Bell revives feud with Simpson in BBC war of the TV big guns
HE HAS enjoyed a distinguished career as a war correspondent, whose propensity to report from the front line in elegant attire earned him the title “the man in the white suit”.
Now Martin Bell, the veteran broadcaster, has re-ignited an old feud of his own by launching a scathing attack on John Simpson, and criticising today’s generation of irritating “arm waving” BBC presenters.
Bell, 74, revealed that he still enjoys referring to his rival as “The Liberator of Kabul”, a reference to Simpson declaring on air that his BBC team had pressed ahead of everyone else and had actually liberated the Afghan capital – a claim which he later apologised for.
The pair had fallen out after Simpson, the BBC’S world affairs editor, described Bell’s method of covering conflicts as “absolute nonsense”.
Bell hit back by saying that Simpson was “elderly and dilapidated”, and clarified that he was referring to his adversary’s opinions rather than his appearance. He also criticised what he termed “age of the arm wavers” – the tendency of BBC reporters to all use the same hand signals.
Bell, whose father Adrian Bell compiled the first ever Times crossword, told how he chose to cover conflicts wearing his famous pale coloured suits due to his belief that they bought good luck. “It’s superstition,” he told Event magazine. “When I was in Croatia we had no body armour or protection, nothing. It was a ferocious civil war with a lot of lead flying through the air: mortars, bullets, everything.
“None of it hit me. I ascribed my survival to the suit I was wearing.” Bell said that his dapper attire meant that leaders of warring clans knew who he was. Speaking about when he got hit by shrapnel in 1992 in Sarajevo, he said: “The word got around among the warlords that the guy in the white suit has been hit and I had extra access to them after that. I’d earned my stripes.”
He joined the BBC in 1962 and spent three decades working as a foreign correspondent, covering conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, Nigeria, Angola and Northern Ireland during the “Troubles”.
Bell said that war reporting was no longer what it used to be. “Reporters retreat to fortified compounds... peer across borders with the help of unverified videos and speculate,” he told Event magazine. “You’ve lost the sense of being there.”
He said that the “worst decision he ever made” was leaving his first wife, after falling for an NBC reporter with whom his relationship “didn’t last”.
He left the BBC in 1997 to stand as an independent candidate for Tatton, Cheshire, after Neil Hamilton, the Conservative MP, became embroiled in sleaze allegations.
The Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates stood aside, and he was elected as MP.