Is Anything Happening? Read online

  All the more reason, I realised, to get it right. There could well be people listening to my words who feared that their own relatives were among the victims. To them, this wasn’t just a news story; this was intensely, searingly personal. A few days after the attacks, on a BBC phone-in programme, I found myself talking to a teenage boy whose father had been in one of the WTC towers when the planes hit. Nothing had been heard of him since, and the boy was desperate to hear from anyone who might have seen his father that day. It was heartbreaking.

  Was 9/11 the biggest story I would ever cover? Without a shadow of a doubt. Did it change the world? It did. At the time, I was reluctant to slip into the easy journalist clichés – our temptation is always to reach for the dictionary of superlatives, as if calling an event ‘the biggest ever’ or ‘the worst ever’ will somehow make us sound more important. But, by the time President Bush addressed the American people that night – ‘We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them’ – it was clear that the global repercussions would be both profound and long-lasting.

  When I finally handed over the reins of the BBC World Service’s continuous programming that evening, I switched on my mobile phone and found a text message from my daughter, Hannah. She was fifteen and had come home from school to find that her usual TV programmes had been replaced by continuous news coverage of the day’s events. Her message to me read: ‘Dad, what’s going on? Are we all going to die?’

  * I once got hold of a copy of the guidelines issued to new BBC radio news producers. One line in particular has remained in my memory: ‘Don’t pass on too much information to presenters; it only confuses them.’

  CHAPTER 2

  FROM SCUD FM TO WILLS AND KATE

  The rules are self-imposed … Not to underestimate the intelligence of the audience, and not to overestimate its information.

  ERIC SEVAREID, CBS NEWS

  ANY REPORTER’S FIRST INSTINCT when a major story breaks is to get to the scene as quickly as possible. But, by 2001, I had learned that sometimes it can be more rewarding – and certainly less frustrating – to stay put and take a bird’s-eye view of what is going on. So I was not one of the thousands of newsmen and women who desperately tried to get to New York within hours of the 9/11 attacks. With the airspace shut and all flights cancelled, the city was virtually sealed off, much to their fury.

  It did not take them long to work out that flying into Canada and then driving south across the border was the answer, and that is what they did. I suspect there were soon more reporters in New York City than had ever before been assembled in one place. It was as if the biggest and strongest beast on the planet had been attacked by an unexpectedly fearsome wasp – everyone wanted to see how the wounded beast would react.

  This is not the place for a potted history of the first decade of the twenty-first century. I doubt that you need to be reminded that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the horrors of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the introduction of anti-terrorism legislation and mass surveillance programmes, all flowed from that one cataclysmic event.

  If somewhere in the most remote mountains or deserts of Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen or Libya there is a University for the Training of Terrorists, the lessons of 9/11 will surely be a compulsory element on the syllabus. Strike hard, kill hundreds, make sure the TV cameras can get there. They are, unfortunately, lessons that have been learned too well: in the years that followed 9/11, there were attacks in Bali in 2002 (more than two hundred dead); Madrid in 2004 (nearly two hundred dead); London in 2005 (fifty-two dead); and Mumbai in 2008 (a hundred and sixty dead). And that was all before the emergence of the group that chose to call itself Islamic State.

  I did get to New York, eventually: on the first anniversary of the attacks, I anchored an entire day of non-stop BBC news coverage from a vantage point in a hotel room high above Ground Zero. It was, of course, unbearably poignant: the day-long roll call of the names of the 2,974 victims, the haunting solo cello of Yo-Yo Ma, the accompanying ceremonies at the Pentagon in Washington and Somerset County, Pennsylvania. I also co-hosted a two-hour global phone-in with one of my oldest friends, Deborah Amos of US National Public Radio. To our regret, it was the only time we were allowed to work together. We thought we made a pretty good team.

