But he was a troubled man. Eating away at him was the inquiry by the District Auditor into events at Westminster City Council, where he had been a councillor between 1986 and 1990. Dr Dutt had last been interviewed in February 1993 by John Magill, the bespectacled and aloof auditor who was looking into charges of gerrymandering against Conservative Westminster councillors.
When Dr Dutt was a councillor he had a flat in Knightsbridge, but his main home was a little one-bedroom flat at No 5 Garland Court, a small redbrick mixed office and housing development near St Albans station. He moved in there in 1990, but his neighbour throughout that time in No 4, William Sawyer, says: 'I can't even remember him saying a sentence to me. Just words.' Indeed, Dr Dutt was the object of great curiosity from his neighbours, who wondered about this mysterious doctor. Mr Sawyer recalls: 'I sat here watching the TV on election night in 1992 and I had no idea that the man across the landing was a candidate in Leicester.' A family friend who went to the flat said: 'It looked as if he ate and slept there but didn't live there.'
To say that Dr Dutt was a private man is to understate the extent of his desire to keep himself to himself. Mr Sawyer says: 'I think he had a visitor once, but I'm not sure. It might have been that he was on the telephone.' He apparently spent holidays alone in his flat. A family friend says there was once a girlfriend and hopes of marriage, but they never materialised.
His political colleagues all repeat the same mantra: 'He was a private man, a loner who didn't mix socially after meetings. We know very little about him.' His secretary, Anne Barnes, in a note to the coroner, wrote that she 'had learnt to respect his privacy' because Dr Dutt 'did not wish to mix socially with staff' or share anything that happened outside his work.
Dr Dutt had virtually no interests other than his politics and his work. He had given up the cello but had recently taken up clay pigeon shooting, installing a gun cabinet in his flat and obtaining a shotgun licence. Born of an Indian father, the eminent ear, nose and throat specialist Anup Dutt, and a Swedish mother, his acquaintances describe him as clever, arrogant and combative.
Early in his career, Dr Dutt was picked out by Dame Shirley Porter, then the council leader, and her cohorts for higher things. His rise through the Westminster City Council hierarchy was meteoric. A year after his election he was vice chairman of the housing committee and a year later co-chair.
That was to prove his undoing. Mikael Dutt went to his grisly end protesting his innocence, denying any interest in gerrymandering. But clearly Mr Magill thought that such a clever man in a senior position on the housing committee could not have avoided knowing about the policy.
When Mr Magill issued his provisional findings on 13 January, his patience had been tried by the four years of procrastination and delays from Dame Shirley and her fellow councillors. Several times Mr Magill had to use his legal powers to drag witnesses to his offices and much of his evidence was found in a raid on the council's headquarters in Victoria Street.
In his report, this normally most phlegmatic of men used language that surprised even the council's Labour opposition, which had prompted the inquiry. In the summary of his provisional findings, Mr Magill called the policy of trying to maximise the sale of empty council homes in marginal wards as 'disgraceful and improper' as well as 'unauthorised' and 'unlawful', and found 10 officers and councillors liable for losses of pounds 21.25m.
Mr Magill was very hard on Dr Dutt, who he considered was lying. He said that the version of events in relation to the monitoring of the sales given by Dr Dutt, who was vice-chairman of housing at the time the policy was implemented in July 1987, was 'not credible'. Mr Magill said that Dr Dutt must have known it was wrong for the council to use its powers to try to secure an electoral advantage. In his provisional view, the term with which all his findings are qualified, he found Dr Dutt guilty of gerrymandering.
The day before the findings were announced, Dr Dutt had already alerted his secretary, Ms Barnes, that he would be away for the day, and immediately sent a handwritten fax to Mr Magill, accusing him of 'a number of falsehoods and twisted interpretations in what you say'. He said that he did not have the resources and energy to defend the case.
By then, he was clearly very troubled. Without close friends or a partner with whom to share his thoughts, he had nowhere to turn. The very ethic of Tory self-reliance, in which he so firmly believed, was another barrier to seeking help. He believed that the District Auditor would eventually clear his name, but he was not one to join in campaigns for the Westminster Ten.
Two days later he wrote another fax to Magill along the lines of the first. Then, probably very soon after, he disconnected the telephone and the fax machine, wrote a note and took out his shotgun. He put it in his mouth and, using a cleaning brush attached to the trigger, blew his brains out. His body was not discovered until 26 January after he failed to turn up for work, which was, according to the pathologist at the inquest, between five and 10 days after his death.
Mikael Dutt did have some other problems besides the Westminster one. He had recently lost a court case concerning some unpaid rent and there were three complaints outstanding about his medical practice; one of the complainants, Richard Ross-Langley, turned up at Dr Dutt's inquest to publicise his case. Dr Dutt's response to Mr Ross-Langley's complaint showed that below the surface, the quiet, well-mannered loner had a ruthless streak.
Mr Ross-Langley's mother had died at St Albans hospital in August 1992, and he wrote a year later to the Coroner asking whether there was still time to make a complaint. The letter was passed on to the hospital and eventually to Dr Dutt, whom Mr Ross-Langley had never heard of, let alone met. Dr Dutt did not answer himself, but instructed Peter Carter-Ruck, the well-known libel lawyer. Mr Ross-Langley was surprised by the response: 'I wasn't at that stage even making a complaint and found myself receiving several letters from Peter Carter-Ruck demanding that I withdraw the allegations.' In a bizarre coincidence, Mr Ross-Langley finally lodged a formal complaint on the day that Dr Dutt's death was made public.
The note found next to his body, under the Bible that he carried everywhere with him (he was a very strong Anglican), is unequivocal: 'My decision to end my life is due solely to the need to continue to fight this matter of designated sales further draining my energy and requiring resources I do not have. I could not do my demanding medical work properly and without this I do not choose to continue living.'
Mikael Dutt's death was an opportunity to the Westminster Conservatives and they quickly grabbed it. Dame Shirley, no longer a councillor, on holiday in California, and Simon Milton, the council's deputy leader, both immediately issued statements blaming the District Auditor's report. Dame Shirley was reported in the Sun as saying that Dutt's death had been caused by a 'legal witch hunt'. 'The strain of the investigation into something he didn't do proved too much for him. Mr Magill has taken on the role of judge. This is the result of one man's justice.'
The counter attack continued in the Mail on Sunday of 30 January. In an article headed 'Inquisition and the death of my friend', Stuart Greenman, a former Westminster City Councillor and former adviser to Dame Shirley, painted a picture of Spanish Inquisition-like tactics.
The reality, according to another councillor who was seen by Mr Magill, was very different. Everyone had the opportunity to bring a legal adviser, but few, according to Patrick Evershed, the vice-chairman of the local Conservative Constituency Association, bothered to do so. The questioning was polite and firm but not unfair.
And the reality of Dr Dutt's protests of innocence? There are those who say that, despite his swift rise and his cleverness, he was not on the inside track. He was not at all the key meetings. As Peter Bradley, the deputy leader of the Labour group on the council put it: 'He was used by them but was not one of them.' A sad epitaph.
'And,' adds Bradley, 'in death, he will prove even more useful to them.'
(Photographs omitted)
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