John Simpson (journalist) - Career

Career

Simpson became a BBC reporter in 1970. He describes in his autobiography how on his very first day, Harold Wilson, then prime minister, angered by the sudden and impudent, as he saw it, appearance of the novice's microphone, punched him in the stomach.

Simpson was the BBC's political editor from 1980 until 1981. He presented the Nine O'Clock News from 1981 until 1982 and became diplomatic editor in 1982. He had also served as a correspondent in South Africa, Brussels and Dublin. He became BBC world affairs editor in 1988. Simpson also presents the occasional current affairs programme Simpson's World.

Simpson's reporting career includes the following episodes:

• In November 1969 he interviewed the exiled King of Buganda, Mutesa II, hours before death in his London flat from alcohol poisoning. The official cause was suicide but some suspected assassination. Simpson told the police the following day that the king, a fellow-graduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge, had been sober and in good spirits, but this line of enquiry was not pursued.

• He travelled back from Paris to Tehran with the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini on 1 February 1979, a return that heralded the Iranian Revolution, as millions lined the streets of the capital.

• In 1989 he avoided bullets at the Beijing Tiananmen Square massacre.

• Simpson reported the fall of Ceauşescu regime in Bucharest later that year.

• He spent the early part of the 1991 Gulf War in Baghdad, before being expelled by the authorities.

• Simpson reported from Belgrade during the Kosovo War of 1999, where he was one of a handful of journalists to remain in the Yugoslav capital after the authorities, at the start of the conflict, expelled those from NATO countries.

• Two years later, he was one of the first reporters to enter Afghanistan in 2001, famously disguising himself by wearing a burqa, and subsequently Kabul in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

• Simpson was hunted by Robert Mugabe's forces in Zimbabwe.

• He was the first BBC journalist to answer questions in a war zone from internet users via BBC News Online.

• While reporting on a non-embedded basis from Northern Iraq in the 2003 Iraq war, Simpson was injured in a friendly fire incident when a U.S. warplane bombed the convoy of American and Kurdish forces he was with. The attack was caught on film: a member of Simpson's crew was killed and he himself was left deaf in one ear.

Simpson has freely admitted to experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs offered to him by locals in various jungles of the world. This prompted jibes from other panellists when Simpson appeared on BBC Television's topical quiz show Have I Got News For You. On his first appearance, Simpson revealed that one hallucination involved a six-foot goldfish putting its flipper round his shoulders while wearing dark glasses and a straw hat.

In 2008-9 Simpson took part in a BBC programme called Top Dogs: Adventures in War, Sea and Ice. It saw Simpson unite with fellow Britons Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the adventurer, and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the round-the-world yachtsman. The team went on three trips, each experiencing each other's adventure field. The first episode, aired on 27 March 2009, saw Simpson, Fiennes and Knox-Johnston go on a news-gathering trip to Afghanistan. The team reported from the legendary Khyber Pass and infamous Tora Bora mountain complex. The three also undertook a voyage around Cape Horn and an expedition hauling sledges across the deep-frozen Frobisher Bay in the far north of Canada.

During the 2011 Libyan civil war, Simpson traveled with the rebels during their westward offensive, reporting on the war from the front lines and coming under fire on several occasions.