  It has become commonplace these days to talk of how the revolution in digital communications technology has created a space for a permanent global conversation. Anyone can talk to anyone, wherever they are, whenever they like, often at no cost, thanks to mobile phone and online messaging apps and live streaming technology. In 2002, though, the idea of a global conversation was still new and exciting, and when the BBC linked up with NPR and the American Forces Network, broadcasting simultaneously on all three networks, we did bring people together from right across the globe. So successful were we that an estimated 50,000 people tried to phone in, and I was told later that two of the BBC’s three switchboards had crashed while we were on air. Our colleagues in the newsroom were not best pleased when they discovered they could make no outgoing calls.

  It took quite a long time for the world to understand the true significance of 9/11 – and it is salutary for those of us in the instant analysis business to look back sometimes on how wrong we often are. One highly respected BBC correspondent – I shall spare his blushes by not naming him – wrote on the first anniversary of the attacks: ‘A year later, the world does not seem to have changed so very much after all. The attacks on New York and Washington were not followed up.’ I doubt that he would say the same thing now.

  I readily admit that I have said, and written, a great deal over the years that turned out to be nonsense. Happily, radio is an ethereal medium: most people only half-hear what you say anyway and, even if they are listening attentively, they will have forgotten your pearls of wisdom within minutes. The important thing for the listener to bear in mind is that reporters rarely know as much as they would like you to think – they hate the idea of having to answer a question with the words ‘I don’t know’, even if that would be by far the most accurate response.

  There was, though, one BBC correspondent who ignored all the conventions. His name was Alex Brodie, and he was based in Jerusalem during the first Gulf War in 1991, when Iraq was firing Scud missiles into Israel. More than once I found myself asking him from a studio in London: ‘So, Alex, what’s been happening?’, only to hear a weary, somewhat irritated voice echoing down the line from Jerusalem: ‘I … don’t … know.’ It was not what any presenter wants to hear.

  Alex was a first-rate journalist, and he later joined the team of Newshour presenters on the World Service. I never discovered if any correspondent had the courage to do to him what he had so enjoyed doing to us when he was in their shoes.*

  By the time of the 9/11 attacks, I already had quite a bit of experience of what is officially called ‘rolling news’ but is often known to its practitioners as ‘rolling bollocks’. The rationale for non-stop, real-time news is that listeners (or viewers) want to be sure that they are being kept informed of all the latest news as it happens, at any hour of the day or night. Waiting patiently for the next scheduled news bulletin is no longer acceptable. But since the development of news on social media sites, and mobile and online news alerts, it is an open question whether there is still the same appetite or need for continuous news channels on radio and television. In the words of two former BBC news executives, Richard Sambrook and Sean McGuire: ‘Cable news established the 24-hour news habit, but today social media and mobile phones fulfil the instant news needs of consumers better than any TV channel can.’1

  The virus that is rolling news can be traced back to Saddam Hussein. When he invaded Kuwait in 1990, and an international US-led coalition went to war to force him out again, the rolling news channels had a field day. Peter Arnett of CNN, which had until then been derisively known in the trade as the Chicken Noodle Network, became an international celebrity as a result of his dramatic live
reports from Baghdad. The BBC had nothing like it, but soon invented a back-of-the-envelope radio equivalent. Its official title was Radio 4 News FM, but it became far better, and more accurately, known as Scud FM.

  I shall have more to say about Scud FM, for which I retain enormous affection, in Chapter 12 – I became one of its core team of presenters and quickly learned how to fill several hours of airtime with little or nothing new to report. I had become a novice broadcaster barely a year earlier, but I told my bosses (the ‘suits’, in BBC-speak) that, unlike my much more experienced colleagues, at least I had the advantage of having reported in my newspaper days from both Iraq and Kuwait, so I did know what they looked like.

