Alastair Campbell’s redtop values have contaminated our politics

When I learnt of Dr Kelly’s suicide, my first thought was that he had been fatally drawn into Alastair Campbell’s world. It is what many people felt. It was a reasonable assumption that Mr Campbell or his office or someone responsible to the Prime Minister’s director of communications had deliberately put Dr Kelly’s name in the public domain – with disastrous results. We have since learnt during the Hutton inquiry that Tony Blair himself was involved in the decision to expose Dr Kelly. At a meeting in his study chaired by Mr Blair on the morning of 8 July, it was agreed to issue a press statement describing an unnamed individual who had admitted to having met the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan. The next day Dr Kelly’s name was leaked to several newspapers.

It was as though this serious, precise and perhaps slightly innocent man had been thrown into a bear pit.