On 18 July 2003, the body of the government weapons inspector, Dr David Kelly, was found in woodland near his Oxfordshire home. Dr Kelly’s death brought to a head months of public and media speculation and intrigue over the September Iraq Weapons Dossier. Two days after the apparent suicide, the BBC confirmed that Dr Kelly had been the main source for Andrew Gilligan’s incendiary report on the Today programme. The report claimed that the government had misled the public over the 45-minute question in the September Dossier, deliberately inserting unreliable intelligence in order to make a more compelling case for the invasion of Iraq.

Lord Falconer immediately called for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly, and so the Hutton Inquiry was born. It was without doubt one of the most eagerly anticipated reports in recent years – and one of the most disappointing. When the inquiry’s findings were published in January 2004, the report and Lord Hutton received widespread criticism for the apparent whitewash of the government. The inquiry failed to answer important questions about the use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War and, while it damned Andrew Gilligan, the BBC and the MOD, the government was exonerated from any wrongdoing. As a result, Lord Hutton’s impartiality has been questioned.

It was important that the Kelly case should be re-examined by someone independent, without any affiliation to the government

In March 2005, Peter Kosminsky’s docu-drama, The Government Inspector, reignited the public debate surrounding the case. Like the Hutton Inquiry that it dramatises, The Government Inspector caused much controversy. Was it too soon after the event? How reliable was the depiction of the characters involved? Was it in bad taste? Etc, etc. These are all valid questions but they do not change the fact that The Government Inspector is a compelling and powerful portrayal of the Kelly affair. It was important that the Kelly case should be re-examined by someone independent, without any affiliation to the government. Kosminsky’s film painstakingly re-creates much of the evidence from the Hutton Inquiry, incorporating contemporary news footage and including independent research. In this way the viewer is presented with a rather unsettling but far wider-reaching picture of Kelly. The opening sequence shows Dr Kelly taking a knife and painkillers, and walking towards the woodland where his body was found. This is interspersed with flashbacks of Kelly searching for evidence of Iraq’s weapons by torchlight. The flashbacks give context to the story and suggest a reason for his suicide. They present two very different views of the weapons expert: Kelly the vital, energetic figure determined to prove Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons capability; and Kelly the vulnerable man torn by guilt and doubt that we see quietly preparing for his death. There is no dialogue in the first few minutes, only Mark Rylance’s extraordinary performance as Kelly, underpinned by a haunting soundtrack that veers between Middle Eastern folk song and Christian choral music.