentially hampering officers’ ability to speak to each other via radio. The first was 35-feet high and was parked initially next to the Kellys’ house but was found to be of insufficient strength. It was later replaced by an 85-foot mast set up in the Kellys’ back garden.
The helicopter which had been buzzing around for the previous 45 minutes or so was forced to leave the area at 4.05am to refuel. Having done so it was back on the scene at 4.35am where it remained for a further 10 minutes. At that point the pilot was running out of legal flying hours so was forced to turn back and land. By that point nobody on board had spotted anything.
SAM – And as dawn approached, what was happening on the ground?
MILES - At 4am a Detective Sergeant Geoffrey Webb was telephoned and asked to report to Abingdon Police Station to receive a briefing about Dr Kelly. He arrived there at 4.45am – exactly the same time Mrs Kelly and her daughters Rachel and Sian had just been asked by the police to go and sit in their garden while a search dog was put through their house. Now this was the second time that an undisclosed number of police officers had checked the Kellys’ property within five hours. Despite police having already gone over it once in search of Dr Kelly, it was decided that this second exercise, involving the dog, was necessary in case one of the five bedrooms had been overlooked.
SAM – And didn't the police then call in a team to start searching the local area?
MILES – They did. At 5am Paul Chapman, a searcher with the South East Berkshire Emergency Volunteers who lived in the Reading area, received a message on his pager, followed by a text message, asking if he was free to assist with an undisclosed search operation. He replied that he was and got his equipment ready before heading off to Abingdon Police Station. His co-searcher, Louise Holmes, and her search dog, Brock, would join Chapman there.
ACC Page had called a meeting, also at Abingdon Police Station, which began at 5.15am. It was attended by Detective Inspector Ashleigh Smith, the area detective inspector; Katherine Govier, the area commander; Sergeant Paul Wood, a qualified police search adviser; and a sergeant from Milton Keynes who specialised in the assessment of missing persons but whose identity was not revealed. The head of Special Branch at Thames Valley Police – effectively the police arm of the intelligence and security services – was also present. This was the first time Special Branch is known to have been involved in the operation, which had by now been given the codename operation “Mason”.
SAM – What happened at the briefing?
MILES - Page was told at what time Dr Kelly had left home; what he was wearing; and given an insight into his mood plus general background information about what had happened to him over the previous two weeks and what impact those events might have had on him. At that stage he decided that he was overseeing a missing person investigation, albeit one with possibly sinister undertones.
SAM – And what did the police expect may have happened at this early stage to Dr Kelly.
MILES - His chief concerns were that Dr Kelly might have become ill while out walking, or had had an accident. He also believed it was possible that Dr Kelly had been abducted, though hypothetically by whom has never been established. However, notably absent from his list of potential occurrences, carefully compiled by Thames Valley Police in conjunction with Dr Kelly’s family plus senior police colleagues, was anything to do with suicide or death by whatever means.
SAM – So the police started a ground search.
MILES – Yes, ACC Page asked the police search adviser and the sergeant from Milton Keynes with specialist knowledge of missing persons to make an assessment of where to begin looking for Dr Kelly, based on what his family had said were his favourite walks. A list of six places was identified. Harrowdown Hill was second on that list.
Page also organised for Special Branch officers from the Metropolitan Police to visit the three offices in London from which Dr Kelly was known to work, the thinking was he might be found in one of them. Page knew that, as Dr Kelly was a government employee, it would be easier to access these offices with the assistance of Special Branch officers.
SAM – So by the early hours searches were happening in London and near the Kelly's home in Oxfordshire.
MILES – Yes, and by 6am DS Webb, who had been rung two hours earlier and asked to assist with the search for Dr Kelly, had just left Abingdon Police Station. He had been briefed by Sgt Morris about Dr Kelly’s disappearance, and was making his way to the Kellys’ house to try and gain a better understanding of why Dr Kelly might have disappeared.
And at the same time, a Detective Constable Graham Coe also of Thames Valley Police CID was called in from Wantage Police Station, which was quite nearby, and soon afterwards he began making door-to door inquiries near Dr Kelly’s house.
SAM – And what did DS Webb report about his first encounter with the family?
