Is Anything Happening? Read online

  So what, really, is the point of interviewing politicians, if they either lie or say nothing of any interest? Hope springs eternal, I suppose, and there are a few occasions when, either deliberately or by mistake, politicians actually say something in a broadcast interview that they have not said before. But that is not the main point: interviews on radio or television are now virtually the only occasions when voters can assess for themselves the claims of those whom they have elected to high office.

  If politicians refuse repeatedly to answer a particular question, voters can draw the appropriate conclusion. If they obfuscate and dissemble, voters will notice. If they are honest and upfront, likewise. It would, of course, be better if voters themselves were able to ask the questions – hence the enduring popularity of programmes like Question Time and Any Questions? – but journalists who are properly briefed and good at their jobs can also have their uses.

  Between 2007 and 2010, the British Foreign Secretary was David Miliband, a ferociously clever and hugely ambitious Labour politician who had every reason to suppose that he might one day be Prime Minister. During his time at the Foreign Office, I interviewed him probably more often than any other senior politician before or since, not only because foreign policy was always The World Tonight’s main interest but also because he was unusually willing to make himself available. On one occasion, we devoted an entire programme to an in-depth interview with him, interspersed with field reports from the world’s main trouble spots. He covered the terrain effortlessly and gave the appearance of having thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

  Miliband also had the distinction, as local government minister in 2005, of having made one of the most open confessions ever of a government U-turn. After it was decided to abandon plans to revalue all residential properties for council tax purposes, he said on Question Time on BBC television: ‘I am happy to come on this programme and say, “Be in no doubt this is a U-turn.” No one can accuse us of trying to cover it up – it’s a U-turn.’ If only more of his colleagues could have been persuaded to be equally forthright.

  I was never a disciple of the Rottweiler school of interviewing, even though I enjoyed a good cut-and-thrust as much as the next person. The fact remains, however, that listening to a politician in full drone is rarely big box office, hence the success of the Rottweiler Kings, John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman. I preferred to probe rather than thump, and my weapon of choice tended to be a scalpel rather than a machete. Alas, elegantly constructed debates in which opposing viewpoints are debated in a calm and rational way will never attract as many punters as a heavyweight boxing match which ends with one of the contestants lying comatose in a pool of blood. Nevertheless, many listeners used to tell us that they appreciated our less gladiatorial approach: given that a large number of them were listening in bed and gently drifting off to sleep, we tried not to leave them with images of bloodied ministerial corpses as they entered the Land of Nod.

  I have always had a weakness for interesting academics who can cast new light on whatever the story of the day is. Perhaps because my own academic achievements were so undistinguished, I have always had the greatest respect for scholars who can relate past learning to present crises, especially if they can do so amusingly and in less than four minutes. The late Lisa Jardine for art and culture, Peter Hennessy for political history, Michael Clarke for defence and security – give me my wish for a perfect studio discussion and they are the ones I would invite to the table.

  Columnists, critics and commentators are nearly always good value as well, simply because they know how to conjure up an interesting thought or two at a moment’s notice. One of the best examples was when it was announced late one evening in 1999 that Cherie and Tony Blair were expecting their fourth child, who would become the first baby to be born to a serving Prime Minister for 150 years. After some frantic phone-bashing, the World Tonight production team rustled up a columnist prepared to comment live on air.

  ‘So,’ I began. ‘What do you make of this news?’

  The answer was the quintessential reply of the freelance commentator: ‘About 600 words, I hope.’

  There is one journalistic activity that I regard as of even less value than the fake jousts with politicians. Vox pops* – the dismal practice of stopping people in the street, supposedly at random, and sticking a microphone under their noses – must surely be every broadcast journalist’s least favourite pastime. They are designed to convince listeners and viewers that broadcasters are canvassing the views of ‘real people’; the truth is that they are constructed as carefully as everything else that is broadcast.

  In the US, they are known as MoS (man on street) interviews, or, more properly, PoS (person on street) interviews. But whatever you call them, they rarely add much useful new information to a news report. They do, perhaps, serve one useful stylistic purpose, however: they add different voices to a programme that might otherwise consist only of boring politicians or equally boring pundits (aka ‘talking heads’).

  So, on the off-chance that one day you find yourself on a windswept street corner clutching a microphone, here is what you need to know. First, choose your question with care – and make sure you ask exactly the same question of each person you talk to, so that their answers can be edited together and still make sense. Second, try to choose a fair cross-section of passers-by: young and old, male and female. Third, choose a location where you will not encounter a preponderance of one sort of interviewee: not at the gates of a college, where you will meet only students, or at a railway station, where you will meet only commuters. Shopping centres and coffee shops are good, except that increasingly they feature piped music that makes it impossible to edit your material.

