John Simpson: it’s not about needing to drink the blood of virgins
John Simpson seems to be mellowing, says Cassandra Jardine.
John Simpson Photo: Martin Pope
On my way to interview John Simpson, an open-top sports car speeds past. The driver is a glamorous young woman, arms piled with gold bangles. Next to her is a large, white-haired man with a familiar square face. It’s like stumbling across a lion in the supermarket. The right habitat for the BBC’s 66-year-old world affairs editor isn’t traffic in Chelsea, it’s a war zone.
We are so used to seeing Simpson dodging bullets or shouting over the sound of shelling that his presence suggests an invasion of west London could be imminent. If it is, the BBC will find him camera-ready in a pale khaki suit with a pink shirt. I suspect that even on holiday he never wears a stripe or a dot that might cause trouble on screen. Forty years in the front line of battle to get the story leaves its mark.
Simpson rarely allows himself to be interviewed because, he says, he doesn’t like to be judged. At 66, however, he seems to be relaxing his rule because he has much to celebrate. On June 13 he will be given the Freedom of the City of London for services to broadcasting, an honour which no longer involves the right to drive sheep over London Bridge. He has also just secured another two-year contract with the BBC.
His amiable demeanour suggests that home life is going well, too. In 1996, he married the South African Dee Kruger, his second wife. Her sister is his agent and the driver of the sports car that delivered him in such alpha-male style to our meeting at her office. He lives nearby, and is often seen in Chelsea cafés with Rafe, his five-year-old son, who appears to be the light of his life. “I can’t look at him without thinking what a wonderful bit of luck it is to have him.”
Isn’t it curious that the big beasts of broadcasting – David Dimbleby and John Humphrys as well as Simpson – have all made second marriages to much younger wives? Far from being offended by the question, he seems chuffed. “I don’t think it’s about needing to drink the blood of young virgins – actually I’m not sure about Humphrys. I’m very fond of him and it’s charming to me that we are now in the same category, with young children.”
But why does it happen? “In television, you get these ancient animals and they work with younger people. Then you get involved – my wife was my producer – and, when you have a younger wife, it wouldn’t be fair not to let her have a child. I can’t say I was hugely enthusiastic until the kid came along. Then I realised what a joy it was.”
This month Simpson has plenty of dad-time because he is grounded, having tests on his hearing. One ear has deteriorated, a result of his being bombed in 2003 when accompanying Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq. Several of his group were killed by American “friendly fire”. Blood was pouring from his ear as he described the scene of carnage on camera, saying, with classic British understatement: “Sorry to be so excitable.”
Until now the major effect of his injuries has been a BBC dispensation to travel business class so that he can stretch his damaged leg. It’s unlikely that anything can be done to revive his hearing, but he doesn’t seem bothered, so long as it doesn’t stop him working. Nor does this reminder of age and infirmity depress him. “On the contrary, my whole face was peppered with shrapnel. I had a big piece of shrapnel around my hip – in my buttock actually – and a really big piece lodged in my flak jacket, just over my spine. I could be blind or paralysed, so not to be able to hear when my wife says, 'It is time to put out the rubbish’, is a very mild thing to have happened. Now I am cupping my ear and doing all the things that used to irritate me in my father [with whom he chose to live after his parents split up]. I’ve become my father saying, 'Speak up boy’, to my son.”
Simpson is a dream interviewee. He talks fluently, never letting his voice drop at the end of a sentence, trained by a 40-year career to carry on seamlessly until fed another question. In that time he has worked in more than 120 countries, covering major events from the tanks in Tiananmen Square (where he rescued a soldier from a mob) to the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 where, notoriously, he entered the country ahead of the troops, wearing a burka, which is on display at the Imperial War Museum, Manchester.
He isn’t slowing up. “January was Egypt, February was eastern Libya, March was western Libya and in April I was in Tripoli.” The Libyan capital, he explains, is an exhausting place because Gaddafi’s regime operates in a random way. Told there was no chance of an interview, he would slink off to his hotel, only for another broadcaster to be granted one a few minutes later.
It’s enough to send a competitive person wild. That’s Simpson. At least it was. He used to have a reputation for being merciless with those who stood between him and a scoop. On the subject of BBC management he is as fierce as ever – “Why are we losing £50,000 foreign correspondents and closing bureaux when we should be losing £90,000 managers?” he blazes. As a journalist, however, he seems to be mellowing.
It helps that recent hot stories, notably the first interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, dropped into his lap without any machinations. “You need an ego. This is a competitive business. But being nice and gentle and holding hands with everyone – I find that a lot more possible now. I don’t have an awful lot to prove, except that I can still do the job.”
Simpson’s softened world view extends to the stories he covers. “The world is a milder place. When we are dealing with Osama bin Laden and Gaddafi and what’s happening in Syria, it doesn’t seem mild, but with the time span of 40 to 50 years, you can see that it’s a less violent and less unpleasant world. In a sense, it’s slightly boring. You have to look quite far now to find a savage dictator, a vicious dictator. There’s no one to match Bokassa – I did the last interview with him – not even Mugabe. After all, Robert doesn’t eat people.
