John Simpson: ‘The BBC fears I’ll be killed if they send me to danger …

One of John Simpson's more memorable keepsakes was a second-hand fountain pen given to him during the Romanian revolution in 1989. It was a fat, flashy number, far too bling for a BBC man, but was still somewhat special: its previous owner was Nicolae Ceausescu[1], Romania's very-soon-to-be-late dictator. "Ceausescu had been captured and we were outside his old HQ in the hope of doing some filming," Simpson recalls. "Eventually they let us in, and Ceausescu's housekeeper gave me the fountain pen as a memento.

"Then, that evening, about 15 minutes before our live feed, it was announced that Ceausescu had been executed, so I scribbled down a new script. It was only afterwards that I realised I'd written what was effectively his obituary with his own fountain pen." Even by the flamboyant standards of foreign correspondent's barstool yarns, this one takes some beating.

Then again, after half a century of globetrotting for the BBC[2], during which he has met 200-plus world leaders and covered nearly as many wars, the BBC's veteran world affairs editor has them in spades. Now aged 79, and very much one of the Corporation's elder statesmen, Simpson has become just the kind of grandfather you might like to have telling stories over Christmas dinner. Hence his appearance on the BBC's festive schedules next week, when he sits down with presenter Adrian Chiles to mull over his life, various brushes with death, and memories of Christmases past.

Simpson will sit down with presenter Adrian Chiles this week to mull over his life

But at the risk of a spoiler alert, most of Simpson's festive recollections do not involve scoffing figgy pud in front of a Bond movie.

Romania in 1989 was just one of many not-so-merry-Christmases he has spent in war zones abroad - not that he'd have had it any other way. Indeed, far from being the big grandee who couldn't be disturbed by BBC bosses at Christmas, he used to actually volunteer for the on-call roster. "Because I didn't live any longer with my children [he parted from his first wife in 1986], I couldn't see any reason not to spend Christmas doing something.

Everyone else wanted to be with their families at that time, and as we all know, most Christmases, something pretty awful happens." So it was with the "Christmas Revolution" against Ceausescu. A hardliner even by Soviet standards he banned public celebration of Christmas in his bid to eliminate symbols of potential opposition to his regime.

Simpson and his team were scrambled to Bucharest on December 21, after crowds booed Ceausescu during a speech, driving through Romania in -25 C and nearly missing the revolution altogether when their car broke down. Once in Bucharest, Simpson did live broadcasts from outside a secret police HQ as revolutionaries besieged it, gunfire crackling everywhere. It was one of his great reporting scoops - although in Ceausescu's Romania, there wasn't even a decent hotel bar for a post-revolutionary drink.

"It was absolutely freezing, and we hadn't brought decent winter clothes," he says. "On Christmas Day we finished about midnight and tottered back to a really rough hotel and fell into a dreamless sleep. A day or two after, though, we did all have a great Christmas meal." On taking the fountain pen home he discovered that it bore a label saying "Gift of the British Labour Party". "They claimed to have had no record of sending it, although it wasn't a very good moment to have said: 'Yes, we sent Ceausescu a nice fat expensive pen.'"

Simpson reporting near Mosul, northern Iraq, in 2003Credit: BBC

Collecting war zone memorabilia is a common habit of foreign correspondents.

Simpson's hoard includes a Taliban T-shirt and a large Isis flag that hangs in the toilet of his Oxford home. His most significant memento, though, is a piece of shrapnel in his backside - during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, an American warplane dropped a 1,000lb bomb just yards from where Simpson was standing, killing 18 people. "George Bush", as he once nicknamed the shard (it being a "pain in the arse") now travels with him everywhere, and is a reliable indicator of the quality of airport security metal detectors. "It only goes off at the good airports, not at the second-rate ones." Simpson is more than familiar with places where the airports are indeed second-rate, if functioning at all.

In Bosnia in Christmas 1992 - covering for Martin Bell - he travelled to Sarajevo with a convoy of aid lorries from Britain. The rooms in the city's bomb-scarred Holiday Inn had neither water nor heating, forcing Simpson to sleep fully dressed in -19 C temperatures. Christmas dinner was watery soup, washed down with imported Laphroaig. "It was pretty rough, with only one meal a day, so we were ravenous all the time."

Other Christmas stints abroad included Moscow during the Soviet Union's fall, and Baghdad in the run-up to the first Gulf War, where he stayed in the Al-Rashid Hotel. Saddam's spooks were said to have planted spy cameras in every room, and had a sideline selling their films of honeymooning couples in the local souk: Simpson hoped that footage of a large BBC hack in his underpants wouldn't be that marketable. He says he always "enjoyed" his Christmas stints abroad, although what passed for a normal day's work could be pretty horrifying.

