John Simpson speech

Well ladies and gentlemen

I would really like to express my enormous gratitude to you for having awarded me this doctorate, (and the) lovely but unjustified peroration. I mean I don't think it's really true I don't feel it's true at all but it would nice if it were and I am very honoured that anybody would think about saying these things. I do feel a little bit like - do you remember poor old Holly Martins in The Third Man, the hero as played by Joseph Cotton - I think who was mistakenly introduced in post war Vienna as one of the great writers of our time when in fact he was just really a writer of westerns and at some stage in the film he gets quite cross. At first he's clearly a little bit bemused at being brought in there by mistake for some better writer, then he becomes quite cross at the idea that people should regard him as something better than he is. I am a journalist. That is, you can imagine that newspaper journalism is what you wrap tomorrow's fish in you can imagine how little there is for the spoken word to last in people's minds and in their thoughts. So I don't stand before you as anything other than just simply a television and radio reporter which is a very humble form of profession but you pay for it after all through your licence fees so I should be grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to do the job.

I also feel a bit embarrassed standing here wearing these things. It was the former American ambassador to Britain, Ray Sykes, who said that the British love dressing up and as the statement or whatever we call it said I did dress up in Afghanistan in a Burka which covered my face, and to the gratitude of all concerned, most of my figure. Although I was briefly the tallest woman in Afghanistan but I think it's safe to say I felt more comfortable then than I do now wearing this. Anyway these things...

We are faced, I suppose, with another war that is coming up. I mean it seems to be pretty certain now. I haven't heard what Colin Powell told the United Nations today about the justification for it but to be honest it is something which has been pretty much inevitable for a long time. In fact possibly since the election brought George W Bush to power. He didn't actually win more votes but it brought him to power and I think there is evidence that this is going to be the case. It is going to be a difficult business; there are a lot of very powerful opinions about it and emotions about it. Certainly against and I think also perhaps in favour. The organisation I work for, the BBC, knows of course as we all do that this a divided country which is going to send its soldiers and its sailors and its airmen into warfare and that makes it very difficult for the armed forces.

I gave a lecture the other day at the Imperial War Museum in London and during the question time, a former colleague of mine, stood up and quoted another, much grander colleague except that I wasn't in the BBC I think when he was one of the grandest trigiseniate, as saying when the nation is divided on these sort of subjects, the BBC is on the rack. And I thought to myself, even as my colleague quoted that, I thought how different it is this time. We don't feel that we are on the rack and we are not nervous about the war. Personally I am very nervous about it because it spite of all the things, extremely kind things, that were said about my personal courage, I do promise you that that wasn't accurate in the slightest bit and I am as nervous before these things as anybody could possibly be. But the one thing I don't feel is nervousness about the kind of context, the political and broadcasting context in which I am going to be working. Things have changed in British Broadcasting and in the BBC's position. It has taken a long time and it's been a slow business. I think two processes are happening which are clearly inter-related and which work together to produce the same result.

One is that governments have learned that although they can criticise the broadcasters, and why not after all we are open to criticism from everybody who pays our wages and who is responsible for our official standing in position, but not in such a way as to put unreasonable pressure on us any longer. And, at the same time there has been a kind of stiffening of the backbone in the BBC which has gone on for a long time, as I say, since the early eighties at least. During which time we have finally realised that we shouldn't be nervous about governments because it's not for governments to tell the broadcasters in a free society what they ought to say and how they ought to run their affairs. It's a matter of being able to put your hand on your heart and say as best you can: "this is the truth in as much as I can know it", and say it, and that that in itself should be a sufficient protection against criticism. What happened over a period, starting I think at the time of the bombing of Libya in 1986 by the Americans, was that there was a lot of public opinion that was quite clearly very against strongly against it and the BBC reflected that in its reporting. I'm speaking purely about the BBC now because newspapers have problems but they have very different problems. Independent television has problems but it has very different problems. The BBC has the problem that governments down the decades have somehow identified it as being the national broadcaster and therefore some of them are inclined to think that if it's the national broadcaster it should in some way reflect the views of the government of the day. We don't, of course, accept that and we never have and it became a little bit easier to start the process of ignoring that and appealing to public opinion, which doesn't share that view at all, as a result of what happened in 1986. We began to broadcast at demonstrations, we broadcast about the results of the bombing in Libya, which caused a lot of civilian casualties, and got us into real heavy difficult water with the government of the day, the Thatcher government. I'm proud to say that I played a small, but not completely irrelevant part, in the BBC's decision, not just simply to stand there and accept neatly the criticisms of the government but to defend itself - to defend itself publicly. To, as it were, appeal to the instincts of the British public rather than to throw ourselves on the government's mercy. Not an easy thing to do, it has to be said, in that during the Thatcher government, at a time when Mrs Thatcher was riding very high indeed and very powerful, and when there was a distinct question that the BBC might be privatised if she received a third term in office. We defended ourselves and we managed to show... I'll just go back perhaps on the circumstances of it a little bit.