MILES - When DS Webb arrived at the Kellys’ house at 7.15am, he found that the family believed that Dr Kelly was alive. They were even in an “upbeat” mood, in his opinion, and were apparently under the impression, like ACC Page, that he might just have become ill somewhere.
SAM – And thats a detail that am I right in thinking was overlooked when it came to the official inquiry into these hours of the search?
MILES – That's right.
SAM – So at 7.15 am, just an hour or so before Dr Kelly's body was eventually discovered, didn't the team who would eventually find him join in the search?
MILES – Yes that’s right, at the same time as DS Webb was with the Kellys, volunteer searchers Paul Chapman and Louise Holmes arrived at Abingdon Police station to be briefed about their task.
They were given a photograph and description of Dr Kelly and were asked to search the area around Harrowdown Hill including the track that runs alongside it from the village of Longworth to the River Thames. The search helicopter had already covered this territory from the air a few hours previously but Holmes and Chapman they drove there and set off on foot with Holmes’s dog, Brock. They were the only volunteer searchers who were looking for Dr Kelly but as you say they were to play a key role in the investigation.
SAM – And at this point the whole operation was ramping up in size very quickly.
MILES - Yes. Also at 7.15am, PC Dean Franklin, normally based at the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, arrived at Abingdon Police Station for a briefing from another senior officer. Franklin lived in Windsor, some 50 miles away, indicating just how important Operation Mason had become. He was shortly joined by his colleague PC Martyn Sawyer, who was specially trained to search major crime scenes and murder scenes and also based at the Royal Lodge at Windsor Great Park.
Franklin told Sawyer that they were looking for a “high risk” missing person, signifying that by this time fears for Dr Kelly had reached their peak and the possibility that he had come to some harm was now considered greater than it had been seven hours previously.
SAM – Do you know why it was suddenly considered high risk?
MILES - No I don’t. It's not clear what, apart from the passing of time, had determined the police to raise Dr Kelly’s risk status.
SAM – So were all these officers drafted in to be boots on the ground and help the search?
MILES - Like the volunteer searchers, Franklin and Sawyer were handed a photograph and description of Dr Kelly before discussing where they would begin looking for him.
By 7.30am a search pattern was established. About 40 officers were asked to start combing a wider area around the Kellys’ house than had previously been covered. A mounted unit from Milton Keynes was also on its way to help, so was an underwater search team.
SAM – And was this when the police released a first statement?
MILES – Yes, at about 8am, Thames Valley Police were preparing to publicise Dr Kelly’s disappearance. Acting Superintendent David Purnell, of Abingdon Police, said in the statement which the force released shortly before 8.30am:
SAM - So here is the statement - “We are concerned for Dr Kelly's welfare and need to hear from anyone who recalls seeing a man of this description in the area since yesterday afternoon. Due to the bad weather and the fact it is unlikely he was wearing a coat he would have been distinctive and people who may have seen him in the area are urged to contact police as soon as possible.”
MILES - This was odd. Firstly, the weather was not bad, though neither was it brilliant for high summer, a little light rain having fallen overnight. Secondly, when Dr Kelly was eventually found he was wearing a Barbour coat. Not only that, but his house had been searched twice by police during the early hours and his family had been spoken to by several police officers at some length. The straightforward matter of whether he had been wearing his coat had been overlooked by them.
SAM – so he was wearing a coat when he was found, what did the police learn he was wearing from his wife and from searching his house?
MILES - Records show that the police said initially in their statement that Dr Kelly was last seen wearing an off-white cotton shirt which was possibly striped; blue jeans; a brown leather belt; and brown shoes.
SAM – But no mention of a jacket.
MILES – No. And they also described him as an avid walker with good local knowledge of the many footpaths surrounding his house, and said that it was not unusual for him to walk for two or three hours at a time, but it was unusual for him to do so alone.
SAM – OK, so the search got underway and it was fairly early on that the discovery was made.
MILES - At 8.30am DS Webb returned from the Kellys’ house to Abingdon Police Station to give Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page a progress report, leaving family liaison officer WPC Karen Roberts with the Kellys.
