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. An international crisis without Simpson is an oxymoron. When correspondents see the great man striding in with his army of producers, cameramen and fixers, they know they’ve got a real story on their hands. When dictators catch a glimpse of his well-tended snowy mane, they know their time is up. In a nutshell, Simpson is news. Big News.

Entirely appropriate, then, that his life story should take some telling. This doorstopper of a book, you may be surprised to learn, is volume three of his autobiography. Lesser mortals might content themselves with one or two tomes. Simpson has finished his third and he’s not even 60. More must surely be in the offing. After all, he’s still zipping all over the place, dashing from one war zone to another, bringing us tales of blood and bullets, flood, famine and pestilence. In another life he could have been the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.