Wednesday 29 September 2010

A new blog about the death of Dr David Kelly

I've been thinking about this for a while: I've decided to write a new blog! It's not that I'm closing this one down but I have so many thoughts I want to record about the death of Dr David Kelly and the mysteries surrounding it that I've decided to devote a blog to this one subject.

There have been a few entries about Dr Kelly on this site but I feel the need to get everything in one place. Although the death occurred seven years ago I am concerned to keep the events of that time in the public eye and hopefully the new blog will be a small contribution toward that aim. The new blog is here.

The new project means that my musings on this blog might become even fewer! We'll have to see how things pan out.

Friday 24 September 2010

Dangerous driving law shold be altered

"The law is an ass". How many times have those words been either written or said? Thousands, maybe millions, I would think. Well here is a classic example of why I think "the law is an ass".

It concerns a motoring case that came to court in which 23 year old Christopher Marr was sentenced for dangerous driving and seriously injuring three young people. Evidently he stole his girlfriend's Volkswagen Golf, he was drunk, he drove on the wrong side of the road at it is said 90 mph and he ploughed into the teenagers who were on the pavement. Miraculously, although seriously injured, none of the three died. Not too long ago the maximum sentence for causing death by dangerous driving had been raised to 14 years BUT if someone is injured by dangerous driving then the top limit is 2 years in custody!

This incident happened up north in Bolton by the way so not on my patch. I'm noting it here because the Judge is seething so much about his sentencing limitations that he is sending the relevant papers to David Cameron, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke and the Lord Chief Justice to try to get the law altered. Marr got 26 months, presumably the extra 2 months were in consideration of the other offences. He got a 10 year driving ban as well - should have been a lifetime one.

Now it's possible from what I've read that the teenagers might be either mentally or physically scarred for life following this horrendous event. My argument is why the massive differential between death and serious injury particularly as in this case there are no less than three young lives affected. It can be a lottery in some instances as to whether a person survives or not: for example the time to get to the hospital, the particular level of skill of the medical team. Yet the dangerous driving is the same. Surely the degree of dangerous driving should carry more weight than it does rather than the length of imprisonment being so dependent on whether someone survives or not.

Sunday 19 September 2010

Back from holiday in Dorset

It's been some time since I last blogged and part of this is down to being away from my computer for a few days - well that's my excuse anyway! I am back in the Tamar Valley now having had a very pleasant short stay in East Dorset where one of my brothers and his wife live. This was timed to fit in with another brother visiting the couple whilst yet another brother was staying at Weymouth (no more brothers after this!) and we arranged to all meet up on one of the days. Fortunately the weather was perfectly tolerable if cloudy at times and on the occasion when we all met up it was particularly pleasant.

There was the opportunity to get out every day and we made the most of it. An afternoon visit took us up a fairly substantial hill to see the prehistoric fort on Hambledon Hill and very impressive it was too! On another occasion a circular walk of about 10 miles was undertaken in The New Forest. We also visited Swyre Head in the Purbeck Hills from which a super view is obtained. On a better visibility day one can see the Isle of Wight to the east but looking west Kimmeridge Bay was well in view with the long smudge of Portland beyond. According to Wikipedia it's also possible to see Dartmoor - I feel a little sceptical about this and it certainly wasn't visible on the day we selected. Another port of call was Corfe with its castle - well to be accurate we admired the latter from below on this occasion.

Traffic aside I was well impressed with Corfe. We snacked at the Model Village Courtyard Cafe and I would recommend that to anyone. A little cheaper than the National Trust prices at the Castle I would suggest, very nice food and friendly service as well. The Swanage Branch Line, now one of our many preserved railways has a station at Corfe and obligingly a steam powered train arrived while we were there!

One of my passions can best be described as "topographical history" - I love both local and national history and I'm especially interested in the way that the built environment has been influenced by the geography of an area. With relatively high elevations being visited it was possible to get an overview of the landscape. Not so though on The New Forest walk, from what I've seen so far there seems to be little variation in height over the Forest which at least is good if one is a cyclist! On the plus side plenty of lovely trees of course and breezy heathland to walk over. Lots of very low key car parking areas also got the thumbs up. I was also interested to see a smart fairly ornate signpost with a date of 2008 at its base - I think that this was the year when the Forest became a National Park.

Would I prefer to live in the east of Dorset than where I am now? No. Although I thoroughly enjoyed my brief break and the hospitality that went with it I am definitely a 'Peninsula' person rather than a 'Middle England' person. Any downside to the Tamar Valley? Well I wouldn't mind the lower rainfall that goes with the part of Dorset visited. But I guess nothing is perfect in this World!


