Thursday 10 May 2012

Mrs Kelly's dubious testimony (3)

At the Hutton Inquiry Mrs Kelly states that she and her husband left their home in a rush on the evening of the 9th of July.  Mrs Kelly knew about somewhere that was available to them in Cornwall where they could evade the press.  That evening they stayed at Weston-Super-Mare which is only just off the M5 motorway.  At the Hutton Inquiry we read this:

Q. Which town did you drive to?
A. Weston-Super-Mare.
Q. You stayed --
A. We stayed overnight. We had a rather sleepless night but we stayed overnight there en route to Cornwall.
Q. You were staying in a hotel?
A. We were.
Q. You had breakfast there the next morning?
A. We did, in the main dining room. We had asked for The Times to be delivered. We just read it as we finished our breakfast. We just read a couple of articles that were about David.
Q. What were the articles about David saying?
A. The first one if I remember correctly -- I am sure I do -- was written by Nick Rufford giving a brief outline of his contact with David, naming him in his article. Then there was another article inside with a photograph of David and a run down of his career given I presume by an MoD source naming him as a middle ranking official.



So she is sure that there was an article by Nick Rufford in The Times of 10 July.


Nick Rufford makes a second appearance at the Inquiry, on 24 September.  Junior counsel Peter Knox asks him this:


Q. I think it has also been suggested you may have been one of the writers or a writer of an article that appeared in The Times on 10th July, that is to say the Thursday of that week. Is that right?

Mr Rufford's answer:


A. That is not true. I do not write for the daily Times, I write only for the Sunday Times.

 It's very interesting to compare Mrs Kelly's description of a second article with this on the Hutton website:  http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090128221550/http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/med/med_2_0001to0003.pdf

Put simply there is no comparison at all!  As stand alone evidence what Mrs Kelly was saying about the articles in The Times cannot be right.  But it has to be allied with the fact that Mrs Kelly says they were reading the paper at Weston-Super-Mare on the Thursday morning.  My last post demonstrates that if such was the case then Dr Kelly couldn't have been playing cribbage with his friends the previous evening.

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