OUR PUSILLANIMOUS PRESS.
Some weeks ago I read - in The Guardian - a piece by an idiot journalist (another one) called Simon Hoggart to the effect that all those people who suggested that the death of Dr. David Kelly had something suspicious about it were either irritating trouble-makers or just drooling simpletons. That such an article, so insulting to many of the paper's readers and so categoric in its bland assuredness, should be printed in the Guardian tells us all we need to know about the slide in that paper's standards and of the unfathomable smugness of newspapers in general.
When Lord Hutton, in his enquiry into Dr. Kelly's death, stipulated that many of the facts be kept secret for 70 years, did Hoggart's eager news-hound's nose twitch in anticipation of another government cover-up? It did not. His reaction was instead to conclude that the noble lord must surely have his own very good reasons for this unprecedented piece of censorship and in any case who was he, a simple peasant journalist, to question the decisions of one who was so clearly his social superior. And when it became known that the knife Dr. Kelly supposedly used to kill himself with had no fingerprints on it - nor,perhaps even more weirdly, were there any fingerprints on his waterbottle - (this information only being dragged from the police using the Freedom of Information Act) did our excited hack - who knows a story when he sees one - pounce on these very curious facts with all of his scribbler's instincts tingling? He did not. He instead assured himself that Dr. Kelly, having taken his pills (nobody knows how many), Cut his wrist and lay down to wait for death, suddenly remembered to wipe his own fingerprints off the knife, and, to make things doubly sure, off his bottle of water. This is what the government tells us happened and therefore, to credulous boneheads like Hoggart, it must be so.
When several doctors eminent in this particular field declared that in their opinions the knife wound could not have resulted in Dr. Kelly's death, Hoggart presumably dismisses them as mistaken (he would know better, of course).
All his family and friends have declared that Kelly was not the suicidal type. He dealt with the KGB in Moscow, the Mossad in Israel and went to South Africa to advise the apartheid government on lethal chemicals. He was a tough nut and certainly not the genial family doctor type portrayed in the media. Even more certainly, he was not the sort of man to run away and top himself because some fat MP had been mildly rude to him.
There are other things. Kelly's own prediction that he might be found dead in the woods, the cancellation of the inquest into his death, and much more, all available on the internet at the click of a button. But Hoggart and his ilk are too lazy to check things out, prefering to sneer at readers who are more interested in the truth than they are. And The Guardian pays him (handsomely) to do it - perhaps they wish to accellerate the speed at which their readership is dwindling.
One might imagine that any of this information, let alone its totality, would make any normally inquisitive person want to know more - and it does. Everybody except our somnambulent press.
