Bold as brass in a burqa

12 April 2012

BOOK REVIEW: News from No Man's Land: Reporting the World

John Simpson (£20, Macmillan)

One of my earliest sightings of John Simpson was in the Intercontinental Hotel in Tehran in 1979.

He was striding across the foyer with a large book under his arm. It turned out to be a copy of the works of Proust - in French.

In those days we worked against each other often. I saw him most recently in April at the site of yet another suicide bomb in Jerusalem - there he was, flak-jacketed, still among the first at the scene.

John Simpson is a showman. He's also an exceptionally hardworking reporter who for more than three decades has gone the extra mile for the BBC.

His book, News From No Man's Land, is part anecdote, part bluffer's guide, part self-deprecating confession, part self-serving puff. For all that, it is an easy and rewarding read.

He loves the BBC through and through and his fiercest ire is reserved for those who don't. In return the BBC has played to his larger-than-life persona.

Simpson's World on BBC World Service Television, whose audience John counts in parts of a billion, has ensured that a domestic Diplomatic Correspondent has become a world affair. Indeed, it is not for nothing that he enjoys the formal title BBC World Affairs Editor.

It's a title whose sheer grandeur he allows himself to raise an eyebrow at, but one he nevertheless loves to bask in.

Simpson's World is an extraordinary weekly odyssey in which the great man meets a man seemingly less great than himself half a world away. They recall times past, present, and future, as the camera lingers long on the Simpson features.

So much so that even the unsuspecting Pakistani shopkeeper who sold him the infamous burqa in which he entered Afghanistan disguised as a woman recognises him.

Afghanistan plays large in this book - not just from within the voluminous folds of the said burqa but in his single-handed conquest of Kabul. Both are great stories told with great gusto.

And both, for all their whiff of absurdity, depict a great truism. John Simpson is one of those increasingly rare TV correspondents who genuinely has seen it all before. He is also a man of remarkable courage and that ultimate determination to 'get the story' whatever the cost.

As the adventures unfold, you realise that modern TV will never produce another Simpson. There are moments in Simpson's book, when Evelyn Waugh's splendid correspondent 'Boot' becomes almost interchangeable with our star. Never more so than beneath the burqa.

Simpson is no small man. The allshielding dress must have been the biggest single piece of woven fabric anywhere in the Indian sub-continent.

Simpson reveals he couldn't face the huge pair of ladies' plastic sandals and settles for his own formidable size 12 boots.

In this completely unsuspicious guise he crosses the Pakistani border into what was then Taliban-policed Afghanistan. This crazy, potentially dangerous, desperate ploy to break away from the vast pack of Western hacks corralled in Peshawar sums up the man.

First, he ensures that his equally 'burqared' cameraman records the visual absurdity, then he sets up a noisy generator to facilitate the transmission, with a Taliban outpost only a few yards away.

The whole escapade achieves several ends - very little insight into the true state of Afghanistan, but nevertheless a complete scoop that leaves the other hacks both infuriated, beaten and amused.

Naturally, his Pakistani hosts are outraged. John Simpson does not go quietly.

He is kindly about colleagues and reserved with his criticisms. But he is unfettered in his anger with much of TV news and the way it is going.

He knows better than most that the space he has been given to develop his career has these days been all but filled up with endless on-the-hour deadlines that rarely allow journalists the time to get to know the terrain, let alone build up the contacts that will feed and facilitate the endless stories to come.

John Simpson is a man of stories. All three of his autobiographical books are packed with them. Those of us who work against him try to dismiss him for arrogance and pomposity, and even those who work with him must find him exasperating.

But he gets the results. He corners the minister or the commander. He reaches the pass. The champagne and oysters, the business-class travel, do not quench his journalistic hunger for more.

In an age when the BBC stands accused of ageism, Simpson, an indefatigably active 58, is proof of what Charles Wheeler still displays at 79, and Bill Deedes at 89.

If you are good and go the extra mile, you will go on for ever. So, to me, it was no surprise that John Simpson made it into liberated Kabul first. He describes seeing the city's sign in the road and his BBC radio engineer closing in on it ahead. 'I sped up,' he writes, 'I wanted to be the first to pass it.'

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Bold as brass in a burqa

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