Love's labour's lost

The break-up with his lady love, Kimberley Fortier/Quinn, was obviously too much for Mr Blunkett to bear and made him lose much of his sense of proportion. Apart form the controversial and, I must say irresponsible, legal fight initiated by him to be recognised as the father of his former lover's two-year old child as well as her yet unborn baby, he showed other clear signs that he was not quite in control of himself. A tabloid newspaper -- the same that first revealed the story of fast-tracking the residentship application the nanny employed by Mrs Quinn -- has begun serialising extracts from Mr Blunkett's biography, shortly to hit the bookstores. In them the erstwhile Home Secretary is openly critical of the performance of a number of his Cabinet colleagues. He accuses the Chancellor Gordon Brown of being a 'bully', describes the Prime Minister Tony Blair as 'weak', dismisses Jack Straw's record as Foreign Secretary as a 'mess' and makes similar unflattering remarks about Education Secretary Charles Clarke, Cultural Secretary Tessa Jowell and other senior colleagues in the Cabinet.

Naturally, Labour rank and file were not at all happy about such comments and both ministers and backbenchers were growing weary of daily headlines about Mr Blunkett's love life while they feared that the row started by his attempt to prove his fatherhood of Mrs Quinn's children was very likely to undermine Labour's election campaign. The Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott became the first senior leader to express the Party's anger by publicly rebuking Mr Blunkett for "personal arrogance."

Mr Prescott has been painted by Mr Blunkett as grumpy, obstructive about ID cards (Blunkett's own pet scheme) and over-sensitive about the sobriquet 'Two-Jags' (derived from his ownership of two Jaguar cars). Mr Blunkett was of course forced to apologise to his fellow ministers for his uncalled for remarks, but that did not stop Mr Prescott from saying on Radio 4's 'Today' programme that the way Mr Blunkett chose to make his personal feelings public had damaged the Government. "I fundamentally disagree with his judgments on his Cabinet colleagues," said the Deputy PM: "but to be fair to David, he has apologised publicly and personally to his colleagues and was honest enough to confess to a certain amount of arrogance in his conclusions." He went on to add that apart from an element of personal arrogance, "a very large amount of personal financial gain and book sales for the author" was also a large part of the whole issue. Mr Blunkett apparently accepted the rebuke, a spokesperson on his behalf said:

"This is perfectly fair comment, which David entirely accepts."

There were also signs that the Prime Minister was cooling in his support for Mr Blunkett. A Downing Street spokesperson said: "We all from time to time have bad days and he has apologised. If you had a bad day and made unfortunate comments, you should recognise the fact. What the Prime Minister agrees with is if you make unfortunate comments, you should apologise for them and he has done that." But fears were already escalating in Downing Street that Mr Blunkett's position was becoming increasingly vulnerable and he was turning into a liability as well. Speaking on BBC's 'World At One' programme, a former Cabinet Minister warned that no minister was indispensable when the Party's chances at the election were at stake and urged the Prime Minister to judge whether Mr Blunkett should stay. And a senior Tory MP accused him of breaking Home Office policy on marriage and made an outright demand for his resignation: "He (Mr Blunkett) has very publicly tried to undermine another man's marriage. What message is that sending out to society?" In fact, the Home Office's 1998 White Paper 'Supporting Families' proclaims marriage as the surest foundation for raising children. Citing this document, the MP said, "I cannot see how the present Home Secretary can maintain his position, which I personally see as untenable."

The newspaper that triggered all the furore further claimed that Mr Blunkett had abused his position as Home Secretary by fast-tracking the visa application of Leoncia Casalme, Mrs Quinn's nanny, not once but twice. An investigation headed by Sir Alan Budd into the first allegation was already under way. According to information obtained by the newspaper, the investigation had traced a visa Miss Casalme applied for to visit her sister in Austria for Christmas 2002. Such an application would normally take about four weeks to be processed, meaning that she would not get the visa in time for Christmas, but her employer promised to help her out: "I will make a phone call," she said, and her phone call certainly produced results because Miss Caslame got her visa in a matter of days.

Although Mr Blunkett's spokesman was initially reluctant to comment on the new allegation, he said later in a carefully worded statement, "Kimberley Quinn told the Home Secretary there was a problem with a visa for her nanny's trip to Austria. But neither the Home Secretary nor any of his officials became involved in the matter." The Austrian ambassador also said he had checked with his colleagues regarding the allegation against Mr Blunkett and was convinced that there had been no intervention in the visa process by the Home Secretary's office. There were many instances where applications were approved quicker than normal, he said, adding: "If we can oblige, if we can help people, we do it." Labour leaders still believed that if Sir Alan Budd's report cleared Mr Blunkett of any wrong-doing on the original visa claims, he could clamber out of the hole he had got himself into and the damage to the Party's prospects could be contained.

