Since the suicide of Dr David Kelly, the BBC's Ministry of Defence mole, public debate has descended even further into the mire. Having spent the past few weeks shouting 'Liars!' at one another, all sides in the dodgy dossier affair are now yelling 'Murderers!', as they try to shift the blame for these tragic events.
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So which of the 'dark actors' is responsible for Dr Kelly's death - the government, the BBC, the security services? The answer, of course, is none of them. It was Dr Kelly who killed himself. That is the way with suicides.
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The new depiction of Kelly as a heroic victim should not blind us to the fact that suicides are responsible for their own deaths. Suicide is rarely heroic; it is far more often a cowardly way out of a crisis, and one that usually leaves behind much bitterness and anger among loved ones. Nor is it true, as what is surely one of The Times' most bizarre headlines suggested, that 'Only the good kill themselves'. Like Hitler? Or Fred West?
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Tony Blair should be blamed and held accountable for a lot of things that have happened over recent years. But neither Blair not Alastair Campbell can be held responsible for Kelly's death. Journalists who now think it brave to ask the prime minister if he has 'blood on his hands' never thought to ask that question during the several foreign wars that Blair has led Britain into.
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The BBC, too, has a lot of questions to answer about its stance. But even the new far-reaching corporate killing law could not be stretched far enough to put the BBC on trial for Dr Kelly's death.
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Kelly himself was one of the primary 'dark actors' in this affair. He had been a leading UN weapons inspector in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, moved in influential circles and consorted with top journalists. Those who knew him have spoken of his 'steel'. His questioning by the House of Commons committee, which we are now told was so ruthless and soul-destroying, seemed pretty soft at the time. Indeed the MPs who accused Kelly of being set up as a fall guy by the government appeared most concerned to get him off the hook, by hastily announcing that he was not the BBC's source.
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It has since become clear that Kelly himself was upset largely because his faltering evidence to the committee had not made clear that he was the informant. None of this seems sufficient reason to kill himself. And no judicial inquiry will ever discover all that was going on in Kelly's mind. The notion of appointing a judge to investigate why a civil servant slit his wrist seems as irrational as it is unprecedented.
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 | | It is odd to hear Dr Kelly described everywhere as a hero |
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But then, the inquiry and the rest of the circus are not really about Kelly. His death is being exploited for political ends, including, ironically, by those who complain that he was used as a political pawn when alive. Some on all sides are trying to use his body as a macabre sort of ventriloquist's dummy, through which they can broadcast their message. And the loudest message has been that he was killed by politics, 'Spun to death' as one headline had it.
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Many commentators agree that Kelly's death is a defining moment that will inevitably 'change politics forever'. In fact there is no reason why a government official's untimely death should change anything of substance. But the reactions to Kelly's death within the political class will indeed change things. Or at least, they will act as a catalyst to accelerate a process that is already well under way: the degeneration of political life.
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The breast-beating reactions to Kelly's death mean that political life will now centre even more on narrow issues to do with 'character' and moral corruption, and even less on big ideas and principles. There will be even less robust debate and argument, as everybody runs scared of being accused of bullying. There will be even less democracy, as more judges and other unaccountable figures are given authority to supervise elected politicians. There will be even more caution and uncertainty at the top, as the defensive responses of both Downing Street and the BBC top brass already reveal. And most of all, there will be even more public cynicism and conspiracy theories about politics and all politicians. The authority crisis that already afflicts not just Blair but all established institutions, recently highlighted on spiked, is now set to get far, far worse (see It's the authority crisis, stupid, by Mick Hume).
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It is odd to hear Dr Kelly described everywhere as a hero. For what? Meeting a BBC journalist in secret in a London hotel? Fudging his evidence to a committee of MPs? Killing himself? Yet in a way he is a suitable hero for these times. He was a UN weapons inspector, the sort of unelected actor whom all sides tried to hide behind in the run-up to the Iraq war. Then he became an anonymous source, of a kind who will automatically be believed above politicians and the media in these cynical, 'trust nobody' times. Now he has committed suicide, an act that is often perversely described as brave these days.
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No doubt in real life Dr Kelly was the decent man described by those who knew him. But in death, the Dr Kelly imagined by the media has come to embody the degraded state of public debate. Neither the government nor the BBC can be held responsible for Kelly's tragic death. But the institutions of British society do share a heavy responsibility for endangering the life of politics.
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Mick Hume is editor of spiked.
Read on:
spiked issue: The Hutton Inquiry
The blame game, by Brendan O'Neill
spiked-issue: War on Iraq
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