Iraq

Posted 4:26 PM by Dil
A tragic death, but part of me cannot help but admire it
By Tim Lott

AS I WRITE THIS, the firestorm around the death of Dr David Kelly rages, and with it the terrible, insistent question — who was responsible for his death?

Was it the Government, in the form of Alastair Campbell, with his ruthless determination to clear himself of spinning the facts surrounding weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? Was it the Ministry of Defence, hanging the hapless civil servant out to dry by confirming him as a possible source for Andrew Gilligan’s story about the “sexing up” of the Iraq dossier? Was it, perhaps, Gilligan himself, by dragging Dr Kelly into the frontline of a vicious propaganda war?

But in all the furore, one crucial piece of the jigsaw is missing, and one very important, yet obvious, answer to the question about who killed Dr Kelly has been more or less ignored. Because it was, in fact, David Kelly who killed David Kelly.

This is a point that must be made, not because I have any wish to whitewash the larger, and clearly malign, forces that led to Dr Kelly’s death. The suicide of this responsible and decent man came as a result of a whole matrix of causes, many of them political and external: the “dark actors playing games” that Dr Kelly referred to hours before he died in an e-mail to an American journalist.

But if we are searching for the complete truth about a death of this sort, then we cannot ignore the motivations and inner drives of another “dark actor” — Dr Kelly himself. In suicide, the personal is almost always paramount. Many people go through far greater crises than Dr Kelly — illness, loss of loved ones, financial catastrophe — without taking their own lives.

The facts that we know so far give the impression that Dr Kelly was a delicate man thrust into a brutal limelight with which he was unable to cope. The forces of the institutions that sought to use him, either to protect themselves or to further their own agendas, it is suggested, were so overwhelming that Dr Kelly buckled under their intractable pressure.

Although there is clearly some truth in this, it cannot be that simple. Dr Kelly was, it is commonly acknowledged, a tough man who had stood up to severe pressure from Saddam Hussein while he was involved in the team searching for WMD in Iraq.

He had a good home life, and a supportive family. Certainly, the grilling he received at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee was unpleasant. Certainly, the pressure he was under must have been formidable.

But to suggest that this forced Dr Kelly into suicide is overly simplistic. To understand the logic that leads to such a terrible step requires greater imagination, and greater knowledge, of the person himself.

I do not have that knowledge. I did not know Dr Kelly, and the information I do have about him is gleaned from the media only. But I do know something about suicide and the kind of personality, or mindset, that contemplates it.

I suffered a nervous breakdown that took me to the brink of suicide in the late 1980s after I took on a job — the editorship of a London magazine — with which I was unable to cope. My mother committed suicide, completely out of the blue, shortly after I recovered in 1988, and I wrote a book about that tragedy, The Scent of Dried Roses.

I have spent a great deal of time contemplating the strange logic of self-destruction. And I would have to say that, from the little I know of Dr Kelly, he was archetypically vulnerable in the face of the kind of developments that he had to try to ride out.

The clinical psychologist Dr Dorothy Rowe, a world expert on depression who helped me enormously in coming to terms with my own demons, makes a fascinating point when she talks about the psychology of suicide. And it is this: only good people kill themselves. What she means by this is that only people to whom it is important to see themselves as good see their very identities as coming under threat when circumstances conspire to make them appear “bad” or failures. Perhaps it is true that all of us seek to cast ourselves as good people — but it is people who rigorously, perhaps even pathologically, take responsibility for their own lives that are most at risk from suicide.

They do not have the politician’s trick of blaming others for misfortunes. They give primacy to their own roles in the outcome of any circumstance. They are good because they try to stay true to themselves — at almost any cost. They are reluctant, above all, to blame others for their misfortunes. Their anger, when it comes, is terrible, but it is directed, finally, against themselves.

It is a condition of great dignity and of great danger, especially when coupled with certain other personality traits that Dr Kelly, according to his family and friends, possessed.

