Ard, I'm glad someone else saw that amazing confrontation between Alistair Campbell and Jon Snow. "Gob-smacking" was Andrew Marr's word for it, and he wasn't over-stating it.

Teribus, the inquiry will probably make things clearer, but it's clear enough already that your theory about Gilligan's Mail article is sheer drivel. If that article was so revealing that it forced Kelly to out himself, how come he managed to lie low for another five weeks? Even when he outed himsslf, he did so only within the MoD and his identity was not known to newspapers. The three that did eventually did put Kelly's name to the MoD all did so within an hour of their editors being phoned by Campbell. Did Campbell plant clues? Let's wait and see.

After Kelly's suicide I thought the widespread assumption would be that he had been less than frank with the foreign affairs committee and that as a man of honour he could no longer live with himself. That was certainly my assumption, though I see no point attaching much weight to it until more is known about the circumstances.

In the meantime any suggestion that Kelly was out of his depth or was led astray by the media is misleading. He was world-renowned in his field, and was widely respected among senior investigative jouranlists for both his knowledge and his readyness to provide off-the-record background briefings. Kelly had lifelong friendships with some of those journalists, and indeed he was discussing personal issues via email with a friend at the New York Times shortly before he died.

From the outset I thought it unlikely that the BBC, including its governors and its chairman - who has a longstanding family connection with Downing Street and is a Blair appointee - would stand four-square behind Watts and Gilligan without the strongest of good reasons. We'll see.

More than any here-today-gone-tomorrow government, obsessed exclusively with short-term intereste, the BBC apires to the highest standards of ethics and integrity. In practice it gets close enough to those standards to be the most dependable news source in the world, by a country mile.