Of course you have to remember that in all my stories I like to try not to be the hero but I'm kind of always in there, somewhere, so you can believe me or believe me not as you choose. Somebody rather unpleasant wrote to me and said that you and, somebody else who I won't name, are always backing into the limelight and there was a certain truth in that I felt. But I was sitting in the BBC canteen having a really unpleasant plaice and chips; I remember the exact angle of the curve of the plaice tail as it lay on my plate. I got a call to go and see the editor of the day who was really, really a nervous man. I mean he was a man who saw his career in tatters around him because the Conservative central office under Norman Tebitt, had written a scathing report about our reporting of the incident to do with the bombing and had criticised us very, very heavily, compared us line by line, moment by moment, word by word, virtually with our competitors much to our disadvantage. So I went in there and I saw this room full of people terribly nervous, if I can say it without being disloyal to my colleagues I would say traditionally nervous. Once another colleague of mine described the BBC's attitudes before general elections as being one of pre-emptive cringe. So I was handed the document and read through it and because I don't want to have any secrets from you, I realised there wasn't any great great criticism of me. And so I said: "That seems to be alright then", out loud, not meaning to, and the poor editor for the first time since this thing had come in showed a little sign of hope and possible future relief. He said: "Do you really think so?" So I thought damn, because I could see that the rest of it was pretty rough, just wasn't rough about me. So I said: "Ah yeah, no problem", I said "You go through it and you'll find all sorts of mistakes in it". I didn't know, it's just that I spend enough time dealing with governments and others to know that no document 25 pages long is likely to be without some kind of mistake in it. They were desperate to be reassured, poor old things, and so we formed little groups and we took parts, 5 pages or something of the report each and we went back and we looked through it and we found dozens, dozens of mistakes, misunderstandings, misstatements, inaccuracies that even in adding up all the timings, you know 5 seconds of this and 7 seconds of the other - time is all that counts in a television report. Instead of the effect of the words, very silly approach I would say, they actually added the times up incorrectly. You know, big deal, who cares? But at a time when we were being attacked for our inaccuracies it seemed rather a good moment to point out the attack wasn't altogether accurate in itself. We put our findings, our defence and it worked because the British public, although at that stage still very much in favour, in many ways of Margaret Thatcher, those great election victories again, time and time again, they didn't really want to see the government pushing the BBC around. They wanted the BBC to be independent. They didn't want it to be the voice of the British people, they didn't want it (to be so British) As Margaret Thatcher once said: "Is this the British Broadcasting Corporation?" We had asked a question that wasn't kind of British. Well that was quite a moment and the following election day - as I tell you all my stories are really about myself I'm afraid - I covered Thatcher's, - you know the moment when she kind of celebrated outside conservative central office, and there was a group of young conservatives, who spotted me, I suppose, and the camera, and started chanting something like 1,2,3 privatise the BBC. Out she came at that precise moment and she said "Hello John" because I also felt, I mean I have a lot of admiration for her in many ways and she was a person who responded to politeness. She wouldn't respond to rudeness and I rather share that view really. She said: "Yes hello", so I said: "You must be very pleased with this result" or something so she said "Yes, yes, no it's wonderful, absolutely wonderful and it's blah blah" things that politicians said in moments like that. And at this stage these chaps are chanting 1,2,3 privatise the BBC, so I thought ok lets have a crack at it and I said: "They want you to privatise the BBC are you going to do it?" There was a terrible silence she said "well, you know, it's em, I think I must go over and talk to them", and I thought that's it! This a moment because she would have loved to have said yes at a time like that, on camera, at a key moment when she had won a smashing electoral victory. That was the time to do it and I thought now it isn't gonna happen.

