30% think Dr David Kelly was murdered
At the start of the week the Daily Mail ran a headline saying only 20% of people thought David Kelly committed suicide. The Mail claimed it was an overwhelming rejection of the official verdict - it wasn't actually quite as overwhelming as it seems, by only mentioning the 20% the Mail implied that a large percentage of people thought he didn't commit suicide, in fact a large majority of people told Harris they didn't know whether David Kelly committed suicide or not, the proportion of people who disagreed with the statement that he committed suicide was only around 22% (the tables aren't on the Harris website anymore, so I'm taking the figure from memory - apologies if it's a point or two out). The Mail could equally have headlined the poll report "1 in 5 disagree that David Kelly committed suicide". Though actually, that itself would still have been quite a striking finding.
The way Harris asked the question on David Kelly was perfectly valid, but considering alternatives I thought their way was quite likely to show a high score for people rejecting the suicide explanation - it is likely to be easier for a respondent to say they disagree that Kelly committed suicide than to actually say he was murdered as part of some conspiracy. The proportion of people who thought David Kelly was murdered would surely be lower than 22% if asked outright? So we asked.
We ran a question on the YouGov daily polling and reasking the question YouGov first asked back in 2003 during the Hutton inquiry. Now, I don't think the wording YouGov used is perfect either. For starters, if I was writing it from scratch, I'd have given people the option of saying other or none of these. However, since YouGov had asked the question back in 2003 I wanted to use the same wording to draw direct changes.
Back in 2003 11% of people thought that David Kelly was murdered, 75% that he committed suicide (most thinking he had done so due to the pressure placed upon him) - given it was at the height of the controversey, only 14% said don't know. Looking at the same question now 30% of people think David Kelly was murdered, 32% think he committed suicide and 38% don't know - meaning in the 7 years since his death the proportion of people thinking he was murdered has almost tripled. The Daily Mail's headline was rather sensationalist, but the underlying fact is that a large minority of people do indeed think Kelly was murdered.
Not of course, lest I be misunderstood, that this makes it any more likely that he was.
