Kelly 'taken aback by Gilligan's name game'

David Kelly was “taken aback” by the way BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan grilled him for information, the Hutton Inquiry was told today.

According to evidence from one of Dr Kelly’s former colleagues, Mr Gilligan tried to play a “name game” to get the weapons expert to say whether Alastair Campbell was responsible for inserting information into the Government’s dossier on Iraq.

Dr Kelly apparently committed suicide on July 17 after he was identified as the suspected source for Mr Gilligan’s report that Downing Street had “sexed up” the dossier on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

The Government inserted a claim into the September dossier that Iraq could use such weapons within 45 minutes knowing that it was probably unreliable, Mr Gilligan reported on May 29.

In a newspaper article Mr Gilligan later named Mr Campbell, then No 10’s director of communications, as the man his source had blamed for altering the dossier.

Olivia Bosch, an ex-UN weapons inspector, told the inquiry into the scientist’s death that Mr Gilligan said he would “name some names” for Dr Kelly to confirm when the pair met at a central London hotel on May 22.

She said: “He told me he had an unauthorised meeting with Andrew Gilligan, someone he had met a couple of times before but did not know all that well.

“He said he was taken aback by the way Andrew Gilligan tried to elicit information from him.

“He said he had never experienced it in the way that Gilligan had tried to do so, by a ’name game’ was the term.”

Dr Kelly told Mrs Bosch that the journalist had wanted to play the “name game” as a way of finding out “who was responsible for inserting information into the dossier”.

“The first name he mentioned, and very quickly, was Campbell,” she told the inquiry.

Dr Kelly said he could neither confirm nor deny this name but felt obliged to give some form of answer and so said “maybe”, she said.

“It didn’t give David time really to think about what was going on in that way.”

When the journalist gave evidence to the inquiry on August 12, he insisted that Dr Kelly had been the first to mention Mr Campbell’s name.

Mr Gilligan said he asked Dr Kelly how the dossier had come to be altered, and that the scientist had replied with just one word: “Campbell.”

Mrs Bosch, a senior research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, said that after returning to the UK from an international conference she heard a broadcast by Mr Gilligan on June 4.

She had not thought Dr Kelly could be the source for the report – even though she knew he had met the Today programme defence correspondent.

This was because it sounded like there was “an attempt to whistleblow” and she would not have thought that was something he would do.

When she later read the transcript of evidence Mr Gilligan gave to the Foreign Affairs Committee, she thought Dr Kelly could have been the source “because there was a discussion about Campbell and the dossier”.

But Mrs Bosch said of Mr Gilligan’s accounts: “I did not really recognise David’s phrasing, not really, the main thing was the Campbell discussion he had.”

She also told the inquiry how angry Dr Kelly had been over an article in The Sunday Times on July 13, which she called the “journalistic experience that irritated him the most”.

She said: “I had never heard David so excited, so frustrated and angry.”

He had been “peeved” by the article by Nick Rufford as Dr Kelly was not supposed to be talking to the press and the article made it appear that he had given an interview when he had not.

Mrs Bosch said Dr Kelly had told her Mr Rufford had appeared on his doorstep and “David had told him to go away”.

“David said ‘I am never going to speak to him again’.”

Mrs Bosch recalled Foreign Affairs Committee member David Chidgey, a Liberal Democrat MP, asking Dr Kelly about his contact with Newsnight journalist Susan Watts at the hearing on July 15.

Following the FAC meeting, Mrs Bosch spoke to Dr Kelly: “Just about the first thing that he said was that he was thrown by the reference to Susan Watts.”

The inquiry has already heard that Mr Gilligan e-mailed Mr Chidgey disclosing that Dr Kelly was also the source for a report by Ms Watts.