According to Webb, after a conversation with Page lasting 15 or 20 minutes, a call came in to the police station confirming that a body had been found at Harrowdown Hill by the volunteer searchers, Paul Chapman and Louise Holmes. It appeared to match Dr Kelly’s description.
And so on hearing of this, Page sent Webb back to the Kellys’ house to tell them the grim news in person. Of course, although the body appeared to the volunteer searchers to be that of Dr Kelly, based on the photograph of him which they had been given, nobody had been able to confirm as much by that stage, even unofficially. This is known because the police have confirmed that there was no wallet and no identifying documentation on Dr Kelly at Harrowdown Hill.
SAM – So tell me how the volunteer searchers had actually found the body.
MILES - Chapman and Holmes had only managed to locate Dr Kelly’s body with the help of Holmes’s dog, Brock. Having searched the track towards Harrowdown Hill, and then the southern edge of the wood, they walked as far as the River Thames before deciding to check in the wood itself.
SAM- And just to quickly describe Harrowdown Hill a little bit, it’s a huge piece of open farmland with the hill itself being a small promontory in the middle that's covered in trees.
MILES – Yes, the volunteer searchers walked the north boundary of the wood until the dog, Brock, picked up a scent within it. They approached the wood from the east, whereupon Brock signalled it had a scent to follow and ran ahead. It quickly returned to Holmes, who was a few hundred yards into the wood by this point, barking to indicate that it had found something. The dog then lay down, leaving Holmes to go further into the wood alone. From a distance, she saw what she described as the body of a man slumped against a tree. She did not touch the body. Her colleague, Paul Chapman, was some way behind so she shouted to him to ring the police.
SAM – Slumped meaning sitting with his back against the trunk of the tree.
MILES – Yes that’s how she described it. Chapman tried to contact the control team but the mobile numbers he had been given went straight to answerphone. He then rang 999 and asked to be put through to Abingdon Police Station. The operator wouldn’t transfer him so he asked to be rung back immediately. Within a couple of minutes he heard from an officer and was able to report the location of the body. The discovery was logged as having been made at 9.20am.
SAM – And how did the police respond when they'd finally received the news?
MILES - Within a couple of minutes three policemen – Detective Constable Graham Coe, Detective Constable Shields, plus a third man who Thames Valley Police have refused to name – were at the scene. Coe volunteered to stand guard alone over the body until more help came. It’s not known where Shields and the “third man” went.
SAM – And Coe was a local CID officer, so plain clothes and used to dealing with serious crimes presumably.
MILES – That’s right. On hearing of the discovery, the police also rang for an ambulance. At about 9.45am paramedic Vanessa Hunt and ambulance technician David Bartlett parked three quarters of a mile from the wood – the closest they could get to it – and encountered several armed police. Having been told they were on their way to a “Kilo 1” call – a call involving a dead body – they immediately assumed there had been a shooting.
They were directed up the bridle path to the wood on foot carrying heavy equipment including an oxygen tank and defibrillator machine, and led to the scene. The two police constables, PCs Franklin and Sawyer, had arrived before them and were fixing aluminium posts into the ground to indicate the route they had taken up to the body.
The paramedic team lifted Dr Kelly’s eyelids to check for pupil reaction and felt his neck for a pulse. They then placed heart monitor paddles used for defibrillation onto his chest on top of his shirt to check for signs of life. They declared Dr Kelly dead at 10.07am.
SAM – What was happening at the Kellys house at this point?
MILES - Back at the Kellys’ house, DS Webb, who had broken the news to the Kelly family that a body had been found, began a further search of the property. He examined Dr Kelly’s briefcase and found a sealed letter dated 9 July 2003 addressed to Dr Kelly from Richard Hatfield, personnel director of the Ministry of Defence, headed “Discussions with the media”. He took this back to the police station along with a notebook; some business cards; various papers relating to Dr Kelly’s appearances before the select committees; his 2003 diary; plus a number of booklets. One was entitled “Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction”, another was called “The Decision To Go To War In Iraq, Volumes 1 and 2”; and a third was “Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction”.
SAM – But I suppose when something happens to someone of Dr Kelly’s importance its normal procedure to quickly locate and remove any sensitive information.