  Chicago in December is not the best time or place to spend hanging around on street corners asking people damn-fool questions. It is a particularly imbecilic pastime if the question you are asking is ‘What do you think about global warming?’ as the snowflakes flurry in the biting wind and the air temperature hovers several degrees below freezing. Still, no one ever said that reporters never act like idiots, and it was on that same reporting trip in 2009 that a senior BBC colleague was to be observed dementedly chasing geese across a stretch of lakeside parkland in the hope of being able to record them quacking. Her name is being withheld for her own protection.

  The vox pops that I really hate are the ones conducted in countries where you know people do not feel free to speak openly. In pre-invasion Iraq, with Saddam Hussein still in power, no Iraqis would dare to say what they really thought to a Western reporter, but that never stopped editors in London insisting that they should be asked. And there are many more countries where the same is true.

  Just occasionally, though, a vox pop does produce a genuine nugget. In 1998, I was in Washington DC at the height of the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, when the then President was accused of having had an improper sexual relationship with a young White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. I had been dispatched to a soup kitchen in one of the poorest areas of the city to ask women there what they made of the allegations. An elderly African-American woman looked at my microphone, listened to my question and then looked me straight in the eye.

  ‘What do I think of our President’s behaviour? Honey, he’s a man, ain’t he?’

  Eddie Watkins was certainly a real person. But no one would ever have called him an ordinary person. He was a convicted murderer, known to his fellow inmates as ‘The Bear’, because his car repair business, used as a front for drug-running, was called Edward Bear Motors. He was serving a life sentence in Long Lartin maximum security prison when I first met him, and he made an instant, and lasting, impression. We wrote to each other on and off over the next couple of years, but it was not until two years after he had stopped writing that I discovered why the letters had dried up.

  Eddie had killed himself with an overdose of pills. In a note that he left for the woman he loved, he wrote: ‘Sorry, the pain is too much. The system kills in so many ways.’

>   When journalists write about a murderer, they must never forget that, however charming, interesting and intelligent he may seem, that man killed a fellow human being. Eddie had been a professional drug smuggler, with close links to some extremely dangerous London gangs, and when he was caught in a joint police–customs ambush while driving a container lorry laden with cannabis from Pakistan worth an estimated £2.5 million, he tried to shoot his way out of trouble. His victim, Peter Bennett, was the first UK customs officer to have been killed on duty for 182 years.

  By the time I met Eddie, at a seminar about prison reform organised by Long Lartin prisoners themselves, held inside the jail, he had already served ten years. He told me that he believed in capital punishment and that he should have been hanged for what he did. I was part of a discussion group that he chaired and, later, in his cell, he showed me some of the poetry he had written.

  I have drunk from the well of bitterness

  Filled with shattered crystal tears

  I have gone beyond the shadows

  And realised my fears.

  What I found remarkable was not that he was writing poetry, but that he was prepared to share it with an outsider and give me permission to publish it in The Observer. The tough-guy killer, who had been abandoned by his mother as a child, brought up in a Barnado’s home because his father, who later committed suicide, could not cope, had become a poetry-writing role model for his fellow prisoners. After his death, an inmate at Long Lartin wrote of Eddie: ‘I was never alone, not while I had The Bear to turn to. When I lost him, I lost a dad and a brother too.’

  I had, unknowingly, acted as Cupid for Eddie, because when my first article about him was published in 1989, an artist by the name of Holly Spencer-Bourne had been struck by his poems and started writing to him. She then took to visiting him from her home in Surrey, and they fell in love. Neither was in the first flush of youth, but somehow each met a need in the other. Eddie was painting as well as writing, and when I visited Holly in her cottage outside Guildford after his death, she showed me the huge collection of his work that she had acquired over the four years of their relationship.

  Why do I still remember Eddie so vividly more than twenty-five years after we met? Perhaps because he personified so much that is wrong with the way we deal with the rehabilitation of offenders. Even a man who has committed murder is capable of changing; as Eddie himself wrote:

  A human being, man or woman, no matter his or her past crime, needs the tiniest hope of release from purgatory, some faint light at the end of the longest imaginable tunnel, if the ever-rising incidents of slashed wrists or knotted bedsheets are not to replace Pierrepoint’s gallows as a jaded population’s uncaring answer to crime and punishment.

  After Eddie died, Holly told me which of his poems had most struck her when she first read it in my magazine article:

  When all is still and the doors shut tight

  And not a sound is heard

  When you’re all alone to face an endless night

  That’s when you do your bird.

  … Yes, the days are the time for the tough guy act

  On this I’ll stake my word.

  But it’s late at night

  When the eyes can’t see

  That’s when you do your bird.

  * Vox populi: voice of the people.

  CHAPTER 4

  WAR AND PEACE

  A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he’s someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

  NIGHT AND DAY, TOM STOPPARD

  MY DEFINITION OF THE best journey in the world is the drive from an airport into town in a country that I have never visited before. There is always a sense of anticipation, sometimes of dread, but the overriding sense is of adventure. What is out there? Whom will I meet? And, most important, will I find the story that I came here for?

