This expanded edition published in the UK in 2013 by
Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,
39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP
email: info@iconbooks.net
www.iconbooks.net
Originally published in the UK in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Icon Books Ltd by Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-84831-321-7 (ePub format)
Text copyright © 2011, 2013 Martin Bell
The author has asserted his moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by anymeans, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Typesetting by Marie Doherty
Contents
Title page
Copyright information
About the author
Foreword
Dedication
London’s Burning
Riotous Illiteracy
Murdochracy
The Lesson
False Prophet
The Chilcot Committee
Principal Witness
Forty Years On
In Memoriam
The Journey
Chain of Command
Bash on Regardless
Call Signs
Look East
Nigeria
Armagh
Idi Amin
St Lucia
The Cavalry
A Political Romance
Vukovar
Lucky Escape
Holiday Inn Sarajevo
Vitez
Karadzic on Trial
Ratko Mladic
Arkan
White Suits
War Plugs
The Sloth
The Egret
The Seagull
Bird’s Nest
The Canaries
Giuseppe Verdi
Ode to Marmite
On Entering Parliament
The Backbencher
Requiem
Bought and Sold
Sleaze Then and Now
Swindlers’ List
Sonnet: The People’s Bell Tower
Regrets
Behind Bars
Brief Encounter
Limerick (1): WMD
Limerick (2): IDS
Clerihew
Due Process
Forty Five Minutes
Political Gymnastics
Minister of State
Retreat from Basra
Hearts and Minds
Wootton Bassett
The Rifleman
Prisoners of War
Loitering Munitions
Foreboding
The Nuclear Option
Appeasement
Moonshine
Libya
History
Medal Parade
The Lighthouse
A Study in Contrasts
The Theatre of War
Agincourt
Challenges and Issues
DQF
Class Warfare
Politicians’ Call-up
Paddy Ashdown
New Labour
Coalition (1)
Coalition (2)
Coalition (3)
Cleggmania
Jerusalem
The Alternative Vote (1)
The Alternative Vote (2)
The Alternative Vote (3)
Odd People
Rules of War
Arab Spring
Osama Bin Laden
In Northern Yemen
Black Swans
Middle Ground
Blue Skies
White Christmas
Screens
The Kindle
The Blogosphere
Illusion
Lines
When Troubles Come
TGV
Anagrams
Tory Dictionary
Kurt Schork
Reporters’ Retreat
Censorship
Tim Hetherington
The Death of News
Neutrality
Bad News
Strictly
More or Less
Golden Age
Haiti
Babylon
Suffolk
Windfall
Absurdistan
Congo
Datelines
Dubai
Iceland
St Helena
Suez and Panama
Border Lines
Baseball
The Banker
Tax Demand
Ballade of Old Age
Royal Wedding (1)
Royal Wedding (2)
Retrospective
The Celebrity Protection Force
Cheryl
Max
Decisions
Radio Five Live
Classic FM
Mother Tongue
Language
Word Abuse
Painted Lady
The Virtues
War Wounds
Trajectories
End Game
The Toast Rack
Museum Piece
Credo
Point of Departure
Epitaph
House of Commons
The Ex-minister
Political Class
Garden Party
Laptop Bombardier
Muammar Gaddafi 1942–2011
War Crimes Tribunal
War Zones
Mission Impossible
Terms of Endearment
The Suitcase
Starstruck
Alice
Radio Set
Mightier than the Sword
Limericks
The Cat
The Vulture
George Osborne MP
Margaret Thatcher RIP
Politicians
Phone Hacking
The Acronym
The Drone
Aesthetics
The Enemy
Pythagoras
Clerihews
Norway
My Mother
Truth and Falsehood
Time Passing
Index of first lines
Index of titles
Martin Bell OBE worked as a BBC journalist for many years and was their Chief Washington Correspondent from 1978 to 1989. He also covered many war zones including Vietnam, Nigeria, Angola, the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Gulf (1991), Croatia and Bosnia. He gave evidence five times in the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. In April 1997 he stood as an Independent against Neil Hamilton, the Conservative MP for Tatton, and won with a majority of 11,000 votes – the first elected Independent MP for nearly 50 years. He was described in the press as ‘a fully paid up member of the awkward squad’. On leaving the House of Commons in 2001 he was appointed by UNICEF UK as Goodwill Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies. His UNICEF assignments have included Tajikistan, Malawi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, S
omalia, Yemen and South Sudan. His other books are: In Harm’s Way (1995; updated edition 2012), An Accidental MP (2000), Through Gates of Fire (2003), The Truth That Sticks (2007) and A Very British Revolution (2009).