MILES – Yes and later that morning, Thames Valley Police’s Special Branch unit was ordered to conduct a yet more detailed search of Dr Kelly’s house and to remove anything which was considered to be of interest, including “documents of a secret nature”, because Special Branch officers are cleared to handle such material. Eventually, five computers plus a handheld digital device had been removed from Dr Kelly’s study by the police Hi Tech Crime Unit along with a zip drive and some zip discs, a stack of floppy discs, some CDs, three mobile phones, a micro cassette recorder, and two memory cards.
SAM – So a body was discovered but was not officially identified as being Dr Kelly and his home office was emptied of sensitive material. What was happening with the Prime Minister as his flight continued over the Pacific?
MILES - Well Tony Blair had been glued to the phone speaking to colleagues in London to find out what was going on. Among those he spoke to was Sir Kevin Tebbit, Dr Kelly’s ultimate boss at the MoD. He also spoke to Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary and the man who had played such an instrumental role in making life uncomfortable for Dr Kelly over the previous two weeks following his admission that he had spoken to Andrew Gilligan.
Perhaps surprisingly, Blair appears to have gone back to sleep after the initial flurry of phone calls he made and received. It was apparently left to his adviser, Sir David Manning, who was also on the flight, to wake him up and tell him the worst when an update on the situation came through from the UK.
SAM – And evidently other senior members of Blair’s government were following things closely too?
MILES – Yes, in particular by Blair’s friend and former flatmate Lord Falconer of Thoroton, who had been appointed Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs the previous month.
In his autobiography, published seven years after Dr Kelly’s death, Blair described the scene as follows: “In the middle of the night Sir David Manning woke me. ‘Very bad news…David Kelly has been found dead,’ he said, ‘suspected suicide.’”
SAM – So Blair conflated the discovery of the body with the immediate addition of it being a suspected suicide?
MILES - Because Blair was flying between Washington and Tokyo, he was crossing the international dateline, meaning that his sense of time might perhaps have been confused.
If the official version of events is true, however, it now seems highly unlikely that Sir David Manning could have been told much before 10am London time – roughly nine hours into Blair’s flight - that Dr Kelly was dead, let alone that his death was a “suspected suicide”.
SAM – Is there an explanation for this?
MILES – Well it takes some explaining. So as I mentioned, the two volunteer searchers who, officially, were the first to find Dr Kelly’s body at about 9.20am did not touch it or spend enough time near it to know the manner of his death. They merely observed that Dr Kelly looked dead and were the first – officially – to inform the police of this. As I said, they did so by phone a couple of minutes after making the discovery.
SAM – Then the two CID officers arrived.
MILES – Yes, Coe and Shields were the next people at the scene, arriving on foot at about 9.30am. Coe was with the body by himself for about 25 minutes. He would have had ample opportunity to inspect it more closely than the volunteer searchers had done and presumably to notice that Dr Kelly appeared to have a bloodied wrist but no other obvious signs of injury. Having seen a knife lying by Dr Kelly’s side, it is quite probable that Coe assumed that Dr Kelly had died from a self-inflicted wound and equally likely that he or perhaps his colleague DC Shields rang a senior officer or Thames Valley Police HQ to let them know of this.
SAM – So observations could have been made and reported up the chain of command.
MILES - Assuming what Blair wrote in his memoir is accurate, and working on the basis that the official story is true, it does not seem fanciful to suggest that the following chain of events or something very like them therefore occurred: DC Coe or DC Shields, or perhaps another Thames Valley Police colleague, would have contacted Thames Valley Police shortly after 9.30am, at the earliest, to report their belief that Dr Kelly had committed suicide. Next, Falconer or one of his colleagues would have been rung in London by someone from Thames Valley Police and told about this. Somebody from Falconer’s office would then have had to contact the plane on which Blair was flying in order to alert Sir David Manning to the situation.
SAM – Ok, so there's a lot of supposition going on immediately after the body was found, but what else strikes you as odd about this chain of events?