Monday 6 September 2010

Tony Blair's Journey, the Queen and Cherie

Well I for one haven't bought Tony Blair's autobiography "A Journey" so this won't be a critique of the book. However a lot of it is out there on the internet and one can get a flavour of what it is about even though it would be dangerous to comment on certain specifics without seeing the context that they are in. Unsurprisingly reviewers have been taking a lot of interest in Blair's thoughts about Gordon Brown. And of course they are curious to see what Blair says (or alternatively doesn't say) regarding Iraq.

I'm not going to get into those things right now, I'm more interested in Blair's disclosures about his private conversations with the Queen. Although I wouldn't describe myself as a fanatical monarchist I do think that the present system in this country is basically a good one with the monarch having no real power but nevertheless serving a unifying purpose. Now I may well be wrong in detail here but believe that when Parliament is sitting the Prime Minister has a weekly audience with the Queen. Furthermore I think that HM invites the PM and spouse to spend some time with the Royal Family at Balmoral.

Even if it's not spelt out wouldn't you think that conversations with the Queen would be 100% confidential. It seems not though with blabbermouth Blair. One newspaper I hear reckoned that the Queen was furious with what Blair disclosed in his book. Whether that is true I don't know but she would have every reason to be. All I can say is "how very Blair" - I'm not surprised about him. He is one of the new rich and powerful who doesn't get it when it comes to the right sort of behaviour to adopt. Harsh words perhaps but true. He and Cherie seem to be made for each other, I remember writing before - on the 12 May 2008 to be exact - about Cherie explaining that their youngest child Leo only came into this world because she didn't have any contraceptives with her when she and Tony were staying at Balmoral. Back then I stated that I was appalled that she put this information about Leo's conception into the public domain - to my mind it was grossly unfair to Leo to make this stuff known.

Cherie is at it again, once more demonstrating that she's not the "sharpest tool in the box". This is about Lord Mandelson's memoirs "The Third Man" which I think came out last July. In it one can read a note that Cherie had once written to him in support when Mandy was in trouble over the home mortgage scandal and had to resign. Included in the note was a vitriolic attack against one Gordon Brown. It may be that Mandelson didn't quote Cherie's note word for word, it could have been that he relayed just the gist of it. Anyway Cherie has now thrown a wobbly about it, stating through her lawyers that being a private note there was no way it should have been included in a book. I don't know the legal rights and wrongs here but I would have thought she was incorrect. The letter to Mandelson's publishers is demanding that the offending bit of prose be removed.

Let's step back a bit, take a deep breath and look at things logically. The book is out there in the market place, it isn't in draft form, are those books already printed supposed to be returned to Harper Collins for the offending page to be replaced? Up until now only a relatively small part of the population (those who have purchased the book) will know about the note and even then not every reader will remember that detail. But by making a fuss Cherie has ensured a much much bigger audience will have heard about it, rather silly if she doesn't want the whole world to know the contents of this note.

Of course it's just conceivable that Cherie really wanted a much bigger audience to know what she thought of Gordon Brown and this was a way to do just that. A bit like a double bluff in a sense. But is Cherie bright enough to have thought of such a thing?

Radio Cornwall new word today is restorated

Just had a quick gander at the Radio Cornwall website (mainly to have a look at the weather maps - it's pouring here at the moment). Anyway on their homepage and under "Other top stories" we have "Quaker house restorated". Clicking this link confirmed my suspicion that this was about the lovely thatched Quaker Meeting House at the equally lovely named 'Come-to-Good' near Truro.

The article is headed "Quaker meeting house in Cornwall is renovated" and this is followed by "A 300-year-old Quaker meeting house in Cornwall has been restored at a cost of £175,000." It seems perhaps that the writer had the two words "renovated" and "restored" in their brain and came out with a word that was a bit of each! Perhaps we have all had moments like that but I do wonder if people pause enough to make a quick check on whether what they are writing is correct.

I had a chuckle about this at least.

Simon Hoggart and Dr David Kelly

"Dr David Kelly's wrists were slit and he had swallowed 29 co-proxamol tablets. No wonder he died." These are the opening words of a piece written by Simon Hoggart in the Guardian last month. I understand that Mr Hoggart writes political sketches for that newspaper and it's quite possible he is good at that. Like Aaranovitch, Mangold and Rentoul he is firmly in the "Kelly committed suicide" camp. And as with them Hoggart can't even get basic facts right about the Kelly business.

