David Kelly: the rise of a conspiracy theory

If the results of opinion polls are to be trusted, the proportion of people in the United Kingdom who believe that the biological warfare expert David Kelly committed suicide declined significantly between February 2007 and August 2010.

Dr Kelly was 59 when he was found dead in woods near his Oxfordshire home in July 2003. Three days earlier he had been questioned by MPs at a hearing of the Foreign Affairs select committee, after he was revealed as the source behind a BBC report claiming that the government had 'sexed up' its dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. When his body was found many believed that he driven to suicide by the manner in which his name had been leaked to the press and by the pressure he had subsequently been put under. Others, however, believed he had been murdered by government agents or by persons unknown.

One of the reasons the Hutton Inquiry was set up in 2003 was to settle this question once and for all. Indeed the government ruled that the inquiry would actually take the place of full inquest. If government's purpose was to put a stop to conspiracy theories, however, it failed.

In February 2007, when BBC2 broadcast a programme about Dr Kelly in their series The Conspiracy Files, the programme commissioned an opinion poll to establish how the public viewed his death. Even at this stage only 40% of those questioned believed that he had killed himself. When, in August 2010, the Daily Mail commissioned a similar poll the percentage who believed Kelly committed suicide has fallen from 40% to 20%. On Monday 16 August the Mail carried a banner headline on its front page in which this finding was loudly proclaimed: ' Dr Kelly: Just one in five believes it was suicide as medical report calls official verdict “impossible”.'

Dark actors

The apparent decline in the numbers of those who accept the official verdict on Dr Kelly's death should not be surprising. This is because, over the past seven years, propagating the belief that Dr Kelly was murdered, or might have been murdered, has become for some people the equivalent of a religious crusade. The Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker held this belief so fervently that he that he resigned from his post of shadow environment secretary in order to research a book. This was serialised in the Daily Mail in October 2007 under the headline 'Why I know weapons expert Dr David Kelly was murdered, by the MP who spent a year investigating his death.'

Rowena Thursby, a former publishing executive and lucid internet campaigner, has also suggested that 'dark actors' were involved in Dr Kelly's death and that this 'may have been murder made to look like suicide'. For a number of years now, as the leading figure in something she calls 'The Kelly Investigation Group', she appears to have dedicated her life to persuading others that a full inquest into Dr Kelly's death should be held. She helped to co-ordinate a group of six doctors who put their names to letters which have been published prominently in reputable newspapers (including the Guardian). These letters, signed by physicians who may not themselves be conspiracy theorists, but whose views have fed the folly of those who are, have persuaded many to doubt the conclusion of the Hutton inquiry that Dr Kelly committed suicide.

~ more... ~