At some stage, perhaps months or years before he was forced into the public eye, the weapons scientist discovered that his own personal defences were shot. Those claims “really challenged his identity of himself”, according to the inquiry’s suicide expert, Professor Keith Hawton. Unable to keep the normal, healthy divide between work and life, he cracked.But only inside. By all accounts, Dr Kelly loved his job as a weapons scientist.

Like many men of his generation, he went further, pouring his soul into his work to the extent that eventually his entire sense of self was bound up with it.So when some sleazy spinner from the MoD leaked the lie that he was a middle-ranking official, or when the over-excited Labour MP Andrew Mackinlay described him as “chaff” before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, he was unable to behave with the strength that he had shown while in Iraq during the early 1990s. Its unshowy regularity has been implicitly compared to the tacky, publicity-crazed world with which it collided so painfully.But perhaps it is worth asking, without wishing to be insensitive, whether the quiet, simple existence presented in the feature articles was quite the model of normality that has been assumed. If the painful process of the Hutton inquiry is to have been worthwhile at all, its findings will provide lessons not only on matters of public life, but of private life as well.Hooked on clich?those who have written about this week’s testimony to the inquiry have portrayed the details of his life – the house, the garden, the family, the pension worries and so on – as being typical of a certain traditional, middle-class Englishman. It might be thought that to gaze too closely at the personal elements of this tragedy is indelicate and shows lack of taste, but frankly it is rather too late for that.The suicide of an apparently sane and successful man has never been subjected to such open and detailed scrutiny. The BBC governors were blinkered in their defence of Broadcasting House and all its works.Living in an age where the protagonists of news stories are expected, like soap-opera characters, to be heroes or villains, evildoers or victims, commentators have agreed that the tragic death of a good, public-spirited man has provided a wake-up call to those in public life whose hard-eyed ambition has allowed them to drift away from simple values of decency and propriety.There is, of course, another largely unmentioned, possibility: that the fault-line lay less in public institutions (although few of them will emerge with much credit) than in David Kelly himself.

Senior civil servants were concerned above all to keep their distinguished noses clean. Journalists, from Andrew Gilligan to this week’s bad-guy, Nick Rufford of The Sunday Times, embellished the truth – or perhaps lied – to get a better story and then, in various ways, let down the source of it. The Government was obsessed by the need to get its own way and used all the black arts in the PR handbook to convince backbenchers and the public of the rightness and morality of its position. A shadow has been cast over public life, we are told; the way that the government, civil servants and the media act and present themselves will never be quite the same.