Brief encounters with the dubious
Justin Marozzi NOT QUITE WORLD'S END: A TRAVELLER'S TALES by John Simpson Macmillan, £20, pp. 461, ISBN 9781405050005 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Volume five — or is it six? — in the Simpson autobiography series. For many people, one volume tends to be enough, but Simpson has a lot to tell. In this latest doorstopper, he offers us an engaging collection of 'snapshots', essays on a lively and eclectic bunch of characters he's run into over the years. There's a crooked extortioner, the maddeningly elusive Japanese emperor and empress, Saddam awaiting execution, film stars, Serbian contract killers, a child sorcerer in the Congo, Chinese tomb-raiders and 'a variety of other thoroughly dubious people including Robert Mugabe and Alastair Campbell'.
The last few words of that sentence, not buried midway through the book but on its very first page, are a masterstroke. It is an exquisite pleasure to see Campbell so ruthlessly dismissed, separated from one of the world's nastiest dictators by the slenderest of conjunctions.
Why the animus? Because Simpson still feels bruised — or he feels the BBC's bruises — over the Gilligan report on Downing Street 'sexing up' the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war. Many will share his anger that the story, which was essentially true, resulted not only in the tragic suicide of the arms-control official Dr David Kelly, cruelly outed by the government, but in the resignations of the BBC's chairman and director-general. Campbell should have been fired.
This being Simpson, however, he can't resist telling his readers that he would have done a better job than Gilligan in the first place. He then talks us through his own story along the same lines for the 10 o'clock news which was better sourced. Being four years late, it didn't have the impact he'd have liked.
Simpson is a good story-teller. He wouldn't have achieved what he has if he wasn't. And it is doubtful he would have been beating down the doors of the world's dictators, reporting on some of the most difficult, dangerous and history-changing moments of the 20th century, if he didn't have an ego the size of a continent. It's all very well having the linen suit from Airey and Wheeler, but a foreign correspondent without supreme self-importance is rather like a politician without vanity.
Simpson is rather pleased with himself, but at least he admits it. And, he would have us believe, it's not his fault. 'We are the ones who reached adulthood in the 1960s, and we were taught then to regard ourselves as the pinnacle of human civilisation,' he says. He's one of the biggest fans of his television programme Simpson 's World and can't stop mentioning that he has lots of friends in high places: I would be greatly humiliated if people thought I was a social snob, although I notice from my writing that I am a considerable name-dropper. (Not, I hope, in private conversation, but the habit is dangerously catching, and as you get older you like the sound of your own voice even more.) He loves reminding us when he's first on to a story: 'I saw, with some pleasure, that I was the only person from British television, or indeed from the British media in general' on the first day of Saddam's trial. At the age of 62, it's rather endearing. The old boy's still got fire in his belly. And lead in his pencil. He has recently fathered a new son, Rafe, by his second wife Dee whose beauty he regularly comments upon, in addition to that of likely young lasses he encounters.
The reporting, whether from Tokyo or Baghdad, is vintage Simpson: humane, wise and simultaneously pompous and selfdeprecating. It is refreshing to see him give so much credit to his colleagues Nick and Oggy, unsung heroes of his on-screen triumphs. He must be mellowing. Now and then a BBC boss suggests he might like to spend more time writing books, in the hope of pushing this immovable object out to grass, but each time Simpson sees him off. He remains the doyen of foreign correspondents, pootling about the globe in search of the next big story, grandly pontificating 'with a glass of something encouraging in my hand'. Easy to mock, amusing to satirise, but long may he continue with Auntie. We'll miss him when he's gone.
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