Any question answered...

Mark, as you know, a lot of bollocks gets published in peer-reviewed journals. :)

Well, obviously I haven't read the article, either, but the BBC article certainly ascribed views to Kennedy about Plato's philosophical views:

I believe that it is nonsensical to attribute any of these views to Plato, although I'm sure Kennedy is putting it rather more carefully.

I'd be very surprised if there was anything much in it. I'd obviously be happy to be persuaded, but unless a senior Platonic scholar comes out supporting this I am going to be extremely reluctant to call it anything but nonsense.

There is a lot to be said about how Plato wrote and people often hope to reduce that complexity. It's not enough that he actually tells you quite a lot about why he writes the way he writes. He even tells you a lot about his method, and yes, he didn't put all of his views perfectly openly, and for very good reasons. There's a huge amount of work on all this.

Unfortunately, I have a rule against having philosophical debates on-line, but I'm most happy to discuss it in person. :)

I don't think there's a debate here. I'm just not willing to dismiss it so easily. Plato on maths and science and harmonies is not new either - see the cosmological argument in The Laws (which I will be re-reading again very soon as it will, excitingly, be working its way into my dissertation. Reading group?). I've never really been able/willing to follow his cosmological arguments, but this might be a fruitful area of research for those who do.

Anyway, I am a believer of esotericism in philosophy, if I'm not a strict Straussian.

Have you read Al Farabi's Plato's Laws? Great example of the belief in hidden meaning in Plato that goes back to the end of the first millennium. Although we're still talking about over a thousand years after Plato wrote, the idea of secret meanings in his writings is not new.