  And so it was that I joined such established BBC stars as Brian Redhead, John Humphrys, Nick Clarke and Nick Ross. From the beginning of the Today programme until the end of The World Tonight, if you were listening to Radio 4 on its FM frequency, you were fed a diet consisting only of war news. Plenty of people, including many of the BBC’s most senior executives, thought it would be an unmitigated disaster. In fact, it was a huge success and led directly to the launch three years later of Radio 5 Live as an all-news and sports network, and in 1997 of the BBC’s all-news TV channel, News 24, later renamed the News Channel.

  In the ten years between Scud FM and 9/11, there was at least one other global news event that ate up countless hours of airtime, not only at the BBC but around the world. It was what the police call an RTA, a road traffic accident, as mundane a story as you could imagine. Except that one of the three people who died was Diana, Princess of Wales, probably the best-known – certainly the most photographed – woman on the planet.

  Six a.m., Sunday 31 August 1997. The phone rings, my wife answers it and immediately hands it to me. I recognise the voice on the other end: it is Keith Somerville, one of the most experienced and respected editors at the BBC World Service. He uses the minimum number of words to convey the maximum amount of information. ‘Robin? Keith. Di and Dodi are dead. Can you come in?’

  It was the start of one of the weirdest weeks in my professional life – and, I think, one of the weirdest weeks in modern British history. At one point, we seriously began to wonder whether the British royal family could survive what seemed like a vast wave of public hostility, sweeping tsunami-like towards Buckingham Palace. I began to ask myself if I understood anything at all about the country I lived in.

  But first things first. What happened in that Paris underpass? Tell us again. What happened? Hour after hour, with only the skimpiest details of the car crash to go on, we could do little else but repeat the headline, over and over again. ‘For those of you just joining us, we have suspended normal programming to bring you continuous news coverage following the death of Princess Diana in a car accident in Paris.’ I can still say it in my sleep, nearly twenty years later.

  The second question was the obvious one: what does it mean for the future of the royal family? Diana was a superstar, and her story – the child of a broken marriage, an unhappy young princess in a loveless marriage to an unfaithful husband – was the stuff of fairy tales. And then that stupid, unnecessary death that could so easily have been avoided if their driver had not been drinking and if they had all been wearing seatbelts.†

  It is rare for me to remember what anyone has said to me in an interview – I have done far too many of them over the years. The truth is that although every interview is of vital importance, and often of real interest, at least to me, at the moment it takes place, I have usually forgotten everything about it within an hour or two. For the same reason, I am too often embarrassed when I meet someone whose opening words after we are introduced are: ‘We’ve already met. You interviewed me once many years ago.’

  However, I do remember three remarks made to me about Diana’s death by three different interviewees in the hours and days that followed. The first was the journalist and political historian Anthony Howard. At some point on that Sunday morning, I asked him what he thought her death would mean for the royal family. ‘I know this might not be a popular thing to say,’ he replied, ‘but it’s the best thing that could have happened for them. She represented a huge problem following her divorce from Prince Charles, and now she’s gone.’

  The second was the novelist Linda Grant, when I asked her to explain why Diana had attained such an extraordinary level of adulation. She replied:

  Even though she was a princess, she represented something that every woman in Britain could identify with. She was a mother of young children who had struggled with bulimia and post-natal depression. She had been trapped in an unhappy marriage. Her husband had been unfaithful to her. She didn’t get on with her in-laws, and she fell in love with someone she shouldn’t have. So she became a clothes horse on which a great many women could pin their own unhappiness.

  The third was the Scottish political theorist and republican Tom Nairn, who said in response to the public reaction to Diana’s death: ‘The people of Britain have this week elected their first president. The trouble is she’s already dead.’

  Two other people whom I interviewed on that Sunday in August 1997 were the actor and comedian Billy Connolly and his wife Pamela Stephenson, who had been friends of Diana’s. I had been warned that Pamela Stephenson, who has a PhD and is a licensed clinical psychologist in the US, was very particular about how she was to be addressed. So, before the pre-recorded interview on the line to their home in California, I checked with her: ‘I understand you prefer to be addressed as Dr Pamela Connolly.’ Quick as a flash, back came the unmistakable gravelly, Glaswegian tones of her husband: ‘Yeah, and I prefer to be addressed as Captain Fantastic.’ It was a welcome moment of relief at the end of a very long day.