In that first sentence of his Hoggart states two things as fact: the first of these is incorrect and the second not proven. I'll elaborate: he says "Dr David Kelly's wrists were slit". For your information Mr Hoggart it was one artery (the ulnar) severed in one wrist (the left). So wrist not wrists. He uses the word in the plural again further down and of course using "were" rather than "was" confirms he meant the plural.

The next "fact" from Hoggart is that "he had swallowed 29 co-proxamol tablets". Mr Hoggart nobody, but nobody, has ever proved that David Kelly swallowed 29 of these tablets. We do know that part of a tablet was found in his stomach and there was evidence of the constituents of co-proxamol in his body. That does not prove that all 29 were swallowed, willingly or unwillingly, by Dr Kelly. Maybe the powers of logic have by-passed you but I can assure you that the medical knowledge out there cannot definitively equate what was found in his body with the 29 missing tablets. Moreover it seems that Dr Kelly had a rare physical condition that made it all but impossible to swallow a tablet let alone 29 of them. But of course Mr Hoggart, in sounding off about Dr Kelly's death, I don't suppose you have bothered to look at any background evidence.

Another bit of information for you Mr Hoggart: Dr Kelly's friend and confidante Mai Pederson is on record as saying that Kelly had a weakness in his right arm that made even cutting steak difficult. So here is the scenario: Dr Kelly takes three blister packs of his wife's co-proxamol tablets with him (even though he hates pills and would most likely find it near impossible to swallow them); he also takes with him a blunt gardening knife (hard to believe that there wasn't a newer sharper knife in the kitchen drawer). Arriving at Harrowdown Hill he somehow manages to swallow all 29 tablets missing from the blister packs (well according to you anyway) and then using his weak right arm and blunt knife decides to cut the hard to get at ulnar artery, not the more accessible radial artery please note.

So this eminently intelligent man decides to commit suicide by the most tortuous way possible with no guarantee of success. There were alternatives: at Harrowdown Hill there are many trees from which he could have hung himself. If that idea didn't appeal he could have walked on north a little further to the banks of the River Thames and thrown himself face down into it. Even if there was only three feet of water it would be quite enough to drown in. And that part of the river is away from human habitation.

Another point for you Mr Hoggart, the last person that we know of who spoke to Dr Kelly was a near neighbour who he knew well. If Dr Kelly was intent on committing suicide one might expect him either to avoid speaking to her, or at most, say "hello". But according to her testimony at the Hutton Inquiry it was he who spoke first saying "hello Ruth", then they chatted for several minutes and she recalled that he wasn't any different to his usual self. Is this really the behaviour of a man intent on killing himself?

Can I make a suggestion Mr Hoggart? Please stick to political sketch writing, that's more your forte I suspect.


Wednesday 1 September 2010

Cornish name for Cameron baby

I was very pleased when the Camerons decided to include a Christian name that had a direct connection to Cornwall following the birth of their daughter in the county the other day. Florence Rose are the first two names and they have added Endellion as a third, 'St Endellion' being the name of a parish close to where they were holidaying in North Cornwall. Endellion has got a nice ring to it I think, certainly my own parish 'Calstock' wouldn't quite work as a girl's name. It might be even worse if they had selected another village in this same parish (my parish is large in population terms with a lot of settlements). Take for example 'Gunnislake' or 'St Anns Chapel' or 'Harrowbarrow' - they wouldn't work either!

A quick note about St Endellion: its church has become very well known to serious music lovers because it is the location for two prestigious musical festivals each year. I've never been and would I think find the music on offer a little heavy for my taste. The website is here Having made this remark I have to say that there is plenty of wonderful classical music around, perhaps I don't devote the time and attention to it that it deserves. The other thing is that the inside of a church is a really special place to listen to good music as a rule.

I've just been looking at a press report on the internet and it seems that Gordon and Sarah Brown have sent their congratulations to Mr and Mrs Cameron on the new arrival. In his autobiography Tony Blair includes the words "Emotional intelligence, zero"in relation to Brown. That might generally be so and in many respects I find Gordon Brown pretty reprehensible. When it comes to people's children though his feelings are warm and genuine: I had commented before about the time when PMQs were cancelled following the death of Ivan Cameron. Brown was really choked (he can't do Blair style acting) - he did feel for the Camerons, partly perhaps because of the tragedy he and Sarah had in losing a very young child.

It sounds as if the new arrival in the life of the Camerons is doing well. Good luck to them.