We've had a lot of trouble since then but it encouraged, perhaps the more timid bretheren to realise that there was a strength in standing up for ourselves properly and the acme, if that's the right word, of the process was in 1999 during the Nato bombing of Serbia and Kosovo. Not, I think, something that most people really want to think about too much and it's something, I think, that a lot of people look back on with a certain sense of embarrassment really. It's hard to think of it with great pride even though I'm sure that the British armed forces carried out their work with great professionalism but it didn't feel too good at the time. I was in Belgrade at the time and it doesn't feel too good afterwards. There was a lot of attack from the government, from the Blair government, that we should have a presence in Belgrade even to report on what was happening there in, as it were, the enemy camp. One particular government minister, Claire Short, indicated that it was wrong. She asked for instance, would the BBC have had a correspondence in Berlin in 1944? Well of course, there were one or two mild differences, not least that this was not a declared war. But of course the BBC would have had a correspondent in Berlin in 1944 if it had been able to. Of course it would, of course it would. We are in the business of telling people as much as we can, not less than we are able to, but as much as we can. The only reason we didn't have a correspondent in Berlin in 1944 was that Britain and Germany had declared war on each other and each others citizens were expelled from the country. But of course we would, even if only 1% of what was being reported was of value and was of interest, of course we would of, of course we would of. And we would have asked, I hope, the right questions of the right people and we would have been as honest as we could possibly be about it.

This business of interviewing dictators is a difficult on. I've interviewed one or two myself in my time. I narrowly missed getting an interview with Saddam Hussein in 1990 on the grounds that the BBC wasn't prepared to undertake to broadcast the interview in its entirety, which was their demand, and we took the line then that we don't open our airwaves to anybody so why should we open them to Saddam Hussein? I was sorry because I would have liked to have seen the great man close up, assuming it was the great man of course. You've got to be careful, he does have doubles, but I think he probably does the interviews himself, I mean you would expect that wouldn't you? I don't think I would want a double to be doing my speaking for me just in case he might not know what he was gonna say. I must say, I don't know how many people saw the interview with Saddam, how many people here saw it last night, that Tony Benn did. I am a great admirer of Tony Benn because I think he is an independent spirit and we need all the independent spirits that we can get. I just didn't feel happy that a free man would be in the presence of the nastiest dictator on the face of the earth and smile and bow the head to him. I felt that that wasn't really what independence of mind demands but these are personal opinions. I've tried my best, it's not easy, to get rid of personal opinions in these things. I mean of course everything is an opinion, the question of whether there is going to be a war is an opinion. It's the question of whether it's right or wrong is a very important opinion and I don't feel that that's my function in life to give my opinions on the rightness or wrongness of it and I don't think it's the BBC's function. I think, in the words of an unlikely perhaps, source to sight for this kind of thing but Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright, writing in one of his letters about his function as a playwright. He said "I feel it's my job to put the evidence in front of the jury and let the jury decide on the result". Well he meant in writing his plays of course but I think that this is really also what the BBC and indeed journalists in general should be doing. Presenting people with the basic materials with which they can then make up their minds about the great issues of the time of which this forthcoming war will be.

Not everybody of course, not every journalist sees their job in that way and I'm rather glad. I would hate to think that I couldn't read John Pilger because he was going to even-handed and balanced as between what he would often regard as evil and what he would regard as good. John Pilger is one of the great national treasures of British journalism whose reporting is always worth reading and you don't turn to him frankly for objective reporting, you turn to him specifically in order to see what his opinion is and to see how he expresses it and that's a great pleasure and a great joy. But it's not the kind of reporting that we should be doing because there does have to be, I think, an organisation which as honestly and as openly as it can, to present the facts as opposed to the opinions, providing perhaps the basis on which other people can make up their minds on this kind of issue.

