Norman Baker on the strange death of David Kelly

Norman Baker was my favourite Liberal Democrat MP of the party's glory years. He was a powerful campaigner, friendly and with enough quirkiness to be a true Liberal. And he had a talent for getting up the noses of all the right people.

Looking back on the death of David Kelly in 2003, it does remarkable that no inquest was held into his death. Instead, it was bundled up with Lord Hutton's inquiry into "the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly".

Those circumstances where expanded to include the intelligence reports the Blair government used to justify war in Iraq and the BBC's reporting of them. Poor Dr Kelly faded into the background.

In 2007 Norman Baker published his book The Strange Death of David Kelly. The talk in this video was recorded two years later.

If you watch it you will find that Norman's conclusion is that David Kelly was murdered. Not by the British deep state, as some like to imagine, but by the Iraqis.

Given what we now know about Russian operations in Britain, this is not far fetched. 

We should be worrying that the British authorities still seem remarkably relaxed about the number of people who have crossed Putin who keel over and die on our shores.

Anyway, a few years after recording this, Norman became a Home Office minister. It's a funny old world.