Husband and Wife communication problems

One of the really troubling matters I've found in looking at the testimonies at the Hutton Inquiry is the evidence given by Mrs Kelly.  Compared with just about every other bit of information I can find relating to the final week or so of Dr Kelly's life the impression I get from her is of her husband being very downbeat and miserable and at times hardly eating.  So why was she painting such a dark picture of the way he was compared with one's other perceptions?

The first thing I would say is that to all intents and purposes David Kelly had two marriages, the first one obviously to Janice Kelly and the second to his job, or one could almost say his vocation.  Of course this situation wasn't unique to the Kellys but marriages of their sort would be in the minority I'm sure.  It wasn't just Dr Kelly's devotion to his job but we find that he was quite frequently away from home and even when at home writing reports, dealing with emails, making phone calls and so on.

In her evidence at the Inquiry Mrs Kelly is quite vague about what her husband's job entailed.  I believe that Dr Kelly had his own difficulties in talking to her about the nature of his work.  It seems that he had no such problem in talking to other women about what he was or had been doing, women such as Mai Pederson and Dr Olivia Bosch.  Of course such people were well versed in the sort of technical matters that Dr Kelly was engaged in.  There has been speculation about Dr Kelly having an affair, my own response is that we don't know about any such thing and I'm certainly not going to get into any such possibility.  I'll just make the point that I believe that Dr Kelly had some communication problems with his wife, particularly regarding the nature of his work and we should remember much of this would have been off limits regarding discussing with anyone other than ones colleagues.

On the evening of Wednesday 9th July the Kelly's are alerted that following the revelation that Dr Kelly was the source for the Andrew Gilligan report the press were on their way and it might be a good idea to disappear from the home in Southmoor and lie low for a few days.  To me this situation must have been very traumatic for them both.  Here are a couple who are very private, who in the blink of an eye are hurled out of their comfort zone.  We tend to think of our homes as our little fortresses, places very reassuring, very private.  In a sense if just one person was in this predicament then it wouldn't be so bad but in this instance I suspect that not only were David and Janice Kelly both very tense on their own accounts but extremely worried about each other.  It seems from Mrs Kelly's evidence that they had a problem with both communicating and sharing their concerns.  We must remember that, in effect, fleeing from their own home they were very much in uncharted territory.

Some of Janice Kelly's evidence relating to the time she and her husband sped off to Cornwall is difficult to believe and an incident involving another scientist "Mr A" on Thursday 10th July leads one toward the conclusion that either Mrs Kelly or Mr A were either mistaken or lying with regard to their testimonies.  I'll blog about this on another occasion.

Suffice to say at the moment that it seems that the Kelly's inability to talk about David's job dates back a long way and that the very difficult situation they found themselves in that July just compounded the situation.

UPDATE: Since writing the above I have read a piece from the MailOnLine for 29 August 2003. I have added a comment about it on this post.