MILES – Well, it remains very difficult to understand why Falconer – or whichever official in Whitehall was first told that the police were searching for Dr Kelly - was even involved in this matter at this very early stage. True, Dr Kelly had been in the eye of a media storm thanks to events we’ve already discussed to do with Alastair Campbell, Andrew Gilligan and the BBC, but that does not explain why a senior political figure was personally involved in the police operation to find Dr Kelly to the extent that he was being briefed by police so soon after the discovery of his body. Who instructed Thames Valley Police to tell Falconer, or one of his colleagues, the minute Dr Kelly was found?
SAM – And it also seems strange that conclusions were being drawn about how he had died before any medical examinations had been carried out.
MILES – I would say it sounds deeply strange. But after these three phone calls had been made, Sir David would have been in a position to wake up Blair to break the news to him, just as Blair described in his memoir, of Dr Kelly’s “suspected suicide”. And, conveying all of this information during each of these phone calls would have taken a bit of time. So I think it’s fair to suggest there was a window of about 40 minutes from the point at which the searchers found the body in an Oxfordshire wood to Blair hearing about the death while cruising at 35,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean.
But, it is really important to remember that the details that Blair would have been given initially would have been sketchy at best, being based solely on the opinion of Coe or whichever of his colleagues first saw Dr Kelly’s dead body at about 9.30am. Apart from the volunteer searchers, nobody except the police had seen the body by that point – if the official version of events is taken at face value.
SAM – But Blair was swift to act on this patchy information.
MILES – Very swift. Thanks to Blair’s memoir it is also known that he and Falconer then spoke about the situation in a separate phone call in which they decided that they were going to hold a public inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death.
SAM – We'll come to the nature of the inquiry later in the series. And specifically the way it was called a “public” inquiry but actually put great limitations on a full and proper investigation. But at this stage regardless of how the inquiry would end up working, it seems like Blair jumped the gun to put it mildly by deciding on this before Dr Kelly’s body had even been properly identified.
MILES – Absolutely, and of this, Blair wrote mysteriously in his autobiography: “I often go over the decision to hold the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death, taken in those early hours, exhausted, on the flight across the Pacific, by means of the unsecured plane phone. I spoke to Charlie Falconer…He agreed to find a judge.”
SAM – Falconer was able to expand slightly on what he and Blair talked about when he spoke about it publicly a year later [in June 2004]. He told the House of Commons Public Administration select committee:
“I had a conversation with the Prime Minister…in which we discussed the possibility of setting up an inquiry into the events leading up to the tragic death of Dr Kelly.”
Then, striking a more tentative note, he added:
“I think at the time I had the conversation the position was that Dr Kelly’s body had been found in Oxfordshire although I do not think it had been made public that that was the position.”
SAM - The time at which these key conversations were held, and who knew what and when, has never been revealed by Falconer. The Press Association newswire was the first to report on 18 July that a body had been found at Harrowdown Hill. It did so at 11.05am meaning that, as long as Falconer’s memory was correct, he and Blair spoke some time before then.
Falconer went on:
“I agreed as a result of the conversation I had with the Prime Minister that we would seek to find a senior judge to head the inquiry, without drafting any terms of reference.”
SAM – So what do these Statements from Falconer show us Miles?
MILES - This all but proves categorically that a tired, probably jet-lagged Blair, flying 35,000 ft above ground, instructed Falconer by phone sometime between 10am and 11.05am that there should be a public inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death – a public inquiry, we are expected to believe, almost certainly established thanks to nothing more than a policeman looking at a dead body that was assumed to be Dr Kelly’s, noticing he had an injured wrist, seeing a knife nearby, a penknife at that, and merely joining the dots as he saw them to conclude that he had killed himself.
Whether or not the original source of the suicide story – possibly Coe or one of his colleagues - was accurate is irrelevant at this point. What is worth emphasising is that, according to the official version of events, before midday no medical professional had examined Dr Kelly’s body, so nobody knew exactly how he had died.
SAM – But he had been treated by a paramedic team at Harrowdown Hill.
MILES - Two paramedics had seen the body, but their job was to do nothing more than confirm the fact of death. Having done so at 10.07am, they left the scene shortly afterwards.
SAM – Did they make any observations about his manner of death?
MILES - We will look at them in a future episode but its safe to say at no stage have these experienced professionals ever thought that Dr Kelly did commit suicide, based on what they saw that morning.
