Kelly family hits out at Cherie Blair

The family of the late David Kelly, the scientist who committed suicide after being outed as the source for the government's infamous "sexed up" intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons capability, have rounded on Cherie Blair for exploiting his name to sell her tawdry memoirs, Speaking for Myself.

Derek Vawdrey, the brother of Dr Kelly's widow Janice Kelly, said: "Cherie Blair should be ashamed of herself. It's somehow so typical of the Blairs to make use of Dai's [the family name for Dr Kelly] death to show the world what a wonderful man Tony Blair is. So far as I'm concerned, my brother-in-law's death was caused by what went on at Number 10 and what they said about him."

Until now the family have maintained a dignified silence, but Vawdrey feels the former Prime Minister's wife's decision to use Kelly's death to show her husband in a good light crosses the line of decency and taste.

In her book, from which Mrs Blair is expected to earn £1.5m in sales and serialisation rights, she recalls the day the news of Kelly's death reached them while they were on a trip to Japan and China. She writes: "In the 25 years since I had known Tony I had never seen him so badly affected. At the Tokyo press conference a journalist shouted at my husband: 'What's it like, Mr Blair, to have blood on your hands?'"

On a stopover in Beijing, the Blairs viewed an installation of terracotta statues. "There is a photograph of the two of us taken that morning that I keep in my study. Tony crouching among these thousands of tiny figures, me behind him, my arms around him, giving him the support he needed. 'You're a good man,' I told him as we were crouched there, the cameras whirring. 'And God knows your motives are pure, even if the consequences are not as you had hoped.' And it's true, Tony knew David was a loyal public servant driven to despair because of the furore."

Vawdrey adds: "It's a bit late for Cherie Blair to write that her husband 'knew that David was a loyal public servant driven to despair'. Where else was the furore created but in her husband's office, with all the wicked nonsense fed to the media that Dai was a Walter Mitty character and so on."