The bar at the Langham Hotel in central London doesn’t open until 4pm and there’s someone playing piano too loud in the lounge. We could be really boring, John Simpson suggests, and go to Broadcasting House: he heads over the zebra crossing with his backpack. He’s just had a meeting here in fact, with the BBC’s deputy head of news: “About my future,” he adds, in a familiar and slightly thespish voice. “Which is OK for now, but it’s only a matter of time.” Simpson is 80 and still holds the position of world affairs editor, which he’s had for 34 years. In 2019 it looked like things were up for him when James Harding, then director of news, cut his pay and overlooked him for a few big missions: he wrote Harding into his last novel, Moscow Midnight, as a dull jobsworth, then had to change the plot when Harding stepped down.
Friends of Simpson’s “from the old days” are now at the top of the news. “The BBC is full of very nice people who are put in charge of restructuring but would rather be making programmes,” he says, standing back to let me pass through the revolving doors. He still has his current affairs discussion show – Unspun World – because “it costs absolute peanuts”: all his interviewees are on staff and they don’t even have a studio: they wander around filming in the building.
Until recently, Simpson was still on a plane somewhere every five days. He will be filming in Israel in January, but he no longer goes on the front line, “because I can’t run any more. There are places they won’t send me to, though nobody actually wants to say that because they think I’d explode in a shower of sparks.” He gets no special treatment at 80. “If I saw signs of that I’d be quite cross.”
At the BBC’s ground-floor bar, he orders a double Famous Grouse with soda water and whispers, as they struggle to get it from the top shelf, that he might as well climb over the counter and get it himself. How tall is he? “Six two, but we all lose height don’t we,” he says, as he taps his card, and within a few moments we are on to his father, who raised him, and has been gone 45 years. “It was his heart – he had lots of tax problems and I really think that did it for him.” When Simpson is at the doctor these days, they pay attention to his heart too. When did he start going, given that he was raised in Christian Science, and they famously don’t go to the doctors? “Well, it was easy not to go when you don’t have anything wrong with you,” he says.
“And now I’m a member of another failing institution: the Anglican Church.” At the height of his war career, he had ten hours’ worth of hymns on his iPod. On the days he makes his show in London, he takes the train from his home in Oxford, and as it pulls out of the station he is compelled to identify the steeple of his local church against the skyline. If he sees it in time, the universe is running in order “and I can slot in”.
He is not an anxious person, he says. He does not have PTSD like his friend Fergal Keane. “My instinct is to say, ‘I’m in charge and these experiences may be unpleasant, but they’re not going to affect me as a person.’” When he watched three botched hangings by the Mujahedin in Kabul, he thought he would never sleep again – but he wrote about it all in the Sunday Telegraph, dictating every detail to “a lovely motherly copy-taker” who said, “Oh you poor thing,” at the end of the call: the men have never featured in his dreams. He was tortured in Beirut in 1982: he will not say what was done to his body, but they followed with a mock execution – a gun detonated against his head, which turned out not to be loaded, then a handshake when he got off his knees. He had a crisis of confidence after that, because he realised he would talk under pressure: the only thing that stopped a confession was the state of his torturers’ English. “A terrible blow to my self-esteem. Realising that you’re not dying on the cross for all of this as you thought you were.”
First things first, then: who was the best dictator to interview? “Saddam, I suppose, because of the menace,” he says. “I mean, what’s the fun of going to interview a bloodthirsty dictator if they’re actually rather pleasant, give you a gift, and you know you’re not in any danger? It’s much more tense if you think, ‘One false word here and I could be taken out and shot.’”
Dictators, in general, are subtle creatures, he says. “Rather quiet people. Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who’s got so much blood on his hands he’ll never be able to clean it off, is terribly mild. Of course, a north-London ophthalmologist by background. In my experience they’re rather glad to see you, and then afterwards, you’ve got to really battle not to say, ‘Well, he wasn’t too bad!’” Why are they glad to see you? Because they believe that what they’re doing is right? “Oh, absolutely, and you’re reaffirming that for them. You’ve come all this way! They’re often evil dictators by chance. They’ve sort of wandered into it.”
Simpson first met Vladimir Putin when he was deputy mayor of St Petersburg. “I’ve been quite impressed with him over the years, and he’s got that Russian thing of being rather polite to people older than himself. But having too much power, being able to kill who you want – and sitting at those vast tables with just a couple of people on their knees – makes you master of the universe.”
Trump is “just the kind of person I don’t like”. They have not met: “I’m rather kicking myself, because I could have gone to see him loads of times, but I just thought, you know, he’s so distasteful.”