SAM - So as experienced professionals who had seen Dr Kelly’s body with their own eyes, the paramedics weren’t sure how he had actually died. What made Sir David Manning and, in turn, Tony Blair so certain this was a “suspected suicide”?
MILES – It’s a good question. As we've mentioned, no note of intent was found with Dr Kelly’s body, and he had no identification with him, so not only was it being presumed by the prime minister from a plane thousands of miles away from Oxfordshire that Dr Kelly had committed suicide, but also that the body found actually was Dr Kelly.
SAM - It seems astonishing that so many assumptions were being made at this very early stage, and equally extraordinary that Blair’s immediate instinct was to go to the trouble of setting up a public inquiry into a matter about which nobody had anything approaching a full understanding. Yet things started moving very rapidly, didn’t they?
MILES - Speaking in 2004, Falconer also told the Public Administration select committee that after his call to Blair ended, he spoke to the permanent secretary in his department, Sir Hayden Phillips, a hugely powerful career civil servant. Separately, he also spoke to the senior law lord, Lord Bingham. As a result of these chats, it was decided that Lord Hutton, a 72-year-old law lord and former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, was the man to head the public inquiry which Blair decided he wanted. Falconer told the committee: “After some thought and discussion, Lord Hutton was a name that emerged quite quickly as a suitable person to do it.”
SAM – And Falconer wasted no time contacting Hutton. Is that right?
MILES - There is no evidence that Falconer had any idea where Hutton was on that particular Friday morning. Indeed, as 18 July 2003 was the final day of the parliamentary session for the House of Lords, it would have been quite possible that Hutton might already be abroad on holiday, or in his native Ulster, or perhaps just at home in London.
But I have been told by staff who worked in the House of Lords at the time that, as a law lord, Hutton was seldom seen there (except on what was known as Judgment Day – always a Wednesday – when he and whoever of his 11 colleagues was required to do so would deliver their legal judgments).
SAM – But Falconer's luck was in.
MILES - Yes, most conveniently, Hutton apparently happened to be working in the Law Lords Corridor, a group of offices on the second floor of the House of Lords.
SAM – And Falconer wasted no time in contacting him.
MILES - It is claimed that Falconer rang Hutton and, having found him to be in the Lords, asked him to come downstairs to his office on the first floor. Hutton later described the events of that morning [in 2004 to the House of Commons Public Administration select committee as follows]:
SAM - so this is what Hutton said - “Lord Falconer telephoned me. I was in my chambers at the House of Lords. He asked me to go to see him in the House of Lords, and I did that, and he then told me of the discovery of the body of a person who it was believed was Dr Kelly; and he said that the government had decided to hold an inquiry into the circumstances of the death if it was confirmed that the body found was that of Dr Kelly. He asked me to be the chairman, and I thought it was my duty to agree to that request. So it all happened in a very short space of time.”
MILES - It’s worth adding that Hutton has also revealed that he was rung by Falconer at about midday.
This means that over the course of the two hours following his conversation with Blair, Falconer held a meeting with Sir Haydn Phillips, spoke to Lord Bingham, then decided that Hutton should head the inquiry, rang Hutton, found him to be working in the Lords even though he did not usually do so on a Friday, and invited him to chair the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death – an undertaking to which Hutton was apparently able to agree on the spot without hesitation.
SAM - The wheels of power were certainly turning remarkably effectively in the Whitehall machine. But is this sequence of events really plausible? Nobody by this stage had, formally, the faintest knowledge as to how Dr Kelly had died.
MILES - Precisely. The question is how did Blair, Falconer, Phillips and Bingham know that Dr Kelly hadn’t had a heart attack while walking, tripped, and accidentally cut his wrist? Come to that, how did they know that Dr Kelly hadn’t been the victim of a random assault and been killed by a psychopath? How did they know Dr Kelly hadn’t been murdered in a premeditated attack by somebody who knew him – or who didn’t know him?
The answer is they didn’t know because they could not possibly have known. Yet the speed of their reaction, and the decision taken to hold a public inquiry, suggests that somebody had some advance warning before 9.20am, when the volunteer searchers found his body, that Dr Kelly was dead.
