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.

Mrs Kelly's dubious testimony (2)

Dr Kelly was a member of the Hinds Head cribbage team, the Hinds Head being a short distance from the Kelly's home and in the adjoining village of Kingston Bagpuize.

In my last post I recalled Mrs Kelly saying that her husband talked to journalist Nick Rufford at the garden gate and that not long after that conversation the Kellys decided that evening to leave their house for a while to avoid the press.  Once that decision had been made they packed some luggage and within ten minutes were gone.

This is the 9th of July but on 22 July Steve Ward, the landlord of the Hinds Head, sent an email to Keith Jones of Thames Valley Police.  In it he clearly states that David Kelly was present at the pub for a friendly game of cribbage on the night of the ninth. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20090128221550/http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/tvp/tvp_3_0100.pdf

He clearly uses the word "night" so we can exclude this particular game being played at lunchtime.  In any case the ninth was a Wednesday, not the weekend so the friendly game wouldn't be played at lunchtime.

So at sometime during that evening a cribbage game took place there in which David Kelly participated.  Many if not most people will be aware that pub activities tend to take place in the second half of the evening, after 8 o'clock say, when people have had a chance to shower and have a bite to eat.  We know that Dr Kelly's evening was split up by the arrival of Nick Rufford so that he definitely wasn't playing crib at 7.30!

This is Mrs Kelly's account of the 9th up until the arrival of Nick Rufford:

Q. Did he go to London?
A. Yes, he was supposed to be going to London so I was quite surprised when he said he was going to work in the garden all day. Again he got on to his vegetable patch and was working in a rather lacklustre way that particular day but he did receive and make some phone
calls as well.
Q. Did you have any visitors that day?
A. Yes, we did in the evening.
Q. What time did you have a visitor?
A. Not absolutely certain. It was something like 7.30 or something like that.
Q. Who was that visitor?
A. It turned out to be Nick Rufford.
Q. Where was Dr Kelly?
A. We had both been sitting out having our coffee in the garden after dinner that evening. I was watering the plants and David went to put some tools away he had been using during the day which involved him going into the yard which lay between our house and the main road outside.
Q. And were you aware that anyone else was there?
A. I suddenly looked up and there was David talking to somebody. I had not got my glasses on so I moved a little bit closer with the hosepipe to see who it was and I recognised it as Nick Rufford. Nick had been to our house before but only by arrangement, he never just turned up before this. No journalist just turned up before this, so I was extremely alarmed about that.


Prior to 7.30 then we see perfectly normal activities of a married couple on a summer's evening: having dinner, sitting outside to drink their coffee, David putting some tools away whilst his wife was watering the plants.  Dr Kelly was clearly not playing cribbage at this time!


Further confirmation of Dr Kelly playing cribbage on 9 July can be read in this schedule (no 47) on the Attorney General's website http://www.attorneygeneral.gov.uk/Publications/Documents/Schedule%20of%20responses%20to%20issues%20raised.pdf

Mr Dingemans asks where the Kellys drove to after leaving their home that evening.  This is the exchange:

Q. Where did you drive to?
A. We headed along the road towards the M4 and got to --  about 9.30, 9.45 we got as far as Weston-Super-Mare and decided to pull in at a hotel there for the night.


So, there we have it -
1. The unsworn testimony given by Mrs Kelly directly contradicts the Steve Ward email.
2. Thames Valley Police either fail to notice this contradiction or ignore it.
3. Although the email is on the Hutton website Hutton ignores it.
4.  It would have been useful to have heard evidence from one or two members of the crib team. 