“In my time, I’ve covered JFK, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan. You don’t have to like these people but they are a bit bigger than the average. It’s hard to see our present politicians as having any kind of grandeur. I don’t imagine that people are going to say to me in 20 years’ time, 'Gosh, what was John Major or Nicolas Sarkozy really like?’ or 'I really want to know about the evolution of the European Commission.’
The highspots have been the 1989 revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, “when people just came out on successive days, in bigger and bigger numbers until the government collapsed on sheer moral grounds” and the “amazing and wonderful” turnaround in South Africa in 1994, where civil war was predicted but nothing of the kind happened.
Is there no one he would still like to interview? Mugabe, Ahmadinejad and Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, whom he would like to ask: “What happened to the man everyone had such high hopes of five years ago?” When he finally retires he doubts if the BBC will appoint another world affairs editor. He says the days of the overview are at an end. Maybe he believes he is irreplaceable but, for the next two years at least, he will continue to pop up in the world’s hot spots.
The end of his era still seems distant enough for him to be able to repeat a remark made when he recently appeared on Countdown.
“I was saying that people have stopped calling me 'veteran’ and have started calling me 'venerable’. 'What comes next?’ I asked. One of the contestants handed me a piece of paper on which he had written 'vegetable’.”
This month Simpson has plenty of dad-time because he is grounded, having tests on his hearing. One ear has deteriorated, a result of his being bombed in 2003 when accompanying Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq. Several of his group were killed by American “friendly fire”. Blood was pouring from his ear as he described the scene of carnage on camera, saying, with classic British understatement: “Sorry to be so excitable.”
Until now the major effect of his injuries has been a BBC dispensation to travel business class so that he can stretch his damaged leg. It’s unlikely that anything can be done to revive his hearing, but he doesn’t seem bothered, so long as it doesn’t stop him working. Nor does this reminder of age and infirmity depress him. “On the contrary, my whole face was peppered with shrapnel. I had a big piece of shrapnel around my hip – in my buttock actually – and a really big piece lodged in my flak jacket, just over my spine. I could be blind or paralysed, so not to be able to hear when my wife says, 'It is time to put out the rubbish’, is a very mild thing to have happened. Now I am cupping my ear and doing all the things that used to irritate me in my father [with whom he chose to live after his parents split up]. I’ve become my father saying, 'Speak up boy’, to my son.”
Simpson is a dream interviewee. He talks fluently, never letting his voice drop at the end of a sentence, trained by a 40-year career to carry on seamlessly until fed another question. In that time he has worked in more than 120 countries, covering major events from the tanks in Tiananmen Square (where he rescued a soldier from a mob) to the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 where, notoriously, he entered the country ahead of the troops, wearing a burka, which is on display at the Imperial War Museum, Manchester.
He isn’t slowing up. “January was Egypt, February was eastern Libya, March was western Libya and in April I was in Tripoli.” The Libyan capital, he explains, is an exhausting place because Gaddafi’s regime operates in a random way. Told there was no chance of an interview, he would slink off to his hotel, only for another broadcaster to be granted one a few minutes later.
It’s enough to send a competitive person wild. That’s Simpson. At least it was. He used to have a reputation for being merciless with those who stood between him and a scoop. On the subject of BBC management he is as fierce as ever – “Why are we losing £50,000 foreign correspondents and closing bureaux when we should be losing £90,000 managers?” he blazes. As a journalist, however, he seems to be mellowing.
It helps that recent hot stories, notably the first interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, dropped into his lap without any machinations. “You need an ego. This is a competitive business. But being nice and gentle and holding hands with everyone – I find that a lot more possible now. I don’t have an awful lot to prove, except that I can still do the job.”
Simpson’s softened world view extends to the stories he covers. “The world is a milder place. When we are dealing with Osama bin Laden and Gaddafi and what’s happening in Syria, it doesn’t seem mild, but with the time span of 40 to 50 years, you can see that it’s a less violent and less unpleasant world. In a sense, it’s slightly boring. You have to look quite far now to find a savage dictator, a vicious dictator. There’s no one to match Bokassa – I did the last interview with him – not even Mugabe. After all, Robert doesn’t eat people.
“In my time, I’ve covered JFK, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan. You don’t have to like these people but they are a bit bigger than the average. It’s hard to see our present politicians as having any kind of grandeur. I don’t imagine that people are going to say to me in 20 years’ time, 'Gosh, what was John Major or Nicolas Sarkozy really like?’ or 'I really want to know about the evolution of the European Commission.’
The highspots have been the 1989 revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, “when people just came out on successive days, in bigger and bigger numbers until the government collapsed on sheer moral grounds” and the “amazing and wonderful” turnaround in South Africa in 1994, where civil war was predicted but nothing of the kind happened.
Is there no one he would still like to interview? Mugabe, Ahmadinejad and Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, whom he would like to ask: “What happened to the man everyone had such high hopes of five years ago?” When he finally retires he doubts if the BBC will appoint another world affairs editor. He says the days of the overview are at an end. Maybe he believes he is irreplaceable but, for the next two years at least, he will continue to pop up in the world’s hot spots.
The end of his era still seems distant enough for him to be able to repeat a remark made when he recently appeared on Countdown.
“I was saying that people have stopped calling me 'veteran’ and have started calling me 'venerable’. 'What comes next?’ I asked. One of the contestants handed me a piece of paper on which he had written 'vegetable’.”
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