This hugely sensitive incident was addressed by the government with such speed as to suggest that, in realising the potential scandal of Dr Kelly’s sudden and mysterious death, the government prejudged its nature before any official police or medical investigation had taken place, let alone the Hutton Inquiry getting under way.
SAM – So well before midday on 18 July, it seems that the government had determined that Dr Kelly had killed himself as opposed to his having been unlawfully killed or dying of natural causes or something like that.
MILES – Yes, it was immediately labelled a suicide. Falconer also spoke to Alastair Campbell on the day Dr Kelly’s body was found. Campbell had been with Blair in Washington the day before, Thursday 17 July, but had decided not to accompany him to Japan, returning to London instead. According to Campbell’s diary, he landed at Heathrow Airport at about 9am on Friday 18 July and while waiting to get off the plane received a message from Whitehall’s media monitoring unit that Dr Kelly had disappeared. This was followed by another message asking him to ring the Downing Street duty clerk urgently. He then learned that a body had been found. According to Campbell he was rung by Blair sometime after 11am. Blair told him: “We should announce a judicial inquiry now.” Campbell also noted in his diary: “Charlie Falconer [Lord Chancellor]…called me re the inquiry.”
As Campbell tells it, Falconer and Blair spent part of their respective phone calls to him urging him not to step down as Downing Street spin doctor, as he had apparently been planning to do, because of how the timing would be perceived by the public. Campbell wrote: TB [Blair] said it would be a disaster for me if I did that. Falconer…said I would be mad to do it.”
So persuading Campbell not to quit certainly shows that in the heat of a crisis, Blair and Falconer were able to keep their heads cool enough to carry on thinking one move ahead of their critics.
SAM – So just to recap, within 21 hours of Dr Kelly slipping out of his front door in Southmoor without saying goodbye to his wife as he left for his 3 o‘clock stroll, a public inquiry into his death had been ordered personally by Tony Blair while in transit flying across the Pacific and Lord Hutton had agreed to chair it – even though, technically, it had not yet even been established as fact that he had died, never mind when, where or how his life had ended.
MILES – That’s right. You have to ask: what made Tony Blair, who was thousands of miles away on a plane, so sure of the circumstances of Dr Kelly’s sudden death? And why did he feel this urgent need to hold a public inquiry into it?
Was it just David Manning, who, we are told, woke him up to tell him of the QUOTE “suspected suicide”? Or was it something else?
SAM - Some have argued that by setting up the Hutton Inquiry Blair was simply following his well-honed media instincts and knew that when he landed in Tokyo a few hours later it would look best if he had something tangible to say to reporters about this appalling news about a man who had been so badly treated by his government – something which could also be used as a shield to hide behind. What could be better than a public inquiry?
MILES - Sure, but wouldn’t he have looked very foolish if it transpired Dr Kelly had been murdered in a random attack or had suffered an accident of some kind? Setting up the Hutton Inquiry so quickly was certainly a risk when you consider that nobody - officially - had a clue how this man had died. The point being, it might not have been necessary to go to the trouble of holding a public inquiry if there was some other explanation for his death.
SAM - And this takes us back to what you call the unofficial story.
MILES - Yes. I think the possibility that Blair, Falconer and Hutton to name but three had a head-start on events cannot be excluded – particularly, for example, when the police had said Dr Kelly had been found lying face down, even though the volunteer searchers who discovered his body had never reported any such thing.
SAM - I know there’s a lot around the response to Dr Kelly’s death that you find suspicious and we’ll go through all the detail surrounding the forensic situation at Harrowdown hill later in the series but beyond those many inconsistencies that you have found you think that the establishing of this public inquiry so quickly is suspicious in itself?
MILES - Yes I am very suspicious. Some kind of early warning that Dr Kelly had died might have signaled to the government that establishing a public inquiry was its best route out of a career-threatening crisis. Don’t forget, Tony Blair’s entire reputation was now on the line. The stakes couldn’t have been higher.
SAM - In the next episode we look at some of the strange inconsistencies concerning the findings from Dr Kelly’s post-mortem. And we investigate how the Hutton inquiry was designed to obscure rather than reveal what really happened to Dr Kelly.