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Diary

Dennis Sewell

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Dennis Sewell on the state of Lebanon and the charm of Guto Harri

My earliest childhood memory is of machine-gun rounds coming through the bedroom wall. There were no loud bangs — the cacophony is almost all at the shooter’s end. Incoming, each successive bullet breathed only the softest hiss, of a kind an exotic insect might make, and left in its trail an enchanting shaft of silvery moonlight. Too young to recognise the danger, I rather enjoyed it. The gunmen back then (this was the late 1950s) were Syrian-sponsored insurgents, who targeted our family’s villa in the Bekaa Valley because we were Brits associated with a pro-Western government in Beirut. Such gunmen are the perennial curse of Lebanon. Between 1975 and 1990 they turned a near-Eden into a charnel house. With the gunmen back on the rampage last week in the uniform of Hezbollah, I spend a long and depressing day online to my keyboard-pals in Beirut. Having long envied those writers whose blurbs boast that ‘the author divides his time between...’, I am determined that my next book will have a divides-his-time clause too. I’ve plumped for London, the United States and the Levant. To that end, I’ve been reviving old friendships and forging new ones among the Lebanese, ahead of a return to my roots. After four days of fighting the army steps in and Hezbollah pulls back. My friends assure me that if Sheikh Nasrallah tries this sort of stunt again, perhaps hoping to pull off in West Beirut what Hamas did in Gaza, Hezbollah will be given a bloody nose next time. Lebanon will fight and Lebanon will be right.

After being constrained by the BBC’s vow of ‘due impartiality’ for more than 20 years, I emerge from White City a free man, but blinking into the dawning realisation that henceforth I shall be expected to hold strong opinions. I’m not at all sure how this will go. Maybe all that pent-up polemic will just come bursting forth as the cork comes off. But what if one’s become thoroughly institutionalised and can no more slap down the reflex of even-handedness than Doctor Strangelove can control his involuntary Nazi salute? Confessing this anxiety to my wife, she immediately spots a business opportunity: a residential centre, a nice country house in the Cotswolds, where former BBC journalists can go to be deprogrammed like survivors of cults such as Scientology and the Moonies. There one might learn to focus on only one side of every argument; practise using emotive language; discover how to select facts and statistics for partisan effect; and be fitted with an ideological prism or an overarching worldview. Later, I try Laura’s wheeze out on a senior Conservative. He laughs so hard he nearly falls off his chair. What is it about the Corporation’s solid commitment to impartiality that some politicians just don’t get?

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