Mrs Kelly's dubious testimony (1)

In arriving at a conclusion as to whether or not Dr Kelly committed suicide it is I think fairly self evident that the testimony from his wife would be of critical importance.  On Monday 1 September 2003 Mrs Kelly was questioned for 65 minutes by senior counsel James Dingemans.  At an inquest the bereaved spouse would undoubtedly have been visible to the coroner and all in the courtroom; not so with Mrs Kelly (nor incidentally with her daughter Rachel who also gave evidence), she was allowed to give evidence by audio link although perversely she could see Mr Dingemans.  Yet we have Hutton, in the attachment to his letter of 3 September 2010 to the Attorney General, saying:

Under section 17A of the Coroner's Act 1988 the public inquiry took the place of an inquest and carried out the functions of an inquest.

On 1 August, following Hutton's opening statement at the Inquiry, Geoffrey Robertson QC made a submission on behalf of two TV companies: ITN and Sky.  They wished to have some of the witness evidence televised.  In his submission Mr Robertson stated:

My submission is that it is important not that the public should read every word of evidence but they should hear the tone of voice in which that evidence is delivered, see the body language and demeanour of the witness who is speaking it, because very often, as one knows, tone of voice, demeanour and so on may give a very different impact and truth to a particular utterance, and very often it alters it considerably. In order to appreciate evidence, as your Lordship knows, the Court of Appeal are always saying: well, the trial judge saw the witnesses.

Although Hutton dismissed the application Mr Robertson makes an excellent point about being able to observe body language and demeanour.

I am not suggesting that Mrs Kelly was reading from a script for instance in giving her responses, the point is that we don't know.  For such a key witness it would be imperative that she was visible anyway.

A story that Mrs Kelly might give evidence by video link to avoid travelling to London appeared in the Daily Mail during the preceding week http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-194201 /Kellys-widow-testify-video-link.html  Although she wasn't visible to those in the courtroom there was contemporary news footage of Mrs Kelly, Rachel and Rachel's fiance David Wilkins approaching the building.

Mrs Kelly's testimony confirms that her husband was going to be named on the evening of 9 July as the mole who, in part at least, was the informant in Andrew Gilligan's controversial broadcast on Radio 4 on 29 May 2003.

Sunday Times journalist Nick Rufford visited Dr Kelly at about 7.30 on the evening of the 9th and we are told had a conversation at the garden gate.  This is the relevant exchange between Mr Dingemans and Mrs Kelly:

Q. And did you speak with Dr Kelly after the conversation?
A. Yes, I did. He came over to me and said that Nick had said that Murdoch had offered hotel accommodation for both of us away from the media spotlight in return for
an article by David. He, David, was to be named that night and that the press were on their way in droves. That was the language David used, I am not sure Nick used that. 

Events subsequent to the Rufford conversation went like this according to Mrs Kelly:


Q. Having heard that the press were on their way in droves, what did you do?
A. We hovered a bit. I said I knew a house that was available to us, if we needed it, down in the south-west of England, and he did not pick up on that initially.
Q. Did you remind him of that?
A. Yes, I did. The phone rang inside the house and he went in to answer it, came out and he said: I think we will be needing that house after all. The MoD press office have just rung to say we ought to leave the house and quickly so that we would not be followed by the press.
Q. So the phone call was from the Ministry of Defence?
A. It was the Ministry of Defence press office.
Q. And they said you ought to leave?
A. Yes. Whether he had offered anything else in the interim I do not know, that was never mentioned. 
Q. Right. But you decided to go down to this place that you knew --
A. Indeed. We immediately went into the house and packed and within about 10 minutes we had left the house.

This is obviously quite a dramatic turn of events but is what Mrs Kelly described true?  There is some support for Mrs Kelly's story, particularly from Rachel.  But, as will be seen in my following posts, the panicked flight from the Kelly home and subsequent events would mean that the evidence from the following witnesses is well nigh certainly incorrect: email evidence from Steve Ward, oral evidence from Nick Rufford, Rod Godfrey and Roger Avery.

Hutton resolutely failed to resolve the conflicts in evidence, in the case of Rod Godfrey the latter even pointed out to Hutton that Dr Kelly couldn't in effect be in two places at once.  He might just as well have saved his breath.

The following posts will look at the problems of Mrs Kelly's testimony in the light of other people's evidence.