Why we still need the BBC

My first posting as a BBC foreign correspondent was Belgrade in the mid-1990s. Serbia was led by Slobodan Milosevic, practically the only Communist ruler in eastern Europe not to have been overthrown. He survived by reinventing himself as a nationalist, though he kept the Communists’ secret police. Our secretary was accosted one day by a couple of them, nasty-looking thugs in black leather jackets. ‘State Security,’ said one, pushing her into a doorway. They wanted her to inform on me. If she didn’t, they would see to it that her elderly father stopped getting his pension. She told them to get lost, a brave thing to do.

To Serbian State Security, I had to be a spy, or at least on the UK government payroll. The Serbian information minister asked me, puzzled, how British officials managed to send me the line to take each morning. (Unspoken was the fact that my phone was being tapped.)