In Bosnia one year, he spent Christmas morning filming an elderly man chopping wood for a stove to warm an elderly care home. The next day, the man was killed by a sniper. Simpson has borne witness to such horrors despite not being an obvious choice for the rough and tumble of front-line life.

As he recalls in his autobiography Strange Places, Questionable People, when he first arrived at the BBC, its news editors were unimpressed by the foppish new graduate intake of which he was part. At one selection board, a boss declared he wanted "men to do a real job, go to dangerous places", describing his ideal candidate as "the kind of man who would walk into a brothel".

In Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991

Simpson found it a steep learning curve, having come directly from reading English at Cambridge, where he edited the literary magazine Granta. He originally hails from a family of property developers, who built much of the "ticky-tacky" two-up-two-down suburban housing that spans south London.

The family business accrued debt, however, and by the time Simpson was born, they could only afford to educate him at a very minor prep school. "We were decayed upper middle class, with pretensions that we no longer had the cash for, which is one of the most depressing things to be." As he tells Chiles, however, his early boyhood as a posho in grimy post-war Norwood was useful career training. As the sole local kid in a bright purple school blazer, he caught the attention of neighbourhood toughies, who gave him an early experience of being abducted, on one occasion imprisoning him in a hut on a bombsite.

"I used to have to avoid the local kids, who'd attack me and throw stones," he says. "Even now when I go to difficult places, I put into practice what I learnt as a nine-year-old." When he was just six, his mother also walked out on his father - "a lovely man, but who was difficult to live with". Unusually for the time, Simpson was asked which parent he wished to stay with.

He opted for his father - reasoning, with a childlike sense of fairness, that his mother, whose first husband had died during the war, already had two children from a previous marriage. "It was, if you like, a bit of BBC balance," he tells Chiles. Much to his father's "relief", he then won a scholarship at 15 to St Paul's. To some, that makes him part of the gilded elite that has ruled too long at the BBC, although he claims to have no great problem with the current diversity drive at the Corporation.

"Privately educated, middle-class Oxbridge people used to dominate, but the world has changed," he says, mentioning how earlier in the day, he attended a service in Chelsea for his late friend Lord Cadogan, the billionaire peer. "The service was full of precisely those sort of people, and as I looked around, I thought: 'These are not the people who run the country any longer.' But I don't have any sense of being hunted down because I'm of the wrong colour or class - I think there's room for everybody." Besides, when Simpson first started his reporting career at the BBC, his plummy tones weren't much help: as a rookie, he was once punched in the stomach by the then prime minister Harold Wilson, for having the cheek to ask him an unscheduled question as he boarded a train. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he came to prefer foreign news to the home beat.

Reading the 9 o'clock news in 1981Credit: Television Stills

Assigned to Dublin in the early 1970s, at the height of the Troubles, he had to leave at one point after upsetting the IRA (an anxious colleague got a call claiming his body had been dumped by a roadside).

Investigating British mercenaries in the Congo in 1976 - his first real front-line assignment - he was chased by several who wanted to kill him, and watched, horrified, when one casually stuck a lit cigarette in a taxi driver's eye. In Lebanon in 1982, Beirut militants detained and tortured him - "not horribly, but what really upset me was that I realised I'd tell them anything". He blamed his prolonged absences abroad partly for the break-up of his marriage to his first wife, portrait artist Diane Petteys, with whom he had two daughters, Julia and Eleanor, born in 1969 and 1971.

In 2006, he married his former producer Dee Kruger, 20 years his junior, whom he met while covering the post-apartheid elections. At 61, he then became a father again when the couple's son, Rafe, was born - since when he has reined in the Christmas travel. By then, though, he had already notched up his biggest triumphs, witnessing the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and sneaking into Afghanistan under the guise of a burqa during the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

He later walked into Kabul, famously declaring that the BBC had "liberated" the city (he insists this was only meant as a joke). It is debatable, though, whether some of his past exclusives would pass today's BBC risk assessments. Like the time he flew into pre-revolutionary Iran with Ayatollah Khomeini, despite warnings that the Shah would have the plane shot down.

He did so against explicit orders from his foreign desk - which might be a sacking offence now. "Fortunately, in the case of the Ayatollah's plane, we won all the awards going that year, so nobody afterwards remembered that they'd ordered us not to go," he says, admitting, though, that today it might be "harder" to get away with.

Simpson walks into Kabul during the fall of the Taliban in 2001

Like many TV reporters, these days he is routinely accompanied on the front lines by an ex-military security guard, who acts as both a medic and safety advisor. Such guards generally stay out of shot, but can often be heard off-camera shouting "run!" or "f---ing get down!" in distinctly non-Oxbridge tones.

