On a late September evening, two giants of the written and spoken word can be observed outside the BBC’s central London headquarters. One is eight feet tall, cast in bronze and bears the name Orwell. The other is John Simpson. At 82, Simpson is still hard at work filming an intro to the latest episode of his series. He checks the script on his phone, takes a breath and completes it in two takes, in between posing for quick selfies with people half his age leaving the building.
He looks every inch – and there are a few surplus ones spilling over the waistband of his white, straight-legged chinos – the formidable silverback who has dominated the BBC’s coverage of world affairs for the past 60 years. The comparisons with David Attenborough are irresistible. The BBC’s world affairs editor is slightly taller and, it has to be said, in person, slightly better turned out. But in their pomp they both projected a powerful aura of authority.
And yet there’s a big difference. If we were commemorating the 60th anniversary of Attenborough’s broadcast life there’d be fanfare and countless PR attendants fussing around us. Instead, minutes after his filming has finished, it’s just Simpson and me in the BBC bar with only my rather feeble half a lager and his double Johnnie Walker for company. He grimaces at the prospect of an encounter with ice in the way the captain of the might have. “Oh no, just straight as it comes,” he offers by way of gentle instruction to the barmaid.
I question why, given their similar professional stature and service, Simpson doesn’t share Attenborough’s national treasure status. “Oh, because there’s only one David and there’s 500 of me,” which, as we’ll discover later, is not close to being true.
It’s clear from Simpson’s very first words that there’s some catnip cunning informing his approach to this interview. “I hope you might find room for one or two thoughts about the BBC and the mess it’s in. I feel I’d like to get it off my shoulders a little bit.”
So polite, so seductive. But first let’s start with actual battleground experiences, some of which will feature in this week’s documentary about his broadcast life. The worst, he says, was at the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Simpson and a team of colleagues were hit by a massive bomb dropped in friendly-fire error by the Americans. “Seventeen people were killed, including my translator. Most of them were burned alive. We had brought with us a photographer who was an Afghan and he vanished in the immediate aftermath. I had to look among all the dead and dying for this photographer and that meant having to turn over the burnt bodies. That was a real low point. We were all bleeding and all of us lost hearing in one ear. I couldn’t believe I was still alive. And I was in a lot of pain because I had big lumps of shrapnel in my body, including my arse.”
His backside had been an area of significantly greater discomfort 20 years earlier while reporting from Beirut. He’d been captured while out alone by a group he now calls “extremist nutters”.
“They said I was a spy and they tortured me in nasty ways that, even now, I don’t want to think about.”
We were bleeding and lost hearing in one ear. I couldn’t believe I was alive
Does he want to elaborate? He goes further. “I haven’t said this to anybody. I didn’t even tell my wife I don’t think. But it was up my arse. They were shoving things up my arse.” He speaks with an embarrassed whisper, even though we’re alone in the bar. “I was in there for three or four hours and then they made me kneel down and did a mock execution. I felt so ashamed of myself and I still do.”
Ashamed about what? “Ashamed that, had I known anything, I would have told them. At the end, the guy pulled the trigger and nothing happened and I got up and brushed the sand off my knees and I said, ‘We’ve got a word for people like you in England – you’re a w****r’. I wish he’d known what it meant. It was a sort of 1–1 draw. I’d re-established who I was instead of begging them to stop.”
Another of the most grisly sights he encountered was the botched hanging of three men in Kabul. “I thought as I was watching it that I would wake up at midnight for the rest of my life, but like all the other horrible experiences they don’t come back to me because I’ve written about them, talked about them and dealt with them.”
Simpson says he isn’t particularly religious but does pray, “especially when I’m in trouble. It means a lot to me. It just helps that sense of calmness and order, which I think you have got to have at some level to get through life.”
One tangible consequence of his obsessive need to be telling stories from the world’s conflict zones was the end of his first marriage, which produced two daughters who he’s still close to. In hindsight would he have done anything differently. More wife, less war? The long pause suggests not. “I do wish I’d been a better husband. I was married to the job. She didn’t understand why I was so keen on it. I suppose,” he chuckles, “I should have cited the BBC in the divorce in some way.”
Not long after, Simpson met and married the South African documentary-maker Dee Kruger. She would have four miscarriages – all girls – before in 2006 giving birth to a son, Rafe, named after the explorer and friend Ranulph Fiennes.
Simpson starts to tell a story about the extraordinary battle currently going on, in which friends have accused Fiennes’s wife of deliberately isolating the explorer. But out of respect for his friends, and possibly the libel lawyers, he stops. “Let’s just say there is something going on with this wonderful man and it needs sorting out.”
Over his long career, Simpson has met some of the vilest men on the planet. Who would he say was the worst? “It took me a long time to realise that he wasn’t just a clown and that he was evil and that was [the Libyan leader] Gaddafi.” And who most impressed him? “The thing that I am most grateful for is getting to know Nelson Mandela. He loved the BBC. He used to get furious when he heard what people said about the BBC, particularly in Britain. God knows what he would say about President Trump suing it for $10 billion.”
Which brings us back to the scratch that Simpson needs to itch. He says that the BBC he loves, the BBC that he’s so proud of, the BBC he believes is at the heart of what shapes who we are, is in the midst of the worst crisis in its history. “I feel the BBC constitutes the essence of what it is to be British and that is why people respect and admire it right across the world. But I do think this is the worst position the BBC has ever been in. I think there is a real possibility that we’re going to lose it as it is unless the Government and the BBC together can come up with a decent way of funding it.”
This is the worst position the BBC has ever been in – there is a real possibility that we’re going to lose it
Would that involve maintaining some form of licence fee? “No, I think the licence fee has had it,” he says bluntly. “If people can decide they simply don’t want to pay, which they’re increasingly doing, we’ve had it, we’re finished. Don’t tell me these people [who have stopped paying their licence fee] don’t watch the BBC. Of course they do. For me that’s just like shoplifting.”
Simpson believes that a mandatory household levy collected and admin-istered by a body independent of both Whitehall and the BBC is the best solution, though acknowledges it seems to be off the table. “The Government has turned that down, but that to me is the right way of doing it. Everybody pays for it like we pay for our defence, for instance. That’s what citizens do.”
Simpson has met the Corporation’s new director-general Matt Brittin. What did he make of him? “He’s a nice man. He asked me: ‘What’s wrong with the BBC?’ I said it’s too timid, it’s not proud enough of itself. It listens all the time to its critics. All the time people are worried about what the newspapers will say and they don’t seem to remember that many of the newspapers have an ideological and commercial reason for doing the BBC down.”
Did he watch the DG’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg in which she asked him whether he’d allow a programme to be “made and presented by AI”? To which his reply was, “I would do, within guardrails”. Simpson hasn’t seen it, professes astonishment but then offers an alternative view. “I think we’ll find that there will be a specific value in having human people telling you what the facts are. This would be our chief selling point – ‘Made by humans, presented by humans, for humans’.”
He might be 82 but Simpson still, at times, gives the impression of someone who fears being told he’s no longer wanted. And there could be a reason for that. Next year he will equal the record set by Charles Wheeler as the BBC’s longest-serving news broadcaster. The following year he will break it, creating a record that’s unlikely ever to be matched.
And embracing the work mantra that seems to have underpinned his entire career, he has plans to achieve that goal. “I want to do a last tour of the places that I really loved. I want to go back to the farthest reaches of the Amazon, to spend a fortnight in Iraq and Baghdad and to go back, of course, to Afghanistan because I love the country so much.”
If he does get to do that, and in 2028 break Wheeler’s record, he will surely have earned his national treasure status.