Foreword
This is as near to an autobiography as I shall write, and I have done it episodically, itinerantly and in verse to reflect the life that I have lived. I tend to feel passionately about things – and that applies as much to the inanities of TV news as to the futilities of warfare; to sleaze and sloths, to celebrities and seagulls and much else. Hence poetry (of a sort) not prose; and the verse is light and dark because the life was.
There is a family history to this. My father, the country writer Adrian Bell, wrote a book of romantic poems early in his life which was kept from us children because they were written to someone other than our mother (and before he met her, as it happened). His father, the journalist Robert Bell, published an ingenious volume of light poetry, After-thoughts, in 1929. I have borrowed and included a poem from each as a heartfelt family tribute.
I can hardly claim consistency of output. I wrote the first of these poems, ‘Chain of Command’, as a soldier on active service in Cyprus in 1958. I did not write another for more than half a century. Then, in December 2009, I was waiting to give evidence about the Bosnian war to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. I was still troubled by the ill-fated decision of the British government to join in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I fell to wondering why some wars generated criminal processes and others did not. It seemed to depend on who fought them and who won them. So I wrote the flagship poem of this collection, ‘Principal Witness’, about Tony Blair before the court of history.
Others followed in short order – indeed, they seemed to write themselves – until in a year I found that I had more than a hundred of them. They appeared spontaneously about all sorts of subjects and in all sorts of forms: quatrains, couplets, a sonnet, a ballade, limericks and even a clerihew – plus other forms which so far as I know are not attempted by regular and professional poets, no doubt for the best of reasons.
I am grateful to the many people who have crossed my path and inspired these pieces, friends and others, named or unnamed – including some, like Idi Amin, who are no longer with us.
Most special thanks go to Martin Rowson of The Guardian for his cover cartoon. It was originally one of his illustrations for John Sweeney’s book about the Tatton adventure, Purple Homicide – Fear and Loathing on Knutsford Heath, published by Bloomsbury in 1997. Sweeney described what we were engaged in as not so much an election campaign but rather a pub crawl with attitude. And at one point he came up with the daft idea that I should ride across the constituency on a white horse. Rowson’s rumpled Don Quixote derived from that.
The arrangement of these pieces is partly chronological, partly thematic and partly as haphazard as the life that they encompass.
And sometimes, when the rhymes took on a life of their own and galloped away with the memories, I followed them out of curiosity, to see where they might lead. And what is poetry anyway but verse for solemn people?
To the old soldiers of the Suffolk Regiment
London’s Burning
One night in Tottenham we crossed a border
Into a land of riot and disorder,
And it’s our land. We law-abiding Brits
Are now the authors of a home-grown blitz.
We steal, we smash, we torch that bus,
No one’s to blame for it but us;
Our sense of who we are is shot to bits,
And wild-eyed tribesmen in Waziristan
Speak sadly of the savage Englishman.
From the dry tinder of a single shooting
Stores are burning, predators are looting;
Across the violent, vicious state we’re in
We see the rule of law is wafer-thin:
Our hellfire burns without a fire wall.
The anarchy of mobs and riot-makers
Throws this our capital into free fall;
A nation of shop-keepers? Not at all –
A nation of shop-breakers.
Riotous Illiteracy
In the rioting that spread across London in August 2011 only the bookshops were left untouched.
