Hello, Prime Members. You can listen to British scandal at free on Amazon Music. Download the app today.

From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford and I'm Alice Levine and this is British scandal.

Today we're concluding our series on the death of David Kelly.

I remember finding this so dense and hard to access at the time. There were all these claims and counter claims being made about the war.

But what's been clear since we've been doing this series is there's this really tragic story at the heart of it.

Somebody who gets caught up in the middle of these two huge institutions.

That's right. It is very complicated. So just to remind you of some of the key points in 2003, the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan made a claim on the BBC that the government sexed up a dossier about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

That creates a huge round with the government, especially Anna Stacan, who was a great lawyer.

And that's when UN weapons expert David Kelly comes in. So he turns out to be the source of that report. He gets dragged over the coals in hearings before Parliament. Then days later, he's found dead near his Oxfordshire home.

Yes, and that transforms this whole story from a political row into this huge reckoning. The government holds a public inquiry into what happened led by a judge called Lord Hutton.

He rules that David Kelly's death was suicide, but he also comes back with some judgments that were seen as a surprise at the time.

He concludes that the BBC's reporter Andrew Gilligan's allegations that the dossier was exaggerated were unfounded.

He also finds that the BBC is at fault and that the government is effectively in the clear.

So the government might have been cleared by Hutton, but meanwhile, weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq and opposition to Britain's involvement in the war just grew and grew.

It is a complicated picture exactly. So what impact did the scandal of David Kelly have on the relationship between the British people and their politicians?

One man who's really thought a lot about this is the writer Steve Richards.

He covered the Blair Premiership as a political journalist at the time and has written about Tony Blair in his new book The Prime Ministers, which came out last year. He also presents a fantastic podcast called Rock and Roll Politics.

Podcasts will never take off.

Steve says the death of David Kelly started a debate over whether Blair had lied to go to war, but actually it's a lot more interesting than that.

We'll ask him how the controversy has affected Britain ever since.

We are supported by Find My Past.

Find My Past is home to the largest collection of British and Irish records online. In fact, it's got the world's largest archive of digitised British and Irish newspapers.

...