Chancellor, I have the honour to present for the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, John Cody Fidler Simpson.
If the British Establishment required all its adherents to put themselves through the kinds of trial by fire John Simpson endures on a routine basis, then the Establishment would have collapsed long ago. Over the last three decades, he has been fired at in Beijing and bombed in Baghdad. He flew into Tehran with the returning exile Ayatollah Khomeini, only to hear in mid-flight that the plane was to be shot down on the orders of the Shah of Iran. He has posed as a mercenary in Kinshasa, and, even more improbably, as a lady in a burka, in Afghanistan. On the Pakistani border in 1989, he reduced to tears of frustration a strange figure - part Desert Sheikh, part Hannibal Lecter, he thought - who failed to persuade Simpson's escorts to run him over in return for cash. That man, he later learned, was Osama Bin Laden. Ten years later in Belgrade, John Simpson was one of only a handful of journalists to remain in the Serbian capital after the authorities had expelled all those from NATO countries. "As everyone else was pulling out I decided I would just stay put and see what happened", was his laconic observation.
That is what John Simpson does. He sees what happens. Then he tells us about it. During the course of this honourable, utterly essential and endlessly problematic activity, he reckons to have laid his life on the line about thirty times. (In fact the source from which I drew this comment specified twenty seven times, but as the source was two years old I felt I had better round it up to thirty. This happens also to be the number of wars and uprisings he has covered). And so, waiting to see what happens in Belgrade, he pours himself a generous slug of malt, lights an Upmann's No 2 cigar, and settles down to listen to a CD in his hotel room, as the air-raid sirens begin and the sky turns red and white from anti-aircraft fire. This is one of my favourite images from John Simpson's superb book of 1998, Strange Places, Questionable People. It is an alluring self-portrait, Byronic in the best sense, underpinning as it does a quixotic Romanticism with nerves of steel. We would perhaps, some of the time, like to be like this. But we're very grateful, all of the time, that he's the one doing it.
What made him like this? When did it start - when did he become him? His reminiscences imply that the young Simpson was more scared of the boys from a different school, who mocked his tie and cap, than he was of the tyrants and terrorists he would encounter in later life. At Cambridge he read English, not on the face of it a dangerous pursuit. Then again, he was taught by FR Leavis, a profoundly moral but sometimes intimidating figure. Was Leavis's lesson an early inoculation against the hypnotic powers of personality and rhetoric? Or did the scales fall from the young journalist's eyes when the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, thumped him for daring to ask a genuine question during a staged photoshoot?
Perhaps it's in the genes. Descended on his mother's side from a cowboy turned aviator, on his father's from the actress and writer Mrs Inchbald, John Simpson literally incarnates skills of communication and a spirit of adventure. Yet no-one is the creation of their family history. One of the most moving discoveries of John Simpson's writing is that one's family, one's own past, can be more mysterious and impenetrable than another country on the far side of the world. Moreover, his writing shows us that in order to report, to say what happens - it is not always possible to retain an absolute even-handedness. There is right and there is wrong, and the difference between them can be stark, as in the case of racism, which John Simpson the world-citizen has always condemned. The truth may demand passion and outrage. John Simpson has had on many occasions to remain cool under fire. But he shows no coolness toward the plight of those whose tragedies continue after the press have packed their bags and gone home. An example: he writes about terrorists turned statesmen in Northern Ireland, and gives praise where it is due, to those who had the courage to turn away from violence, and towards a peace process. But he would not, he writes, cross the road to shake hands with at least one prominent convert to the ballot-box over the bomb, because "I remember too well what it is like to watch a teenager who has been shot through the kneecaps writhing on the ground." John Simpson tells the truth. That is his job. But the truth is multi-dimensional, a kaleidoscope of ifs, buts, drama, spilt tears and spilt blood. The skills that its telling enlists are complex. In today's guest we see their master exponent.
We are not the first to honour him. One of the two youngest foreign correspondents the BBC has ever had, he swiftly went on to fill all its major news positions, from diplomatic editor to presenter of the Nine O'Clock News, and now World Affairs Editor. (He retains an occasionally exasperated loyalty to the BBC, and a personal loyalty to those less famous than himself who share his dangerous profession.) Awarded a CBE in the Gulf War Honours List of 1991, he has also won two BAFTA awards, the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year award, and Columnist of the Year for his magazine work. He is the author of many books. There is a superbly turned, literary edge to his writing, which frequently draws on the poets in order to make sense of the world's intermittent madness. Many of us have sought for words that describe adequately the phenomenon that is Margaret Thatcher, but I doubt that anyone but John Simpson has noted her strategic deployment of 'aposiopesis'. (Particularly interesting, in that aposiopesis [as you know!] means appearing to be lost for words, a trait not generally associated with that particular Prime Minister!) So: sometimes our guest shocks us into the dictionaries. Always he shocks us into a deeper understanding. But then journalism, he writes, is "an art and not a science". In some eyes, of course, it is a dark art. And yet, amidst the darkness, humour also has its place in John Simpson's world. Covering the uprising in Iran, he is, as often, arrested. The Shah's soldiers train guns on him. Understandably keen to contact the British Embassy, and noticing a phonebox, he walks towards it with a measured slowness, conscious that a deviation to either left or right will result in his certain death. However, once inside the phonebox, he discovers that it takes different coins from the ones in his pocket. "So I went back and asked the soldiers; and like true Iranians they not only pulled out the necessary coins, but insisted I should keep them as a present. Then they pointed their guns at me again." John Simpson tells the truth. But, as he writes in News from No Man's Land, "It all depends, of course, on who does the telling."
Chancellor: I have the honour to invite you to confer upon John Cody Fidler Simpson, the degree of Doctor of Laws.
Geoff Ward