They looted clothes and trainers, mobile phones,
All goods of glitz and value and utility,
But never even paused at Waterstones,
Seeing its books as objects of futility:
Shakespeare’s undrinkable,
Kipling’s unthinkable,
Milton’s unwearable
Wordsworth’s unbearable
(This one at least we’d make allowance for,
The Sage of Lakeland being such a bore).
And as for our inflammatory writers,
Trotsky, Karl Marx and Chomsky – all in vain.
Not even they attracted London’s rioters,
Being judged not worth a broken window pane.
So here’s the Law of Lawlessness immutable:
Books are declared redundant and unsuitable,
Their words unread, their worth unsung,
Unwanted and unlootable,
By these our feckless and illiterate young.
Murdochracy
The operations of the Digger
Were such that, as his power grew bigger,
The moral jeopardy was graver
For those who sought his Sun-lit favour:
To their advantage or to his? Go figure.
Lachlan, Elisabeth and James,
These were the competing names
Of the next generation
Of Murdochisation,
And useful to know:
But again, Cui bono?
And those who were willing
To pocket his shilling
Had a name for his fee,
Which they called the Rupee.
The Lesson
Iraq, Afghanistan, now Libya too,
We learned one lesson and we learned it well:
Going to war’s the easy thing to do,
But getting out of it is hard as hell.
False Prophet
We followed him, as the half-blinded must;
He was our light – and what the prophet saith,
With eyes ablaze, we tend to take on trust.
We were beguiled. His truths were but a wraith,
His myths of mass destruction turned to dust.
Impenitent, he cut a fateful swathe
From peace to war and then from boom to bust;
And told us falsehoods, always in good faith.
He had this self-belief, and never hid it,
That what he did was right because he did it.
He went for it, pursued the chosen course
And never showed a flicker of remorse.
But in the end the fever in those eyes
Showed something else – and that way madness lies.
The Chilcot Committee
Three mandarins and two professors
Sit around a table:
They are the Iraq War assessors,
So far as they are able.
Let only their j’accuse impress us.
It was fought on a fable.
Principal Witness
‘Please take a seat, Prime Minister, and stay,
We’re interested in what you have to say.’
I only know that what I did was right.
The ghosts of soldiers looked on in dismay.
The written record pulled a rattling coach
And horses through his government’s approach.
The case for war was all but watertight.
The ghosts of soldiers looked on in reproach.
The rights and wrongs were neither here nor there;
Admire the spin, the twist, the fine veneer.
Of course I can sleep easily at night.
The ghosts of soldiers looked on in despair.
The shock and awe were easy to assess,
One called it ‘a catastrophic success’.
For Basra and Baghdad the future’s bright.
The ghosts of soldiers looked on in distress.
Others had testified that, in their eyes,
The post-war plan was chaos in disguise.
I knew it would be all right on the night.
The ghosts of soldiers looked on in surprise.
Pay tribute to the fallen, share the grief,
Ah, that’s the way to do it, brave and brief.
For all we stood to gain, the costs were light.
The soldiers’ ghosts looked on in disbelief.
Forty Years On
At school he didn’t join the CCF
(Army cadets), he said he wouldn’t play
Toy soldiers, and he therefore stayed away.
He was indifferent to the point of deaf
To bugle calls and trumpets from afar;
He much preferred the sounds of his guitar.
Forty years on, as head of government,
He loved to walk along the mustered ranks,
And radiate among the troops and tanks;
His attitude to war was different,
And for a while it helped his fortunes thrive;
The troops, however, did not all survive.
In Memoriam
If you should wonder why we breathed our last,
It was because of his sincere convictions,
The flotsam tide of falsehoods floating past,
The fantasies to which he clung so fast.
The false prospectus hammered to the mast,
The narrative as flaw-flecked as the cast,
And certainties that turned out to be fictions.
The Journey
In the tradition of the music hall
And those who trod its boards, Eric and Ernie,
Are those TV producers, comics all,
Whose opening gambit is always the same,
Before we’ve even shot a single frame;
They say to me, ‘Just take us on a journey’.