Father of the Chief Medical Officer was murdered by terrorists
AMID the deepening crisis, he has provided welcome reassurance and measured advice for a nervous nation. Yet the calm demeanour of Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty hides a personal tragedy.
Thirty-six years ago, when Professor Whitty was a teenager, his father was murdered by terrorists in Greece.
Kenneth Whitty, 44, was cultural attaché at the British Embassy in Athens when he was targeted in March 1984 as he gave a lift home to three women who worked for the British Council.
As his Ford Escort reached a crossroads, a pedestrian signalled for him to stop. When he wound down his window, the man pulled out a pistol and fired five times, hitting Mr Whitty three times in the head and also killing one of his passengers.
The murders stunned the diplomatic community and raised security fears because the Queen was at the time in Jordan on a groundbreaking tour of the Middle East.
In the wake of the killing, an internal British Council memo, now filed in the National Archives, was sent to all staff with advice on personal safety and precautions.
A group calling itself the Revolutionary Organisation of Socialist Muslims claimed responsibility for the deaths. Abu Nidal, the founder of the militant Palestinian group Fatah and later a freelance terrorist responsible for more than 300 murders, is widely believed to have ordered the assassination.
After the killing, a message sent to a news agency in Beirut said Mr Whitty had been targeted in response to Britain’s bid ‘to resume its former colonial role in the world by spreading colonial culture under a new guise’. It also threatened more attacks due to Britain’s ‘continuing detention and persecution of our Muslim fighters’ – believed to be a reference to three members of Nidal’s group who had been jailed in the UK for the attempted murder of the Israeli ambassador to London in 1982.
The future Chief Medical Officer was, like this three older brothers, at Malvern College boarding school in Worcestershire when their father was murdered. In an obituary, The Times noted that Kenneth Whitty had himself been only four when his father was killed in action in 1944. Another newspaper published a photograph of the diplomat in a cricket team from Clifton College in Bristol, where he played alongside John Cleese.
At the time of his death, Mr Whitty had been arranging the Greek leg of a major European tour of the play School For Scandal with Donald Sinden. At the first performance after Mr Whitty’s death, the cast assembled on stage for a minute’s silence.
Following his funeral in Alfriston, East Sussex, Mr Whitty’s widow Susannah set up a scholarship to help pay for sixth-form pupils to travel to Britain from Nigeria, Uganda, Malawi, Belgium and Greece – all places that her husband had worked as a diplomat.
Back at Malvern, the then 17-year-old Chris Whitty did not let the tragedy hamper his academic progress.
After excelling in his science A-levels, he went to Pembroke College, Oxford, before qualifying as a doctor.
Following in his father’s footsteps, he worked in Africa during the 1990s but eventually returned to Britain as a consultant physician and lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
He became chief scientific advisor to the Department for International Development in 2009, moving to the same role at the Department of Health seven years later. He was made a Companion of the Order of Bath in 2015 and appointed as Chief Medical Officer last year.
His knowledge of coronavirus, which has impressed Whitehall officials and the broader public, is built on a long history of research into deadly diseases including ebola and malaria.
In addition to the numerous academic papers on that subject, however, is an altogether different piece of work: research he published in 1992 that showed how students lied about how much alcohol they had drunk the night before – but were honest about what they planned to drink later.