But on Wednesday the 15th, the Budd inquiry established that there had indeed been an exchange of faxes and e-mails about Miss Caslame's visa application between Mr Blunkett's private office and immigration officials. That left Mr Blunkett with practically no choice and so after three weeks of headlines about his affair with a married woman, Mr Blunkett quit, no doubt to spare any further embarrassment to the Prime Minister who told him, "You leave Government with your integrity intact." But even more significant perhaps than the PM's endorsement is the compliment paid to David Blunkett by the very newspaper that has been instrumental in effecting his exit: "Whatever the rights and wrongs (and all parties in this tragedy have been guilty of terrible misjudgments and cruelties)," said its leader comment: "the fact is, in a Cabinet of pygmies Mr Blunkett -- a fundamentally decent man -- was a giant….For whatever his errors, this is a remarkable man, with a huge contribution to make. Government is poorer without him."

David Blunkett's departure from the Cabinet is definitely the most significant since Tony Blair came to power and leaves the government staring at an enormous hole in Labour's pre-election strategy of which the former Home Secretary was a key architect. He made it clear, however, that when the court battle over access to the children he claims as his own is over, he will try to return to front-line politics. But Mr Blunkett's 'Mr No-Nonsense' image has become badly tarnished and no one is at the moment inclined to place a bet on his resurrection. Only time will tell whether he can make a come-back or not.

Questions that demand answers
Remember Dr David Kelly? Yes, the Ministry of Defence scientist who allegedly was the principal source of BBC Radio 4 reporter Andrew Gilligan's story about the "sexed-up" dossier presented before the Parliament by Prime Minister Tony Blair on the then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities, and who died in mysterious circumstances just a few weeks after Gilligan's despatch was aired? Well, the mystery surrounding his death seems to have no intention of going away as, nearly a year and a half after the tragic incident, questions over how he actually met his end have begun to re-emerge. The official version of the death was suicide -- Dr Kelly apparently ended his own life by taking an overdose of painkillers and slashing a vein in his wrist. But two ambulance paramedics, David Bartlett and Vanessa Hunt, both highly experienced members of their profession, who were the first people to examine Dr Kelly's body after it was discovered on a July morning last year, have now openly voiced their doubts over the cause of death.

The inquiry commission set up under Lord Hutton to ascertain if there were any exceptional circumstances leading to the MoD weapons expert's death ruled that Dr Kelly died from loss of blood from the incision in his wrist. Opinions of medical experts, however, make that conclusion somewhat untenable. A study undertaken in 1998 on prison suicides by wrist-slashing found that only one in 275 was successful. Arguably, Dr Kelly could have been one of the 275, but to die from haemorrhage, he would have had to lose about five pints of blood, whereas there was no evidence of his losing more than a pint. Paramedic Hunt who had originally told the Hutton Inquiry that although Dr Kelley's "left arm had a lot of blood on it", there was "no obvious arterial bleeding", has now further elaborated herself. "If you manage to cut a wrist and catch an artery," she says: "you would get a spraying of blood, regardless of whether it's an accident. I did not see any blood on his right hand. If he used this right hand to cut his wrist from an artery you would expect some spray..."

But according to Hunt and her colleague Bartlett, there was absolutely no sign that this had happened. In fact, a successful suicide by cutting the wrist is so rare that it is not even listed separately as a cause of self-killing by the Office for National Statistics.

Apart from the questions raised by the recent statements of the two paramedics, there are more unanswered questions. When Dr Kelly's body was first discovered, it was found leaning against a tree, sitting up with "his legs in front of him, his right arm to the side of him." Yet when Bartlett and Hunt arrived there some thirty-five minutes later, Dr Kelly was lying flat on his back. And a number of items -- a blunt gardening knife, a discarded watch with blood on it and an unopened bottle of mineral water -- which the people who had originally found him had failed to spot before, had mysteriously appeared close to his body. So who had moved him and who had placed these items near him during those thirty-five minutes and why?

Almost as soon as the news of Dr Kelly's suicide became public, his dental records were found to be missing from the doctor's surgery he was registered with. His dentist reported their disappearance to the local police immediately upon discovering it. But only two days later the records reappeared at the surgery, baffling both the dentist and the police. In fact the police were so alarmed by the incident that a DNA test was conducted on the dead man's body to prove that it was really Dr Kelly. So what actually happened?

Answers to these questions, and a few others as well, are still missing, but there is as yet no serious attempt to find the missing links. And so the classic question -- one that I myself raised in London Letter over a year ago -- "Did he fall, or was he pushed?" still remains unanswered.