Some TV crews complain that such guards are inherently risk-averse; Simpson, who learned his trade without them, finds the opposite. "Often these people have been in the SAS or Paras and are quite adventurous-minded," he says. "So when you say: 'Look, I'd like to do this tomorrow', they find ways of doing it, rather than just saying: 'No, you can't.'" "But sometimes you have to be pretty disingenuous.

When I went to Mosul in 2016 during fighting with Isis, we had an utterly useless head of news who made me promise that I wouldn't go within a certain number of miles of the city centre. So I told the crew I was going to have a sleep in the back of the car and that they should just drive wherever they needed to. When I woke up later, we'd got some very good pictures, and I argued to myself that I didn't break my promise because I wasn't aware of what was going on."

As well as his own safety, though, there is the welfare of local fixers to think about - something Simpson knows all too well. Among the 18 who died in the friendly fire incident in Iraq was Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed, a 25-year-old Kurdish BBC translator. "He was a lovely boy, and was the only financial support for his large family," Simpson tells Chiles, admitting that he suffers "survivor guilt". "I keep his photo with me, and it will be by my bed tonight. The one duty I can perform is not to forget him."

To this day, he still travels to war zones for his TV programme Unspun World interviewing president Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine in February and visiting Lebanon in October. His hardcore bullet-dodging days, though, are over. "I'm sure the BBC doesn't want to send me to ultra-dangerous places any longer. I mean, if something happened, can you imagine the Daily Mail headline? 'Why did the BBC send an 80-year-old to the most dangerous place on Earth?'"

He is also on Twitter/X, with nearly 250,000 followers, although unlike certain other BBC names, he doesn't see it as his personal political mouthpiece. He was, he says, "really cross" with Gary Lineker following the latest Twitter controversy, when he endorsed a video of an academic accusing Israel of "genocide"[3]. "He [Lineker] knows what we can and can't do, and it was embarrassing.

With the amount he earns, he should have a greater sense of responsibility towards the BBC." (The BBC's impartiality rules, however, are not the same for presenters and newsreaders.)

'Privately educated, middle-class Oxbridge people used to dominate, but the world has changed'Credit: Matt Writle

One topic on which he has spoken out is defending the BBC policy of describing Hamas as militants rather than terrorists[4], insisting it is "simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn". "I lost quite a lot of friends over that, and was attacked by everyone including the president of Israel," he says. "But I talked to Jeremy Bowen, who's just come back from Israel, and he said his relationships with the government were just the same as before, and nothing had changed. We're not really in the business, though, to make sure everyone's friendly to us."

So after nearly 60 years at the BBC, what next for the man who's been everywhere? He's writing a new book, he says, about world events since 1945. He also intends, at some point, to write an article in support of colleague Huw Edwards, who is now expected to leave the BBC[5] in the wake of allegations of him paying a teenager for explicit images.

The teenager in question denied the claims. Simpson didn't know Edwards particularly well, but feels appalled by how he has been "cast out". "We all do idiotic things from time to time...

But what happened to him is awful. And the way that nobody speaks about him in the BBC - that upsets me too. I don't think we should have 'non-persons'."

Simpson mentions this in response to my asking whether he'd be interested in taking over Edwards' role as the "voice of the nation", narrating state occasions like a coronation. He is, after all, one of the BBC's best-known faces, and the job might suit a semi-retiree. The answer is "no".

For one thing, his high profile is mainly "because people think I'm David Attenborough". And for another, the reverential tone isn't really him. "That hushed voice... 'and now, His Majesty, the King...' - it's not quite my thing," he grins. "Besides, Huw and David Dimbleby did it fantastically well, whereas I can't say a sentence without humming and hawing, and you don't want that at a coronation. I like to think I have a rather rougher edge."

With that, he is off - although this Christmas, don't expect to see him on TV dodging bullets in some freezing war zone. Instead, he's off to a friend's house in balmy Portugal - where the food will be hopefully better than in Sarajevo, and the gift list may run to more than just deceased dictators' fountain pens. He has no regrets, though, about all those last-minute airport scrambles. "I'm really glad I covered all those events - even if it meant missing the chestnuts on Christmas Day."

My Life at Christmas: Adrian Chiles Meets John Simpson is on BBC One on December 10 at 10.30am

References

1. ^ Nicolae Ceausescu (www.telegraph.co.uk)
2. ^ half a century of globetrotting for the BBC (www.telegraph.co.uk)
3. ^ endorsed a video of an academic accusing Israel of "genocide" (www.telegraph.co.uk)
4. ^ BBC policy of describing Hamas as militants rather than terrorists (www.telegraph.co.uk)
5. ^ Huw Edwards, who is now expected to leave the BBC (www.telegraph.co.uk)