Brief encounters with the dubious

Volume five — or is it six? — in the Simpson autobiography series. For many people, one volume tends to be enough, but Simpson has a lot to tell. In this latest doorstopper, he offers us an engaging collection of ‘snapshots’, essays on a lively and eclectic bunch of characters he’s run into over the years. There’s a crooked extortioner, the maddeningly elusive Japanese emperor and empress, Saddam awaiting execution, film stars, Serbian contract killers, a child sorcerer in the Congo, Chinese tomb-raiders and ‘a variety of other thoroughly dubious people including Robert Mugabe and Alastair Campbell’.

The last few words of that sentence, not buried midway through the book but on its very first page, are a masterstroke. It is an exquisite pleasure to see Campbell so ruthlessly dismissed, separated from one of the world’s nastiest dictators by the slenderest of conjunctions.

Why the animus? Because Simpson still feels bruised — or he feels the BBC’s bruises — over the Gilligan report on Downing Street ‘sexing up’ the intelligence used to justify the Iraq war. Many will share his anger that the story, which was essentially true, resulted not only in the tragic suicide of the arms-control official Dr David Kelly, cruelly outed by the government, but in the resignations of the BBC’s chairman and director-general. Campbell should have been fired.

This being Simpson, however, he can’t resist telling his readers that he would have done a better job than Gilligan in the first place. He then talks us through his own story along the same lines for the 10 o’clock news which was better sourced. Being four years late, it didn’t have the impact he’d have liked.

Simpson is a good story-teller. He wouldn’t have achieved what he has if he wasn’t.