The Hutton Inquiry is trivial
11 Aug 2003
[776w]
The Hutton Inquiry is trivial. If a man dies, this is not trivial at all. That goes without saying (though you notice I am cowed enough by conventional piety that I do in fact say it). But if we are to respect the dead man to the extent of thinking him to have had a mind of his own, we should also say that he died by his own choice. And this is something no Inquiry can pretend to understand.
Of course it is possible to be forced into suicide. Socrates did not choose to take the hemlock. But the Athenians would have killed him if he had not. On the other hand Dr Kelly was not compelled. He was in a position anyone would have found morally painful, but that is widely different from being forced to kill oneself. Otherwise it would be hard to believe Richard Nixon or John Profumo or Peter Mandelson would not also have died by their own hands.
At the margins it is hard to tell the difference between a situation where a man kills himself by his own choice and where he is compelled. But to hang on to the idea of free will you need at least to say that an action you would call compulsion at the moral level would also be violent enough to be a crime. As anti-stalking law moves in favour of the victim, this means quite a lot of actions might still be thought of as forcing a man to commit suicide. But there is no suggestion any of these actions was done. If there were, it would not be Lord Hutton but Thames Valley police doing the inquiring.
You might argue there already were good reasons to inquire into the whole sorry business before it came to such a sad end. You might think it was important to find out which of the BBC and the Government was telling the truth. You might want to know how different were the reasons the Government gave for going to war from the reasons that actuated it. I would disagree, on grounds that we can’t ever hope to know about reasons, only about actions; that it is sometimes the function of Governments to withhold information; and that the question whether the war was right or wrong is much more interesting. If the Hutton Inquiry were an inquiry into our reasons for going to war, it would still be to a large extent trivial. But in fact it is an inquiry into a death: it would not have happened without death. And it cannot therefore call the one witness of all witnesses who could shed light on any aspect of its subject beyond the trivial.
I don’t set up to tell anyone the right way to remember this unfortunate man. But if I should ever kill myself I would want people to remember me as having had enough power of will that I could be held responsible for my actions. To remember me in any other way would be to remember me as a child or an imbecile. If I killed myself I would want you to think it was I who had done it and not another. You should be free to lament my decision, or possibly even to censure it, but I hope you would not think anyone else had killed me.
This is just the respectful way to remember someone, giving the benefit of the doubt to a man who can no longer speak up for his own maturity and power of will. But leave on one side the proper reluctance to speak ill of the dead: isn’t this by all accounts not just the kind thing to say of him, but the truth? The most widely respected impressions of Dr Kelly’s character are that he was a man who knew his own mind. The only people to come up with the idea that he was mentally irresponsible are the ones who had an interest in his being thought to be a fantasist.
If Dr Kelly was not a Walter Mitty figure, but an intelligent and sober man in the prime of life, then there is a very wide gap between any foolish or wretched things the BBC or the Government have done, and his death. His was the action. The only non-trivial causes of his death are things an inquiry could never hope to find out. He has taken them to his grave and (so he would, as I understand it, have expected) beyond. He has left the triviality behind for Lord Hutton to chew on.
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