Wednesday 6 October 2010

Difficulties in establishing times of events

One of the difficulties I face with this blog, and I was aware of this before taking the plunge, is in establishing the times of the various events that took place that concerned David Kelly's death. It would be very nice if the reader could peruse this blog with every entry following each other in the correct time order but that's not really practical. Another thing: I am much more up to speed regarding certain aspects of the Kelly business than others. To get everything I want to say in something approaching the correct order would have meant delaying the start of the blog for weeks if not months and I really didn't want that. So apologies now if it becomes difficult to find a blog entry relating to a particular aspect of Dr Kelly's death. I'm giving a lot of thought though to the heading and labelling of the various entries to assist navigation (and to help retain my sanity!)

Just a couple of examples of my problem in establishing any sort of timeline: by and large Norman Baker has gone to a lot of trouble to achieve factual accuracy in his book "The Strange Death of David Kelly" but I'm sure at one point he states that the volunteer searchers found Dr Kelly's body at 8.30. Well we can't be certain without looking at police records whether we know the exact time Paul Chapman made the call to Abingdon Police Station to say that Dr Kelly had been found but it was much later than 8.30 that's for sure - I'll go into my reasoning in a later post.

The other discrepancy I'll mention now is the time at which Mrs Kelly reported to the police that her husband was missing. At the Inquiry she states that the call was made "at about 20 to 12 at night". But go to the very first paragraph of chapter 5 of the Hutton Report and his Lordship transforms this to "about 12.20 am on Friday 18 July".

These are just a couple of instances that demonstrate the problems any researcher into Dr Kelly's death has to surmount.


1 comment:

  1. On the subject of timings I can't fail to observe that the clock here, reflecting posts published and comments made, still remains somewhat locally askew! This is easily corrected in the Blogger dashboard, via Settings, then Formatting, down to Time Zone, and finally all the way to the bottom of the page to Save Settings.

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