ONE of David Kelly’s daughters has described how the Ministry of Defence, her father’s employer, had shown a “total lack of support” to him, writes Steven Shukor.

Ellen Wilson, 30, told Tom Mangold, a former BBC journalist and friend of Kelly, that her father felt he had been badly treated during his years of working for the ministry.

She revealed her father’s feelings in the days before his death to Mangold.

He said last night: “She did not believe there was a single tipping point for her father, rather an accumulation of pressures leading to the humiliating encounter with the foreign affairs select committee.”

She said her father was not a depressive but had realised he had not controlled his performance in front of the committee.

“Being called ‘chaff’ and ‘a fall guy’ didn’t help either,” she told Mangold.

Andrew Mackinlay, the Labour MP for Thurrock, had dismissed Kelly as “chaff” during his evidence.

Mangold noted that Kelly had actively come forward to help the authorities in their investigations. He said: “Paradoxically, she said Kelly had not only volunteered his relationship with the BBC defence reporter Andrew Gilligan but looked forward to speaking to the committee.”

While Wilson told Mangold her father had been “quite happy” to speak to Gilligan, “he had not discussed with him all the controversial matters surrounding alleged Downing Street interference with the September dossier”.

Mangold, writing in The Mail on Sunday, also cast doubt on how much information Kelly gave Gilligan about the claim that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could be deployed in 45 minutes. It was clear, however, that he had briefed journalists on the difficulties in finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Mangold’s says the original information on the “45-minute” claim came from an MI6 agent in Baghdad, a senior Iraqi officer who has since been relocated by the British.

Mangold said: “What he said was not that biological and chemical weapons could be deployed — ie, fired — within 45 minutes. That’s nonsense, and Dave Kelly and I laughed about it when we spoke. What the agent said was the Iraqis had created a system that would enable Saddam or his nominees to communicate with regional military commanders within

45 minutes, authorising the use of weapons of mass destruction. And this is not the same as deployment or launching.”

Mangold compares Kelly’s apparent suicide with that of Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who killed himself at the height of the Profumo scandal in the 1960s: “He too fell victim to pressures of press and government.”

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