UK Court Blocks bid to re-open Inquest into Dr David Kelly's Death
Posted: 2nd May 2025
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David Halpin on the suspicious death of Dr. David
Kelly and how he thinks there ought to be an
inquest. D.Halpin.infoaction.org.uk. Was Robin
Cook’s death suspicious? To the Attorney-General
of the UK The Rt.Hon Richard Hermer KC re: the
absence of a proper inquest into the death of
David Kelly CMG DSc in July 2003 Published: 22
July 2024 Dear Lord Hermer First, I would like to
offer my congratulations on your recent
appointment to the post of Attorney-General.
write to you in this regard. On 17 February 2009
you invited me, together with some other doctors,
to visit you at Doughty Street chambers to
discuss the death of Dr David Kelly. We set out
our concerns about the manner in which the state
had dealt with this tragedy and explained to you
our doubts that it was investigated rigorously.
As you know, the coroner’s inquest into Dr
Kelly’s death was – uniquely – subsumed into the
ad hoc inquiry chaired by Lord Hutton, who
concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life in July
2003. This is the only time in British legal
history that a coroner’s inquest into a single
death has been adjourned using Section 17A of the
1988 Coroners Act so that a non-statutory public
inquiry could be held instead. The lawful process
of the opening of a coroner’s inquest did not
happen. The cart was put before a well tried and
respected horse. Careful analysis over many years
by the group of doctors of which I was a member –
plus the work of various lawyers,
parliamentarians and investigative journalists –
has found how woefully inadequate Lord Hutton’s
non-statutory public inquiry was. To name just a
handful of its deficiencies: Lord Hutton failed
to call key witnesses to give evidence to his
inquiry; yet those witnesses who were called were
not required to give evidence on oath. We now
know that there were no fingerprints on the knife
Kelly allegedly used to end his life
– even though he wasn’t wearing gloves on the day
his body was found. (This was never mentioned at
the Hutton Inquiry even though it was known to
Thames Valley Police at the time the Hutton
Inquiry hearings took place). Lord Hutton spent
only half a day of the 24 days on which his
inquiry sat examining the medical evidence
relating to Dr Kelly’s death. And Lord Hutton
failed to consider the crucial matter – incumbent
upon every coroner – of whether Dr Kelly intended
to commit suicide. I must stress that the above
list is not exhaustive. It is designed to
underscore the point that, legally speaking, Lord
Hutton’s ad hoc inquiry was less independent and
less thorough than a coroner’s inquest would have
been, with disastrous results. The high bar that
a coroner would have had to clear in order to
reach a suicide finding in the matter of Dr
Kelly’s death was simply absent from the Hutton
Inquiry. When we met you at your chambers in
2009, we were being helped pro bono by Leigh Day
& Co. Knowing you to be a man of truth and
integrity, Frances Swaine, of that firm, advised
us to consult you. Your sympathetic view was that
we should focus on the first cause of death
advanced by Lord Hutton – “haemorrhage from a cut
left ulnar artery” – as originally written by a
Home Office pathologist, Dr Nicholas Hunt, and
also to judicially review the then Attorney
General, Baroness Scotland, rather than JR her
refusal to instigate an inquest. You may know
that with wide public support a hearing was
eventually held at the High Court in December
2011 – Halpin v Regina. In total, about five
hours were spent in plea and defence. At the
hearing’s conclusion, Mr Justice Nicol read out
from 19 pages of text and determined that the
Attorney General of the day – Dominic Grieve –
had been right to refuse an inquest into Dr
Kelly’s death in 2011. And there, the matter of
Dr Kelly’s unnatural death has most
unsatisfactorily remained, for Mr Grieve’s
decision was no more than a distant echo of Lord
Hutton’s original finding. I am aware that
Britain’s legal system is facing many crises,
especially in the criminal and family justice
courts and in terms of prison capacity. Yet
public trust in our country’s law enforcement,
and what follows in the courts, has withered.
Specifically, many British citizens – including
some Appeal Court judges – do not believe that Dr
Kelly’s death was adequately investigated at Lord
Hutton’s inquiry. This has left a cloud of
suspicion hanging over this troubling and vital
matter. For this reason I am calling upon you to
kindly consider allowing a full coroner’s inquest
into Dr Kelly’s death to be held in order to
resolve this situation for once and for all. My
understanding is that you alone as
Attorney-General, has the power to do this. I
revere ‘the law’ and quote from your speech of
yesterday in the Royal Courts of Justice. “Being
in government is a privilege that carries the
responsibility of having to make hard choices but
as we face the challenging path ahead the rule of
law will be the lodestar for this government.” *
Yours sincerely, David Halpin MB BS FRCS Dartmoor