DIARY
JOHN SIMPSON
By rights, I should still be in Iran. Instead, the marvellously named Ministry of Islamic Guidance refused me a visa. I would only be allowed in again, an official said, if I showed my goodwill by reporting favourably on Iran. But since you can't ignore the vast corruption there, I don't suppose I'll get another visa now. Too bad: Iran is a splendid place, especially for travel snobs like me who prefer to avoid the easi- er destinations. It has, though, a certain Alan Clark quality to it. A friend who did get a visa brought back a booklet called Principles of Marriage from the holy city of Qom. If your wife refuses maliciously to satisfy your sexual desires, it advises you to educate her. 'Hitting,' says the 'Dear Mary' of Qom, 'should be done by hand or by using a thin and light wooden stick. Physi- cal punishment should not be so hard as to create ill-feeling.'
By coincidence, two top figures from Iranian television news have just spent a couple of weeks in London. When they came to the BBC television newsroom, they were unsettled by their inability to spot the link-man with the British Government. `How do your instructions come down from the top?' one asked. I tried to explain: each news programme has its own editor who makes his or her own decisions, without being given instructions. The two smiled in Polite disbelief. Finally one said, 'It's him, isn't it?' He pointed to a figure at a com- puter terminal watching the incoming news reports. Occasionally this man would have a quiet word with the editor. 'That's the copy-taster,' I explained. 'He makes sure the editor knows the latest on everything.' The Iranian smiled again, as one who might say, 'Yes, and I'm the Shah of Persia.'
Itook them to Westminster to watch Prime Minister's Questions. Suddenly our way was barred by an attendant in full evening dress. The Iranians were charming men, but their deep-set eyes and several days' growth of beard made them look a lit- tle like car-bombers. What upset the maitre d' figure, however, was the fact that they weren't wearing ties, which the politically Correct in Iran regard as degradingly west- ern. Fortunately, spares are kept in the Press Gallery, so I tied them for the Irani- ans, giving fatherly instructions: 'Chin up! Fold your collar down!' It didn't spoil Prime Minister's Questions for them; they Were entranced. They probably regarded the Westminster dress code as a charming mediaeval custom, like insisting that mul- lahs should wear turbans at all times. Instead of going to Iran, I'll- be spending a month reporting from Bosnia. I also hope to do a favour for a friend. I'm taking her some newspaper cuttings about a recent American court judgment against a jour- nalist who invented quotations from some- one; plus the name of a good New York lawyer. The American journalist P.J. O'Rourke, who also goes to places like Iran and wrote a book called Holidays in Hell, was in Bosnia recently, and my friend guid- ed him round. She is brave and cultivated, and gets through the roadblocks by per- suading the thugs who man them that she is whatever they are, whether Serb, Croat or Muslim. The last time I worked with her, some drunken Serbs wanted to keep her, steal our camera, and throw us over a cliff. She dissuaded them, on the grounds that she was Serbian. When P.J. O'Rourke's article appeared in Rolling Stone, she was `There's no place for women in the church.' the light relief, the joke foreigner, whose excellent English had been turned into the `Me very happy see you in my country' vari- ety. Worse, he identified her clearly (with just a change of Christian name) and revealed that she was a Croat who often pretended to be something else. By now the word will have gone round, and her life will be even less safe than before. Maybe P.J. should choose another hell to holiday in, while the lawyers sort things out. First prize two weeks in Iran, second prize four weeks in Bosnia.
Have you ever thought,' a colleague of mine once remarked, 'that the word "journalistic" is only a term of praise among journalists?' He was right, of course. For most people, it has overtones of speed, sloppiness, surface attraction, lack of depth: in short, what most of us turn out, and not only in the tabloid press either. Recently, our grander newspapers ran arti- cles about someone who was briefly in the news. Not one of them mentioned the fact that only a dozen or so years earlier he had been accused of causing the death of two people in melodramatic circumstances. Not even the newspaper which had then railed most strongly against him in an editorial seemed to remember. It must have been a great relief for him, of course. Maybe it had been filed under some different heading in the cuttings libraries; or maybe no one bothered to look that far back, assuming there would be nothing of interest.
Aa journalist myself, I share all the shortcomings of the profession, and have a few more of my own. I am, for instance, hopeless at any form of arithmetic. A few months ago, I was planning to throw a big party to mark the 25th anniversary of my joining the BBC; only to find that I had added up the years wrongly on my fingers, and the anniversary had passed the previ- ous year. Once, there would have been a BBC remembrances who would have organised the equivalent of a Queen's tele- gram for centenarians: a discreet lunch, perhaps, plus the offer of 'grace term leave', which sounds like something left over from the Indian Civil Service. In these leaner, meaner times such elderly comforts have long since disappeared; and anyway a recent survey found there were twice as many people under 40 in the BBC as above it. While the nation ages, its broadcasters get younger. As for me, there's no anniver- sary worth noticing now until the 30th; which, perhaps, gives me enough time to work out which year that will be. C
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