Our man in the thick of it

There he is on the cover, our handsome 57-year-old Boys’ Own adventurer, probably doing a piece to camera, cheered on by the locals who have come along to revel in the BBC’s long-awaited liberation of Kabul last November. Why couldn’t he have arrived a few years earlier, they’re probably wondering. It could all have been so much easier. No beastly Taliban. No need even for America’s B52s and the Northern Alliance. There was always a far better and infinitely more elegant solution to the interminable Afghan conundrum. Send for Simpson.

Of the BBC’s big guns, they don’t come any bigger than Simpson. Revolution in Serbia? Put Simpson on a plane. Trouble in Tiananmen Square? Simpson’s got it covered. With 36 distinguished years in the BBC behind him, this man, to the envy of colleagues and rivals around the world, is the foreign correspondent’s foreign correspondent. He puts the heat into hotspot, the flak into jacket.