He was a highly intelligent man. Once he had created a chain of logic for himself, it would have been very difficult for him to wriggle out of it. He was a perfectionist who could not bear sloppiness or imprecision. He was a religious man, which meant that he had a strict code of ethics. He was a man to whom his reputation was hugely important, because it was a crucial part of his identity. And perhaps there was something rigid in the mindset of a man whose chosen trades were of scientist and civil servant — worlds that deal in clarity and empiricism and that are bound by rules.

A man committed to honesty, to integrity, to an honourable way of being. How can this admirable set of personality traits lead a man to take his own life? I am anxious, out of respect to Dr Kelly’s family, not to push this argument too far. So let me say that one other thing I know about suicide is that it is, ultimately, a mystery that defies analysis. I do not know the answer. But I do believe that suicide is always concerned with a crisis of identity.

Dorothy Rowe makes the point that the suicidal personality will kill himself as a body rather than die as a self. Some people are so determined to be the person that they imagine themselves to be that a set of circumstances that exposes a gap between that version of themselves and reality becomes unbearable.

For my mother, it was the image of being a good parent, and a rock for everyone else to lean on, that was fatally compromised when her son became suicidal. For me, it was the idea that I was the successful one in the family, the high-achiever, who was forced out of the job of his life after a few weeks in the editor’s seat. For Dr Kelly, I don’t believe that it was the grilling by the select committee that killed him, or the pressure of being in the public eye. It was that he was caught in the Scylla and Charybdis of his own conflicting need to do the right thing, and the threat of having to compromise the image he had of himself.

He had tried to do the right thing by briefing a journalist on a matter of vital importance to the public: the WMD dossier. And yet Civil Service rules told him it was the wrong thing. As a man, telling the truth was paramount. As a civil servant, talking to journalists was an infraction of certain rules of professional conduct. Being a man to whom rules and integrity are important, to breach that code of secrecy must have been a very grave thing, and to feel that he had gone a step too far in doing so, mortifying.

This same dilemma must have tormented him during the public grilling by the select committee. Originally, he had tried to be a good man by telling the truth, in confidence, to Andrew Gilligan.

Then, named by the MoD, he was in danger of being exposed as a “bad” civil servant, ie, someone who breached their rules on confidentialty. He might have even faced prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Furthermore, he was under pressure to sell out Gilligan, a course that was also unacceptable to him.

In the end he writhed, and whispered, clearly in torment — because there was no course he could take that would not condemn him. Not in the eyes of the public, but in his own eyes. In that select committee meeting he had, in effect, lied, or at least not told the complete truth, which may well have amounted to the same thing in his own mind.

On the afternoon that he killed himself, Gilligan was giving his own evidence to a parliamentary committee — and perhaps for a man of integrity, the idea that a man who had given his life to the pursuit of truth and integrity might be exposed as a liar, for all the good intentions behind it, became intolerable. The identity that he had constructed for himself had been fatally compromised; there was only one way out.

Of course, a different man — a worse man — would have found a far easier way out. We can all think of disgraced people in the public eye who have lied and wriggled their way around the truth, and sought to shift the blame on to others. A decent man like Dr Kelly, guilty of a tragic infraction of the rules out of the best possible motives, cannot shift the blame on to others. He was guilty of imperfection. He was the author of his own life. Thus, for him, he had to take the consequences.

To take his own life was grossly out of proportion to the indiscretion he had committed. He died a good man, and what I imagine he would have considered an honourable death (it is not forbidden by the Baha’i religion, which Dr Kelly practised), would have confirmed his moral integrity to himself. It certainly maintained the integrity, in a psychological sense, of his personality.

Doubtless, his family and friends would have preferred an imperfect man who had made an understandable mistake alive, than a impeccable man dead. But Dr Kelly, in his determination to remain the David Kelly he imagined himself to be, took a different, infinitely more tragic, and fatally misguided course.

Now he will be remembered in the way he would have wanted to be: as a kind of public hero rather than a compromised, possibly even disgraced, civil servant. It is a terrible price to pay, not only for himself, but for his family. I deplore it, but there is a part of me that cannot help but admire it.

David Kelly died a martyr to his own agonised commitment to truth.