Simpson has often talked about the last 30 years as an era of small, dirty skirmishes. “But Ukraine is comparable to the big wars of the past, the drawn-out ones where people die in trenches, which we haven’t seen since the Korean War.”
If he could be anywhere in the world tomorrow, regardless of physical fitness, it would be Sudan, “Where there’s this appalling war, which nobody cares about covering. Fourteen million people displaced – it is a stupid war. I’d love to go. I’m not
a great one for places where there are lots of other journalists: I like to be on my own. Especially BBC journalists: I don’t want a big collection of colleagues around…”
There are many stories of this stubborn individualism. In 2003, Simpson walked into Kabul ahead of the Northern Alliance – he won an international Emmy for the report on the Ten O’Clock News – and said, “It was only BBC people who liberated this city.” Then there was the time, before the Nato bombing of Belgrade in 1999, that he voted to leave Serbia along with other BBC journalists, then jumped off the bus at the last minute. Not true! “The warlord Arkan had announced that he would cut the throats of any Nato journalists in the Marriott Hotel – he had my room number. The hacks all panicked. They voted to leave but I didn’t want to.” Simpson got wind of an Australian TV team coming to Kabul and “joined forces” with them, remaining for several months. He snapped the main tendon in his left leg during an air raid and did live broadcasts propped against a wall with the leg out of shot, in case the BBC made him come home.
In one of those Serbia reports, Simpson suggested that Nato bombing was creating more support for Slobodan Milošević among the Yugoslavs. On 21 April that year Tony Blair said, at Prime Minister’s Question Time, “My view of democracy is he is entirely able to present whatever reports he likes and we are perfectly entitled to say that those reports are provided for under the instruction and guidance of the Serbian authorities.” Simpson threatened to sue, and won a sort of apology from Alastair Campbell.
To this day he won’t listen to Campbell’s podcast with Rory Stewart (“stupid, I know”). They were not his favourite power duo, not least for their attacks on the BBC’s coverage of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“What Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell did to the BBC was the worst single act of damage a government has done,” he says. “Boris Johnson came close, holding the BBC under the water – the Conservatives put their hands round the neck of the finances. What Campbell did was to make it obvious that if you put enough political pressure on the BBC, you could make it go quiet: shocking, that in a democracy someone would do that.
“The BBC irritates everybody, that’s what it exists to do,” he goes on. “But it’s really unfair that it gets the blame for what are political decisions. It’s so painful.
“Every Labour MP I’ve talked to is favourably disposed to the idea of the BBC – but maybe [Culture Secretary] Lisa Nandy feels that it wouldn’t be ‘good’ for it, to praise its existence?” What would he do to reform it? That the chairman is chosen by the government is “an anachronism in a free society”, he says. And the licence fee needs changing: “In Germany you pay it as part of your taxes; you don’t have the right to refuse.”
Six months ago Simpson got caught up in two demonstrations outside Broadcasting House, one pro-Palestine and one pro-Israel. “A man came over and spat at me and said, ‘You are personally responsible for enabling genocide’”: the issue was that he didn’t use the word “terrorist” in reports of the 7 October attacks by Hamas. The former head of BBC One Danny Cohen – “who I consider a friend of mine, though I’m not sure he would say the same of me” – criticised his and the BBC’s “anti-Israel bias”. Simpson was asked to make a video explaining why he didn’t use the word – and came under fire when he said they didn’t use the word “evil” for the Nazis either.
“I do wonder why Danny Cohen thinks that someone can spit in my face and say I’m enabling Israel. If you want your side supported, go to the Mail, go to the Guardian, but don’t come to us.”
I asked the director-general of the BBC, Tim Davie, about managing these big beasts of global news. “John is a fierce defender of impartiality,” he said, “but people know that he’s saying what he believes – they respect his authenticity.”
After we meet, Simpson emails me: the spit didn’t actually hit his face. He doesn’t want people to think he’s exaggerating.
[See also: The triumph of Paddington Inc]
He has two daughters from his first marriage, now in their fifties, and became a father for the third time at 61, in 2006. Last year, he told the journalist Craig Oliver how his son Rafe would bar the doorway as a child in an attempt to get him not to leave on assignments. Rafe is now 19, and they have not talked about those years. “I mean, we are very close, but it’s like something out of a 1920s novel. We talk to each other in quite clipped terms. We don’t go in for long discussions about motives.”
Simpson regularly refers to himself as self-obsessed, but it seems out of place when he describes his own childhood. He was born into an arena of constant conflict between two incompatible parents. In a 2005 memoir, he records a poignant assumption that must be familiar to any child of divorce: “I knew it was all my fault because they would go hushed when they said my name.”