Broadcasting, strangely, and I say strangely because one sees other people's broadcasts in other countries - broadcasting is actually, I think, a much fairer business in this country than the newspapers are. I think that is partly to do with the regulation of the television industry, of the broadcasting industry, which makes it absolutely clear. I mean the charters and the legislation, setting up the different broadcasting organisations, makes it clear that they are simply not allowed to advocate one political view over another and that's very tightly policed and it's very effective. So that when you watch ITN, when you watch Channel 4 news, when you watch Sky news you are also getting a balanced account of these things. They are not allowed to do anything differently. Sky news of course is owned by the Murdoch group, not known for its quiet and silent opinions, but you don't get an idea of that if you watch Sky news on television. It's to do with the controls under which we work and although journalists are famous for not enjoying controls, I think in this case it is something for which our industry can be profoundly grateful.

So now, here we are heading into yet another, I can't believe it, they are like buses coming in almost groups of three or four nowadays, another war, and I don't know what my part will be in it. I've no idea at the moment. I am hoping to go to Baghdad but I've been banned from there since 1991 so it's not going to be altogether easy. I wrote a book unfortunately, it was a great mistake to have made, and even worse I wrote with a certain amount of honesty what had happened to me thinking that all the officials that I'd been dealing with would be gone within a matter of months probably. Well some of them have gone, mostly to higher positions in the Iraqi hierarchy so now for instance, my dear old friend who ran my affairs and used to be in charge of me, well now he's the Foreign Minister, so he's even less enthusiastic about having me there but you never know, people can change their minds and I've got hopes.

Why? Very difficult question to answer really, I mean I try to explain this to relatives of mine and you can see the look in their eyes as they think - this is just a lunatic. Why should he want to go to a place that every sane person wants to get away from. Well actually there is a good and sensible reason which is that if I don't go to Baghdad I'm gonna have to knock around in Northern Iraq in places where there are no hotels and no nothing and it's going to be absolutely ghastly, and I'm going to be sleeping on the floor, in pigsties and goodness knows what. I suppose not pigsties in Iraq but anyway the equivalent. You know a 5 star hotel, even one without a roof and with a missile coming down in the middle of it, seems arguably better than that but it's not the only reason. The reason really, is that somebody's got to do it, somebody really does have to do it. This will not be a war in the old sense of the Second World War. It won't be declared, it's an action, it's a military action and I feel with every ganglion in my makeup, my body, if we're paying the bills for missiles and rockets and we are allied with a country which is going to be firing its missiles and rockets and bombs at the place I want to know personally what's gonna happen and what they do and I think that we all deserve to know what the results of our actions are. That these things aren't just going off into the wide blue yonder where people of whom we have little understanding or knowledge and whom we regard as perhaps strange and perhaps not as valuable as ourselves that we don't need to know what happens. It's enough for the Ministry of Defence to tell us or the Department of Defence to tell us how many missiles have been fired that day and how many have hit their targets and how precisely they've hit their targets. Well that's one way of covering wars but I do believe most profoundly that we need to know what happens at the other end. Who is on the receiving end how accurate they are? Maybe they will be very accurate, they were extraordinary accurate, I promise you, in 2001 in Afghanistan and they were pretty accurate much of the time in Belgrade in 1999. Maybe this will be a war without casualties, if so, I'd want to be there to be able to tell people and I hope they might believe me and not think that I've just been bought up by some government. But if there are civilian casualties I think we should know about it and I feel that the audience, you as the licence fee payers, I do hope you all pay your licence fee, will know about it and will want to know about it.

So when I go there, I will go to some part of Iraq, whether it's the pigsty or room 617 in the Al-rashid Hotel, I don't know. But when I do go I shall be different, I'll even have a different title, I'll be called "Doctor" and people will keep coming round to me asking me if I'll help them with their chilblains and their broken limbs. But I'll go there with great sense of honour that you should have given me this very high honour. I do most humbly apologise for not having been here last year but I hope you forgive me and it's extremely nice to meet you all now.

And thank you very much indeed.

Thank you