MEDIA STUDIES
I hope the worst thing to say about Martin Bell is that he's a holy fool, but perhaps there's worse
STEPHEN GLOVER
Abetween Martin Bell and Neil Hamilton there can be no doubt who is the more attractive man. The one is a brave war correspondent who has covered 11 wars for the BBC and was quite badly wounded in Bosnia. He seems honest and almost embarrassingly self-deprecating. Some foreign correspondents are inclined to brag about their derring-do, but Mr Bell is apparently not one of them.
The other is a man who by his own admission has done several things he ought not to have done, including misleading the Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine, about his relationship with the lobbyist Ian Greer. (Having made this admission, Mr Hamilton appears to have partially back- tracked.) Even if Mr Hamilton were wholly blameless, which it is plain he is not, his Clinging on to his constituency at the risk of seriously damaging his party during a gen- eral election would seem odiously self- serving.
All the same, Mr Bell should not have stood against Mr Hamilton. I have no idea Whether he will win or not. In either event, the decision is likely to harm his reputation and the good name of the BBC.
Mr Bell's central claim and self-justifica- tion is that he is non-political. He said so on Monday at his press conference, and he says so in his book about the war in former Yugoslavia, In Harm's Way. Mr Bell takes much pride in his separation from political concerns. So do his Liberal Democrat and Labour supporters. It suits them perfectly that he should be seen to be above politics. It makes him more electable in a con- stituency which has as its sitting incumbent someone who gives party politics a bad name.
But it is hardly possible for any of us in this world to be above politics, and it is cer- tainly not creditable if you are standing as a Member of Parliament. Mr Bell's inade- quacies were exposed by his reporting of former Yugoslavia, for which he has been much praised, and championed by some as the doyen of the modern school of foreign correspondents He reported in his sepul- chral voice the death and destruction he saw around him. Sometimes he showed remarkable sympathy for the victim; at other times he was strikingly dispassionate. The impression we got night after night was of a stricken and utterly hopeless country. What was missing was a broader political Intelligence — the very thing which Mr Bell is proud not to have. For him war is war: desperate, cruel and inexplicable. It is not the continuation of politics by another means, but a realm unto itself. So he stood there, showing us how horrible the carnage was but offering us very little interpretation of the political conditions which underlay it. His approach did much to encourage the 'something must be done' school, of which I confess I was a member. The problem was that no one had the faintest idea of what should be done on the basis of any of Mr Bell's reports.
Perhaps Mr Bell has simply got one of those minds which can never come to grips with politics. In Harm's Way gives no more sense of political nous than his reporting in Bosnia. But my guess is that he actually recoils from politics not so much because he thinks it complicated or boring but because he finds it so often morally dis- tasteful. There is something of the revivalist preacher about Mr Bell. At Monday's press conference he managed to look preposter- ously tormented, as though the sins and omissions of one pretty insignificant Tory MP weighed as heavily upon his soul as all that killing and destruction in Bosnia.
Mr Bell, far above politics as he likes to think of himself, cannot escape the charge that he has been manipulated by profes- sional politicians for their own party politi- cal purposes. For Labour and the Liberal Democrats Tatton is an unwinnable seat. In return for dropping their no-hope candi- dates, who were presumably no less anti- sleaze than Mr Bell, they have acquired a figure whose every word will be reported. His presence in Tatton will be a daily reminder to the rest of the country of the allegations hanging around the Tories' necks.
It hardly matters to Labour and the Lib- eral Democrats whether Mr Bell should win or lose. They intend that he should inflict as much damage as possible on the Tories on the national stage.There is noth- ing wrong or disgraceful about their strate- gy. Politics was ever thus. But it is regret- 'I think it must be Blur.' table that a highly respected journalist who has spent his entire working life with the BBC should find himself doing the work of party politicians far better than they could ever do it for themselves.
I have given Mr Bell the benefit of the doubt on the assumption that he is a kind of 'holy fool' who simply cannot understand what is being done to him. It is possible, of course, that he is knowingly compliant. I was worried by his statement that his BBC career seems to be going nowhere: this implied to me that standing in Tatton might be regarded by him as a sort of career move. That ubiquitous white suit, which he wore at his press conference and during his fracas with Mr and Mrs Hamil- ton on Knutsford Heath, makes me uneasy too. If he were a professional politician, one would say that this much-paraded suit smacked a little of vanity and self-promo- tion — vices with which no one has ever associated the saintly Mr Bell.
he late Jack Tinker's successor as
T
Daily Mail theatre critic is said to be Michael Coveney, subject to his resolving his contractual arrangements with his pre- sent paper, the Observer. Mr Coveney is a comparatively highbrow figure, and one wonders how his reviews will sit in the Mail. Mr Tinker established himself as a more popular voice, and his recommendations were taken seriously by Middle England. He placed many bums on many seats.
Behind Mr Coveney's rather unexpected appointment there is a story of great unhappiness at the Observer. The man who presides over the newspaper's review sec- tion is Jocelyn Targett, a talented and youthful journalist much preoccupied with presentation and inclined to think the cov- erage of pop and 'the visual media' rather more important than fuddy-duddy things like opera and classical music. The distin- guished music critic Andrew Porter was recently let go' by Mr Targett. Other crit- ics, including Mr Coveney, sought an audi- ence with the paper's editor Will Hutton, who said he would not interfere with Mr Targett's running of the review. Apparent- ly, one of the critics' complaints was against the dreadful punning headlines which Mr Targett encourages on their pieces. All of which may explain why Mr Coveney has jumped to the Mail from the paper which once employed Kenneth Tynan.
Previous page
