Fight to the Death, broadcast on Wednesday evening was a riveting, low-key TV programme, in the best BBC tradition.  The facts were set out,
with objectivity.  And for me, a clear picture emerged.

My conclusion is that Dr Kelly died for reasons that were deeply personal to the man himself, a man who was drawn fatally to the flame of public recognition.  His public “naming” was not responsible for his death, indeed, I find no evidence that he even resented it.  And the machinations of Downing Street, awful as they were, were not the
cause of his death, although they undoubtedly triggered off the process during which he took his own life.  Fight to the Death left no doubt that the probity of Downing Street, the Joint Intelligence Committee, and the independence of the Civil Service were suborned by the Blair cabal.   It exposed the new-found, facile and inappropriate preoccupation of the BBC with “scoop journalism”, the delusions of omnicompetence from which BBC managers clearly suffer, and the pusillanimity of Gavyn Davies and the BBC Governors, who believed that the BBC could do no wrong.   It exposed the pitiful weakness of Geoff Hoon, reduced to a mere cipher in the Downing Street subornation process.

But none of that explains David Kelly’s death.   My conclusion is that he died at his own hand because, as a sensitive and honest man, he could not live with himself.  Authorised by the MOD  to brief the media on technical weapons matters (his telephone list extended to 26 different journalists), he went too far in his meeting with scoop-specialist Andrew Gilligan.  It is clear that he initiated a damning criticism of the Downing Street process.  Gilligan, hungry for the kind of scoop that the BBC expected from him, certainly went too far in its reporting.  His sloppy use of language and sloppy ethical sense also caught him out.  But in the subsequent processes Kelly found himself drawn – at his own instigation – into a web of half-truth in which he became caught in untruths himself.  In his own mind, he perceived a formal distinction between speaking “on the record” and “off the record” upon which only a naïve man would have placed reliance. 

• For the Ba’hai faith, to which he was a convert of five years’ standing, “the truth” is the central unifying concept.  Ba’hai dispenses with any more specific concepts of deity and seeks universality in a common allegiance to “the truth”.  Yet David Kelly, having at his own intitiative flown too near the flame of celebrity, had taken himself into a shadowy world of half-truth and innuendo. 

He could not live with that.