The two greatest boasts among foreign correspondents are “I was there” and, with even more swagger, “I was there first.”After 50 years in the game John Simpson holds a lot of these trump cards. The Northern Ireland Troubles, apartheid South Africa, Tiananmen Square, Bosnia, Iraq: you name it, he was probably there.
In 2001 he disguised himself in a burka to become, he reckoned, the first western journalist to enter Taliban-held Afghanistan. A few weeks later, during the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance, he claimed on air that it was his BBC team that had liberated the city.
Simpson's career is garlanded with awards and distinctions. He has written two novels and at least 12 works of nonfiction; the latest of these, the grandiloquently titled We Chose to Speak of War and Strife, turns Simpson's gaze to his own profession. A collection of anecdotes about famous journalists (although only British, or British-employed, ones), this book is packed with stories of adventure, quick-thinking and derring-do, some of them featuring Simpson himself. It will doubtless sell well for Christmas.
But those looking for a more thoughtful book, for the study of “the world of the foreign correspondent” suggested by its subtitle, will be disappointed. For a start that subtitle is inaccurate. With only one or two exceptions Simpson’s protagonists – the likes of William Howard Russell, Martha Gellhorn, Jon Swain, Michael Buerk and Kate Adie – are not, strictly, employed as foreign correspondents when he writes of them.
A foreign corr is a journalist who is based, whether permanently or for a term of several years, in a country or on a beat, and who is expected to cover its politics, economics, cultural affairs and even its gee-whiz dead-donkey stories. If there’s a war on their beat they’ll cover that too.
In these days of internet-fuelled decline the average foreign correspondent, particularly in print, may be a staff employee but is more likely to be a freelancer, trying to assemble a living wage and working expenses from several “strings”. They make their own contacts, do their own research, queue for their own visas, plot their own strategies and carry their own bags. As agencies go broke or downsize they may well no longer be there at all.
Simpson’s book has nothing to do with these small fry. Instead it concentrates on those reporters variously referred to as firemen or war correspondents: star journalists who are sent out from home to cover the stories with the biggest domestic interest. They move on to the next story when public attention has waned.
Their job is not only to get good material but also to front up for their organisations – to get their famous faces and bylines on to the big running stories. Often, as in Max Hastings’s daring solo excursion into Argentinian-held Port Stanley, in the Falklands, or Simpson’s own dash to be “first” into Kabul, their biggest scoops are really about themselves.
Simpson can perhaps be excused for having this top-down view of his profession. Although he portrays himself as an outsider at the start of his career – Hastings “was everything I wasn’t, or didn’t feel myself to be: privileged, upper class, connected and clever” – Simpson went to Dulwich College Preparatory School, the exclusive St Paul’s School and Magdalene College, in Cambridge. From Cambridge he was inducted straight into the newsroom at Broadcasting House. While still in his 20s he was given his first foreign bureau: Dublin. He has never worked for anyone but the BBC.
His description of the typical “foreign correspondent’s” modus operandi is therefore instructive: “Let’s suppose you are in Baghdad. You have flown in and probably been picked up by a couple of the local security people who are hired to look after the bureau where you will be working and staying: a villa close to the center of town . . . That day, or the next, you’ll be driven in an armoured four-by-four, with a security man riding shotgun . . . heading for what was once called the Green Zone . . . In the [British] ambassador’s residence . . . you settle down in a comfortable armchair with the ambassador and his senior staff. The gins and tonics appear, accompanied by magical biscuits cooked and served by the ambassador’s very British gentleman’s gentleman.”
Few foreign correspondents have had this experience of Baghdad or of anywhere else.
Simpson is not without insights, as we see in his tribute to the great Marie Colvin, the courageous Sunday Times reporter who was killed at the start of the siege of Aleppo. "Although she was never rude or aggressive to people like me, she called it 'show-business', and maybe by her standards she was right. She was a journalist of an older and different type: not the flashy 'special' who descends on a place for a week or so, appears on the screen in front of millions and goes home to collect the awards, but someone who spent months there, understanding the people and the country and writing articles 1,200 words long about them, once a week."
But his book can find no place for many other necessary reflections, such as the remorse and guilt that many foreign correspondents come to feel for having built exciting careers, with tremendous camaraderie and fun, against a backdrop of abject human suffering.
All too often his eagerness to put himself into the story, even other people’s stories, strands Simpson on the wrong side of the line that separates Alan Whicker from Alan Partridge. “Saddam was an appalling man in many ways. But those of us who sat through his trial and had to watch him being hanged on camera, the howls of his executioners ringing in his ears, retained a certain respect for him. And I personally shall never forget meeting his gaze in the courtroom and watching the anger in his eyes turn to a certain humorous warmth.”
Ed O'Loughlin reported from Africa for The Irish Times and was Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age of Melbourne. His third novel, Minds of Winter, was published by Riverrun in August
