Cut short

‘She hung up and ended the interview,’ said John Humphrys on Saturday morning’s Today programme (Radio 4), sounding rather bemused.

‘She hung up and ended the interview,’ said John Humphrys on Saturday morning’s Today programme (Radio 4), sounding rather bemused. Had he really been cut off mid-round? The battle not yet won. He’d just been talking to Reem Haddad, director of Syrian state television and also, or so the BBC’s website declares, a spokesperson for the Syrian administration (an odd combination of roles, one might think).

Haddad had questioned Humphrys’s use of the number ‘500-odd’ persons as having been killed by state troops during the current uprising in Homs and Deraa. ‘What lovely numbers you give me,’ she said. Humphrys responded from his lofty eminence as the BBC’s man in London by asking her, ‘Can I suggest to you the way it is done in a civilised and democratic country. That is to allow reporters, independent…’

‘You cannot tell me what is civilised,’ Haddad burst in, furiously. ‘You cannot lecture at me. I am sorry I need to end this.’ And that was that. Interview over. Humphrys was left searching for words as he wondered what he had said to provoke such an intemperate response.

Haddad’s reaction was verging on the hysterical. But she had a point. By assuming the moral high ground, Humphrys completely lost his footing. That high ground is not nearly as solidly based as we might think; it’s much more like sand than granite. Humphrys’s tone, his choice of words were straight out of the colonial rulebook, taking us back in time to empire and the caricature of the sly, corrupt, cruel East. In any case, 500 was a suspiciously round figure to insist on as the total number of the dead, dehumanising the report, taking away its awful reality of individuals killed, fathers lost and families destroyed by a single bullet.