FEATURES
Features Editor Neasa Cunniffe
Trinity News 13th April 2004
9
Simpson’s World Tim Walker
I
BBC’s renowned television journalist, John Simpson on the Hutton report, Fox News and being in the right place at the right time.
t’s every young lad’s dream. Or at least it’s one of mine, as I consider the looming prospect of graduation. One day, there’s a knock at my door and I open it to find a pair of men in black, offering me a job with a shadowy arm of British Intelligence. The following day I receive a phonecall from the BBC, who are also looking to recruit me. It sounds like a farfetched Boy’s Own fantasy, but this is almost exactly the position John Simpson found himself in as he graduated from Cambridge in 1966, and his luck has not deserted him since. It’s hard to think of another television reporter who has been in as many of the right places at the right times over the past 30 years, or perhaps I should say the wrong places - the Dublin bombings of the early ‘70s, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Tianenmen Square, Belgrade, Kabul, Iraq. His infallible sense of timing could prompt the conspiracy theorists amongst us to wonder if, in fact, he ever did turn down that first offer. With the Hutton enquiry showing up both the BBC and the British intelligence services, I wonder if he’s happy with his original choice. "Oh, I’m so grateful now that I didn’t take a job in intelligence," he stresses, "I’d like to say it was an enormous sense of nobility that drove me against them, but actually it was at least partly that the BBC paid twice as well." Amongst other accolades, Simpson’s career at the BBC has brought him 3 Baftas, a CBE, and now somewhere in the region of 350 million potential viewers for his BBC News 24 programme, ‘Simpson’s World’. As a result, he is fiercely loyal to the corporation, and angered by his masters’ kneejerk reaction to the Hutton report, which resulted in the immediate resignation of the immensely popular Director General, Greg Dyke, and a number of other senior figures. On the day I spoke to him, Simpson - currently the BBC’s World Affairs Editor - had drafted a letter to the organisation’s acting chairman with the support of other influential colleagues, including John Humphrys, Jeremy Paxman and Andrew Marr. "I wrote what John Humphrys described as a ‘suicide note’ to the chairman saying I didn’t like what was happening," he explains. "I think it’s quite important for someone to stand up within the outfit and say: ‘Look, this isn’t how we want it to go. We would like a
line to be drawn under the affair so we can get back to the business of reporting.’ I think we’ve been much too apologetic." Later, in his address to the Philosophical Society, Simpson praised the BBC as "an organisation where truth does seem to mean something." He holds the journalism of his competitors, Sky News and ITV, in similarly high esteem, reserving his contempt for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, whom he describes unflinchingly as "an absurd outfit of ignoramuses shooting their mouths off. I regard Sky as colleagues and competitors rather than enemies." There’s a twinkle in his eyes now: "I regard Fox News as an enemy to be smashed into the ground." Thankfully, British and Irish television news are protected by statute from the kind of political influence that now afflicts American reportage. Sky may be a Murdoch subsidiary, but they are not a mouthpiece. Sitting opposite John Simpson, it is hard to forget the names of other people who have done the same, as his interviewees. Ayatollah Khomeini, Robert Mugabe, Colonel Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein are amongst those who spring immediately to mind. Once he had decided not to have the reporter assassinated, Osama bin Laden wrote a letter to Simpson expressing his deep respect for the BBC, and promising to give an interview when the opportunity arose. Now 59, Simpson has seen 34 conflicts in as many years, and borne witness to the terrible and the inspirational in equal measure. For whilst his recent close call in Iraq (a US friendly fire incident that killed his translator and seventeen others) and the bombing of Belgrade during the Kosovo crisis (when Simpson was the only British reporter in the Serbian capital) have given him "a particular dislike for people dropping high explosive on other people from the air," he has also seen at first hand the fall of the Taliban, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. So if he isn’t a spy on the side, how does Simpson manage to beat the pack to the stories so consistently? "Well, is it some wonderful instinct which one possesses?" he muses rhetorically. "Probably not. Probably it’s that if you race around enough with your ear to the ground then there’s a fairly good chance of being in the right place at the right time. I’ve been in the wrong place so
many times, but they don’t say ‘when this happened, John Simpson was on the other side of the world,’ do they?" Like all the best role models of the old school, Simpson has little time for what he calls the ‘touchy-feely pain management’ offered by modern news corporations to employees who have been placed in traumatic situations in the line of duty. He indulges in his own brand of therapy, he reveals, by putting his experiences in print. Which would explain the three volumes of autobiography he has produced since 1998, as well as his new book about Iraq, ‘The Wars Against Saddam’. Simpson’s own involvement in Iraq has been considerable: he reported from the Kurdish town of Halabjah immediately following the infamous chemical attack of 1988, and was the BBC correspondent in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. His reporting earned him the ire of the Ba’ath administration, however, and he was banned from returning to the city during last year’s conflict. Instead, he was placed in Northern Iraq and, thanks to that friendly fire incident, now has a piece of shrapnel lodged in his hip as well as a missing eardrum. I ask if he feels personally responsible for our image of Iraq, having been so closely associated with its coverage. "There are some subjects that are so deep that they don’t bear the stamp of any individual reporter, and I think Iraq is one of them," he says. "When I went to Iraq, I was quite anxious to tell people that, in spite of all these dreadful things, it was a country with real people living in it, not an abstraction that could be dismissed and bombed with impunity. Even now, Iraq is not a country in flames, despite what you might read." Unlike many other reporters, Simpson chose not to be embedded with British or American troops for the duration of the war. "I didn’t like the idea of being dependent on the soldiers you have to report on objectively for everything - food, security, transport, power. Supposing they start executing prisoners - how hard will it be to be absolutely honest about people that you’ve come to like? Wouldn’t you go soft on them?" His decision to report ‘unilaterally’ arguably placed Simpson in a far more dangerous position than his colleagues who were embedded with military units, a theory borne out by his experience. "As it turned out - surprise, surprise - good journalists
“If you race around enough with your ear to the ground then there’s a fairly good chance of being in the right place at the right time” who were embedded reported well, and bad journalists who were embedded reported badly, and the policy gave us some of the best coverage of conflict we’ve ever had. So perhaps I was wrong to be opposed to it, but I just don’t feel it’s for me." Wars have a habit of making
celebrities of those who report on them. Simpson has had more than his share of the limelight, and during the Iraq War it was the turn of his BBC colleague, Rageh Omaar. Omaar has recently published his own book about the conflict, but presumably being nicknamed the ‘Scud Stud’ can be as much a curse as it is a blessing. "I’m sure I speak for Rageh too when I say that none of us like that sort of attention. It’s not what we’re in it for, and you have to stop yourself from getting caught up in it, which can be hard. But if you simply go on trying to be the best reporter you can, it fades very quickly. I’m fairly sure television journalists are forgotten even quicker than newspaper
journalists…" Simpson’s injuries have left him a little the worse for wear, but his formidable physical stature is undiminished, and his formidable professional stature is, if anything, enhanced. Though he is happily based in Dalkey with his second wife and producer, Dee, he has no plans to settle down any time soon. "I stagger around like an increasingly elderly nutter and have a very nice time. I just came back from fourteen days in the Congo in the most disgusting conditions and at the moment I still enjoy it - and I’m looking forward to the next story."