  There has been a great deal of debate over the years about whether the media over-reported – and misrepresented – the public reaction to Diana’s death. My own belief, in retrospect, is that we did, but for understandable reasons. It was not because somehow the media were in awe of royalty (although large sections of them were certainly in awe of Diana), but because they were genuinely taken aback by the vast piles of flowers that were left outside Kensington Palace and the rising tide of anger among some exceedingly vociferous Di-admirers and Charles-haters.

  On the Tuesday after her death, I went to Kensington Palace myself to talk to some of the people who had gathered there. I was so shocked by the vehemence of the anti-royal family sentiments that I advised my editors not to broadcast them. They were unlikely to be typical, I said; I was worried that I may have just found the angriest and most vocal people in the crowd, attracted by the sight of a BBC microphone.

  But by the following day, those same sentiments that I had heard, but not broadcast, were on several newspapers’ front pages. Not for the first time, or the last, my judgement had been less than perfect. By the following Friday, Scotland Yard were warning that they were expecting up to two million people to line the streets of the funeral procession, and the route was doubled in length to accommodate the anticipated crowds.

  It was as if some hitherto undiagnosed form of mass hysteria had taken hold – but it was officialdom and the media that had succumbed. I was one of the BBC’s team of commentators who would line the funeral procession route, and I had been allocated a position in Whitehall, just across from the archway into Horse Guards Parade, from which the procession would emerge before turning right down Whitehall to make its way towards Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey.

  We had had less than a week to prepare for the occasion, but the BBC has a well-oiled royal funeral machine permanently on standby, so it managed to get itself into shape in good time. As I sat in my commentary box, perched precariously fifteen feet above street level, I reflected that I would probably have at most sixty seconds on air as the cortège passed in front of me. It was my first experience of live commentary and I did not want to mess it up.

  Next to me in the commentary box was an experienced outside broadcast producer, and on a makeshift desk in front of
us was a tiny TV screen on which we could watch the progress of the funeral procession as it made its way through central London from Kensington Palace. After a long, long wait, it reached us, and only at the very last moment did I remember to look up from the TV screen and focus directly on the scene in front of us.

  Immediately, my eye was caught by the simple wreath of white roses on the gun carriage bearing Diana’s coffin, and a white card with just a single word on it: ‘Mummy’. As I described the scene, I looked at her two sons, William, then just fifteen, and Harry, aged twelve, walking stiffly behind the coffin in their immaculate dark suits, white shirts and black ties. I have a tendency to cry at the least provocation, much to my family’s embarrassment, and it was all I could do to keep my voice steady.

  Because of the fears of unprecedented crowds, all BBC personnel involved in coverage of the funeral had been booked into central London hotels so that we could walk to our allocated positions before dawn and be ready in good time. No one was going to risk relying on public transport or taxis. I set three alarms for 4 a.m., and I did not oversleep.

  But the sight that greeted me as I left the hotel and set out on my pre-dawn walk through central London was not at all what I had expected. Yes, there were people who had spent the night on the pavements, huddled in their silver-foil thermal blankets, shimmering in the reflected glow of the London street lights, but there were nothing like the numbers that we had been led to expect. The numbers swelled, of course, as the morning wore on, but the estimates had been wildly exaggerated.

  I think I know why. First, the media had been madly in love with Diana, and the reason was obvious: she was the best guarantee of reader interest in decades. Put a picture of Di on the front page and you sold more papers. It was as simple as that. (The Daily Express thinks it is still true, twenty years later.) So there was a natural tendency to exaggerate the reaction to her death, which in turn fed back into public sentiment. It was a perfect emotional feedback loop, increasing in intensity with every passing day.