Unanswered questions

We still aren’t sure why, two summers ago, Dr David Kelly killed himself. I don’t believe for one moment he was murdered — cui bono? And, for example, I have no doubt the mysterious men in black near the scene really were policemen.

Yet it does remain puzzling. The general view seems to be that he was a man who prized above everything his integrity and his honesty. However, faced with the loss of his job and pension he dissembled about what he had told Andrew Gilligan. At the meeting with the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, he realised he had been rumbled — he suffered a terrible blow to his self-esteem, and he knew that his life was about to unravel.

(Sitting in that committee room, I entirely failed to spot the fact that he had suddenly come to this awful conclusion. Kelly spoke in little more than a whisper, and I fantasised that, with Andrew Gilligan in the Charing Cross Hotel, he had been equally inaudible. ‘They can serve us lunch in four to five minutes,’ he might have muttered, and Gilligan could have heard ‘launch in 45 minutes’.)

But if Dr Kelly had been kicked out of the Civil Service he would — contrary to the view of those who imagine we live in a close approximation to a police state — have been f