The Slog has learned that the Stafford hospital Inquiry clinical negligence specialists Leigh Day & Co were also instructed by the thirteen doctors querying the autopsy gagging order on David Kelly’s mysterious death.

It’s a game of two halves in the legal profession. And for Andy Burnham in a tight corner, it looks like a case of ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’.
Today the increasingly embattled Health Minister gave the Commons details of the Inquiry’s reeport. The documentation makes for very grisly reading. One wonders if the Kelly autopsy will be equally full of holes.

Full of holes? Surely not. Well, the good people of Staffs who have had relatives killed or been abused at the hospital…or thrown into psychiatric hospitals and had their children removed under bizarre circumstances….do not have a high opinion of Andy’s report. One such person (a former victim awarded damages against the Staffs health and social care axis of negligence) writes, ‘Andy Burnham was the one who got Robert Francis to do the cover up at Stafford Hospital’. This is not, I hasten to add, an allegation we can either support or deny. So keep your writs dry, gentlemen.

But it does make you wonder whether Leigh Day is working for both sides via Kelly and the DoH….or just the one.

As the earlier post insisted, there is too much secrecy in this area: and too many people with a vested interest in maintaining it.