In summer 1951, his mother refused to accompany him and his father on a day trip to the Festival of Britain. When the six-year-old Simpson returned to the house, she was in the hall with a suitcase, and announced that “she and Johnny” were leaving. “Don’t you think he should choose for himself?” said his father – more of a debate tactic than a serious suggestion, Simpson thinks. But, with his eyes fixed on the doorknob, Johnny reasoned, out loud, that his father needed a child, because his mother had two by a previous marriage. He could not look at her as she walked out – while on his father’s face he saw, not relief, but something like panic. The guilt between Simpson and his mother was an impasse to their relationship for the rest of her life.
His father was a storyteller, a sailor. For several years, he and Simpson lived with a man called Brian “because he was a bit bisexual”.
“I think he was fascinated by his own character, and he could be quite bullying to other people. To women, and the man that he lived with. He could be really cruel, and that used to give me a lot of pain. But I miss him every single day. My childhood left me with a real sense of the damage that you can do to your kids without even noticing, like an elephant treading on something it can’t see.”
Would he have become a foreign correspondent if he had gone with his mother? “Oh, I don’t know,” he says, in a way that suggests he’s thought about it many times. “I would have been much more domestically rooted. But my father could have been a real king over the water. I’d have worshipped him from a distance.”
You could trace, in the life Simpson chose, the child who learned that its world could change in ten seconds; who took sides once, with disastrous effect, then founded his identity on being “impartial”. It was the journalist Martha Gellhorn who became his hero, and “a kind of surrogate mother” as he got to know her in her later years. “She was a free spirit and a journalist before absolutely everything else.”
His first marriage ended because of his career. “She said, ‘You can’t know how hurtful it is that after just three, four days, you start to think about where you’re going next.’ It was one of my many failings as a human being, to be always concentrating on the next place.”
He talks about it like it was going on holiday. “I think it was, in a way. There are not many places I went to that I didn’t positively want to go to. Sarajevo during the siege, Baghdad when it was going to be bombed. That’s where I wanted to be, no matter how unpleasant and dangerous it was. I suppose because I just wanted to be there, and strut my stuff.”
When he gets up in the morning, the first place he checks in on is Ukraine. “My gut instinct is that having made a catastrophic mistake in invading Ukraine will actually make Putin much less inclined to do anything else. He’ll come out of this, thanks to Trump, as the victor, but he’s not a madman… he’s villainous but he’s not Al-Gaddafi, or Saddam Hussein.”
The thing is, he says, when you’ve done this job for 60 years, “you do realise that, you know, it will pass. When Nato bombed Belgrade, I was there under the bombs and thought, ‘This is my Second World War, people are always going to be asking me what it was like.’ And nobody remembers. I’m not saying the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza will be forgotten. But I covered two Israeli invasions of Lebanon, for instance, where tens of thousands of people’s lives were affected, and it’s as though this is happening for the first time.”
His 2016 book on war correspondents, We Chose to Speak of War and Strife, opens by imagining his own memorial. Several foreign correspondents have spoken of Simpson’s compulsion for danger – Alan Little called it “suicidal curiosity”, while Lyse Doucet, writing from Sudan, told me, “I’ve always been in awe of John’s bravery – I’ve marvelled at his courage.” I ask whether there is any deflation in thinking you’ll be killed and not being killed, over and over again, but he’s not having it. He has a big bit of shrapnel in his hip “and sometimes, on a plane journey when it’s hurting I think, ‘I wonder how much I could get off the BBC for this,’ but I don’t sue.”
He still has no nightmares. “I just think I’ve kind of got it sussed. I’m not suggesting I’m a well-rounded character: I’m a sort of nutter, really, but I’ve developed ways.” He took up the flute at the height of his career, and used to take it to war zones and practise in his hotel room. There are things he doesn’t understand about himself – like the fact that he hates taking phone calls and will do anything to get out of one. “But I don’t thrash my son or kick my dog.”
His daughters live in Kingston and Tonbridge. “I don’t spend nearly enough time with my grandchildren: that’s one of my big, big regrets. And of course, I regret being nasty to people occasionally. Then, if I can, I make up for it, by writing a letter or something.”
We are on the zebra crossing again, outside the BBC. It’s dark and time for John Simpson to get home to Oxford. “I’m off to Marylebone,” he says, looking down the street. “Well, I would be if I could get a f***ing taxi.”
[See also: Gary Lineker: “I seem to live in the Daily Mail’s head”]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024