  The flight has been long and uncomfortable. The in-flight meal has been inedible, and the entertainment system was rubbish. The thick file of background material that I have brought with me seems both inadequate and irrelevant. Passport checks at the airport have taken for ever, I have a tight knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach, and an essential bit of our kit has gone missing. The good news is that our hotel driver is waiting for us, even though it is three o’clock in the morning. The bad news is that his car has no seat belts and he is a terrible driver.

  ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he says. ‘David Beckham. Very good. Manchester United. Yes?’ My producer and I smile weakly, and hope that every time he turns round to smile at us, as we sit stiffly in the back seat, whichever God he prays to will keep an eye on the road ahead. When we arrive at the hotel, there is no one at the desk. We shout. ‘Hello?’ A man appears, bleary-eyed, a grubby white shirt hanging loosely over his trousers. We fill in the forms, he takes our passports (will we ever see them again?) and hands us the keys to our rooms.

  Only two crucial questions remain. Does the shower work? And is there Wi-Fi in our rooms? If the answer to both questions is yes, nothing else matters. I shall sleep soundly (mattress and mosquitoes permitting). If the bar is still open, perhaps there is time for a cold beer.

  The most terrifying country that I have ever visited is a place that you have never heard of and that you will never find on a map. It is called Hostalia, and it exists only in the imagination of the people who provide hostile environment training for journalists heading into war zones. On each occasion that I was there, I was kidnapped, held up at gunpoint and stranded in a minefield. And all that in countryside within fifty miles of London.

  ‘Hostile environment’ is a useful euphemism for a place where you might get killed. Once, shortly after hostile environment training was introduced at the BBC, I overheard a discussion about whether a particular reporter, unusually well-spoken and well-bred, might be a suitable candidate to send on a course. ‘Her?’ someone snorted. ‘Her idea of a hostile environment is a boring dinner party.’

  By the time I arrived at the BBC, I already had some idea what a hostile environment looked like, having reported extensively from Lebanon during its fifteen-year civil war. But following the death in Croatia of my talented young World Tonight colleague John Schofield, I was hardly going to kick up a fuss about being reminded that bullets can be dangerous.

  Hostile environment training is specifically designed to be frightening – and it is. I know of one reporter who came back from his course so traumatised that he decided he would never ever volunteer for duty in a war zone. He was worried that it would count against him, and I tried to reassure him that it would not. Not even the BBC expects everyone to be prepared to risk their life in the service of the licence fee-payer.

  The trainers on these courses are usually former soldiers, and they do not have a very high opinion of university-educated journalists whom they have probably seen poncing about in body armour in front of the TV cameras. So they enjoy their work and, quite rightly, make no allowances. Nevertheless, I was occasionally left feeling uneasy at what sometimes verged on sadism as they relished their make-believe roles as drunken gunmen at roadblocks. They could be horribly convincing.

  So much so that one woman had to be withdrawn from a course that I was on after a ‘gunman’ had reduced her to tears as he taunted her about the fate of her children. ‘What kind of a mother are you? Why did you come here? How will your children cope after we have killed you? Don’t you care about them?’

  Was it realistic? Unfortunately, it was. Was it necessary? I am not so sure.

  I am in the back of a Land Rover with three colleagues, bumping along a mud track somewhere deep in the countryside of Hostalia. Suddenly, a group of masked gunmen appear from the side of the track, blocking our way and shouting angrily. ‘Stop. Out. Now.’ We scramble out and they push us to the ground.

  ‘Hands behind
your heads. No talking.’ We do as we are told.

  ‘You. Get up.’ They kick at the youngest woman member of our team. ‘Over here.’ And they shove her roughly to one side.

  ‘Who is the leader?’

  We are prepared for this: How to Negotiate Checkpoints, Lesson One, includes a whole section on why you should always designate a team leader. Gunmen can get twitchy if they do not know who is in charge. I am the oldest, and most experienced, member of our group, so I have drawn the short straw. It is the only time that presenters are allowed to think of themselves as team leaders, and I regard it as an honour that I could well do without.

  ‘Why are you here? Who sent you? You are spies. We will shoot you.’

  ‘No,’ I say in my best BBC voice. ‘We are not spies. We are reporters. Press. And if you do not want us here, we will turn round and go back. I am sorry if we have entered a forbidden area.’

  We go on like this for a few minutes, he shouting, and me trying to sound suitably apologetic. There is no point standing on your dignity when you are surrounded by men with guns. So I act humble.

  Then the mood changes suddenly.

  ‘You can go. But she stays.’

  He points at our colleague, standing to one side. ‘She is young. Pretty. She will have a good time with us. Party time.’

  I look him in the eye: ‘Could we have a word in private?’

  We step to one side and I make my pitch. ‘I can see that you are an honourable man. A soldier. I know that you would never leave your sister with strangers. I cannot leave my colleague; it is against our honour, too. But I understand that we have inconvenienced you, so we are prepared to compensate you.’

  I pull a fat bundle of (fake) dollar bills from my pocket – always carry dollar bills in Hostalia and be ready to give them away – and I thrust them into his hand.