BBC veteran Bell’s ‘dilapidated’ jibe at rival Simpson
RENOWNED television war reporter Martin Bell has launched an extraordinary attack on fellow frontline broadcaster John Simpson.
The two have been taking potshots at each other since their 1990s heyday, after Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, criticised Bell’s emotive style, saying: ‘Save us from reporters who pass judgment.’
Now, in an exclusive interview in today’s Event magazine, Bell, 78, takes aim at his rival, stating: ‘Simpson’s objections have begun to look a bit elderly and dilapidated.’
He goes go on to admit that Simpson is ‘a very good writer’, and adds: ‘He writes fast and he’s brave – he’s been injured much more seriously than I have. But we are very different people with different attitudes to our jobs.’
Bell, who found fame for his reports from war zones in the Balkans, claims: ‘News as we have hitherto known it has been laid to rest’. And he adds: ‘Reporters retreat to fortified compounds… peer across borders with the help of unverified videos and speculate. You’ve lost the sense of being there.’
Bell was famous for the pale suits he wore while reporting from battlefields.
‘It’s superstition,’ he explains. ‘When I was in Croatia, we had no body armour, nothing.
‘It was a ferocious civil war, with a lot of lead flying. None of it hit me. I ascribed my survival to the suit.’
But Bell, who left the BBC in 1997 to become an independent MP, was finally hit by a mortar in Sarajevo in 1992, and he reveals that the shrapnel is still lodged in his body.
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