Kelly was a pawn in battle with BBC, says family’s lawyer

BRITISH Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon was yesterday labelled a liar and a hypocrite by the lawyer for the family of David Kelly.

In his closing submission to the Hutton Inquiry, Jeremy Gompertz QC accused the British government of treating the weapons expert as a “pawn” in its bitter battle with the BBC over the alleged “sexing up” of the Iraq weapons dossier.

He said Mr Hoon had been an “enthusiastic supporter” of naming Dr Kelly as the BBC’s source and charged him with a “cynical abuse of power” in the Ministry of Defence’s treatment of him in the days leading up to his death.

However, counsel for the British government, Jonathan Sumption QC, robustly defended the MoD’s actions insisting that Dr Kelly had had no right to anonymity and warning against “a hunt for other people to blame” for his death.

He risked further angering the family by backing the claim that Dr Kelly had received “outstanding” support from the MoD, despite Mr Gompertz saying his widow and daughters had been “deeply hurt and angered” by the remark.

Despite acknowledging mistakes in the BBC’s reporting, counsel for the corporation Andrew Caldecott QC also attacked Mr Hoon, accusing him of “cynical indifference” in his failure to correct press reporting about the dossier.

Mr Gompertz said Mr Hoon’s denials that he had been involved in a strategy to publicly name Dr Kelly as the BBC’s source had been exposed as “hypocrisy” by the diary entries of No 10 communications chief Alastair Campbell.

They reveal he was an enthusiastic supporter of the proposal to put Dr Kelly’s name into the public domain. This is totally contrary to his previous stance.

“If, as the family submit, there was a strategy to out Dr Kelly, to use a witness to undermine Andrew Gilligan in furtherance of the Government’s dispute with the BBC, this was a cynical abuse of power and deserves the strongest possible condemnation.”

The inquiry is investigating how Dr Kelly apparently came to take his own life after being publicly identified as the source of the BBC’s report on the Iraq weapons dossier by journalist Andrew Gilligan. Mr Gompertz said it was not the aim of the family to seek “revenge or individual scapegoats” for Dr Kelly’s treatment.

But he said they wanted to expose the “duplicity” of the British government and the “systematic failures” of the MoD in their handling of Dr Kelly after he came forward to say that he had spoken to Mr Gilligan.

He said the MoD had not even had the “common decency” to inform Dr Kelly of its plan to confirm his identity to journalists who came up with the right name or offered counselling on how to deal with the pressures of the media spotlight.

“He was characterised by his employers to suit their needs as a middle-ranking official and used as a pawn in their political battle with the BBC,” Mr Gompertz said.