John Simpson: ‘It's been great to watch how Ireland went from a pretty backward country to a real powerhouse in Europe'
With a grandmother from
Co Tipperary
, the veteran journalist and broadcaster John Simpson holds dual British-Irish citizenship. Speaking from his home in Oxford, he says the idea of moving back to Ireland is a topic of quite regular discussion with his wife. He has lived in Rathgar in
Dublin
'but even more gorgeous was moving to
Dalkey
, to Bullock Harbour in Dalkey'.
'My life has been bound up with Ireland for a very long time. I got married very early [to his first wife], too early, at the age of 21, and we had our honeymoon in Ireland, in
Co Cork
, which was just delightful. From that age, through to today, Ireland has been part of my life.'
He accepts that television 'is a medium which does of course bulk up your ego', but he says having a Doppelgänger helps keep him humble. 'Everybody thinks I'm
David Attenborough
. They think I'm doing two jobs or something. For years now any self-image has been modified by the knowledge that people can't even recognise who you are.'
A number of paths led Simpson to a career in journalism. 'I found when I was at university in particular, that I was good at writing and love the sound of my own voice,' he says. The other was reading
George Orwell's
1984 when he was 15. 'I was so horrified by the thought that you could scrub out the past and rewrite it according to the interest of the government of the day, that I remember thinking very, very clearly then ... I want to do something to make sure that doesn't happen.
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'The desire to see things as they are, and present them to people as they are, and to make sure that people don't forget what they were like – that was something that mattered to me when I was 15 and it still matters to me now that I'm 80.'
He continues to present Unspun World with John Simpson, which is broadcast on
BBC2
. 'That's a high even in [the sense] of, with one foot in the grave and the other one on a banana skin, I can still have a real enjoyment of journalism.'
For a low point in his storied career, he points to his time in Beirut in the 1980s reporting on the
Israeli
invasion of
Lebanon
for the
BBC
. 'I was captured, and accused of being a spy, and tortured and subjected to mock execution. I've talked about some of those things in the past, but I've never talked about the torture, never to anybody, not even to my wife ... I realise, while I was being messed about with by these torturers, that I would tell them anything.
'I was so humiliated ... I like to have a good opinion of myself and I realised I wasn't strong enough to resist it, that I kind of kept silent about it, kept it a secret, and it's only in the last five years that I felt free to talk about it ... It doesn't come much lower than that, sort of gibbering with fear and pain and praying to be free of it. And then having a mock execution at the end of it. I really do know what a near-death experience is because I was about half a second away from it. It's just that there wasn't a bullet in the gun.'
He has had other near-death experiences. 'Getting bombed in Iraq, by the Americans. A 1,000lb bomb landed 15 paces from where I was standing, killed my translator who was standing beside me. God knows why I wasn't killed. Being nearly ripped apart in Iran, that was a pretty fierce experience.'
John Simpson: 'Everybody thinks I'm David Attenborough. They think I'm doing two jobs or something'
But his first such experience was a little closer to home, he explains, during The Troubles. 'I was BBC correspondent in Ireland. On the very first day I covered an IRA funeral in Belfast. The key thing was to get a sound recording – I was working for radio – of the moment when the guys pulled out their guns and fired over the grave. And I had a tiny little tape recorder which was new on the market – this was 1972, I think. Every time I thought someone was going to pull out a gun I sneaked out my little tape recorder and thought nobody could possibly notice what I was doing, and of course they did and they said I was a British spy. And the man in charge clearly of Provo security for the funeral said to the other guys who were around us, 'Give him one up the nostril.''
A colleague of Simpson's had noticed what was going on. 'All the other journalists had left by this stage, because the end of these things is always the most dangerous. I was too new to the game to realise that. This man from the London Sunday Times spotted what was happening and came back, and said in a very Brit way, 'Oh hello, John. Is there any problem?''
[
John Simpson: My torture was 'deeply humiliating, wounding to the spirit'
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]
Although his colleague vouching for him was enough to get Simpson out of the situation in that case, the experience was sufficiently frightening to make him question if journalism was really for him. 'I sat down on the bed and I thought, 'this stuff isn't for me. This is too dangerous. It's too nasty. You can get seriously hurt and I want to go home.''
He paused and considered before making a decision. 'I mean, whoever said journalism should be a safe profession? And as I worked my way through to that thought, I just thought, 'Well, you should just be really grateful you got out of that. Make sure you don't get into similar situations through your own stupidity again, and give it a bit of a try.''
Simpson's family lived in Dublin then and he commuted to Belfast. 'There were great stories in the Republic too, at that stage,' he says. 'It was a textbook perfect start to a career ... I've loved Belfast and I've loved Ireland, as a whole, ever since.
I'm very much afraid that the future for Palestinians is to be driven out of their own country
—
John Simpson
'I made a huge number of friends, particularly in Dublin.' he continues. 'In the South I was much, much freer.'
Simpson doesn't have any big concerns about the Irish and UK relationship post-Brexit, even with the growth of
Reform UK
, the party led by
Nigel Farage
.
'I don't know how strong Reform is going to be. I certainly don't think it or anything else will really get in the way of a good relationship with Ireland,' he says. 'As we're seeing with Donald Trump, there are these big waves and troughs. But we mustn't ever think these things are permanent. Donald Trump will be gone in just over three years' time and the world will carry on without him. And it will carry on without individual politicians in Britain.
'One of the great things in my life has been to watch how Ireland went from being a frankly pretty backward country, through to being a real powerhouse in Europe ... And that has been such a joy to me to see. Ireland needed to get out of Britain's shadow and it's done that and the Brits have been obliged to regard Ireland as a serious entity which they've got to treat with as much care and thought as they treat France or Germany or the US.'
Just as in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, he's aware of some of the unrest and discontent around issues such as immigration in Ireland. 'I think it's just a matter of governments learning how to balance themselves with these difficult circumstances ... I don't think any recent government in Britain has been terribly good at it. And I don't think any government in Ireland has been terribly good at it,' he adds.
As much of the world looks on in despair at
what is happening in Gaza
, Simpson doesn't see any solution in the short term. 'I'm now running out of hope for the longer term,' he says. 'I've always assumed that at some stage a form of a two-state solution would be established and, well, I think Binyamin Netanyahu has made it impossible for that to happen.
'I'm very much afraid that the future for Palestinians is to be driven out of their own country. It's a terrible thought to me, but I think that is where Israel is going ... and I think that at the moment, at any rate, the US is allowing that to happen.'
Influencing public opinion in Israel is the only potential solution he sees at the moment. 'Not by being angry and dissociative, but by supporting the quite large number, the proportion must be about 40-45 per cent of Israelis, who don't want to go down that route. But isolating Israel and condemning it – it may be morally the right thing to do, many countries might feel it's the right thing to do, but it wouldn't have the effect of helping the future of the Palestinian people,' he says.
John Simpson and his son, Rafa, in Brighton
As Simpson reflects on his extensive past and continuing career, it's hard to imagine how he managed to combine it with being a father.
'Badly for the first two,' he admits. 'My two daughters are absolutely lovely girls and they've been so nice to me. I was an absentee father. I was never really around properly. Then I married again in 1996 and we had a son who spent part of his life in Ireland, went to Castle Park School in Dalkey and loved it. I was [at] a kind of level then where I was able to say, look, I'm not going to catch a plane because somebody's shot themselves in the toe in Vladivostok. I'm going to stay in London, and if you, the BBC, don't like it, well, I'm sorry, I've got other commitments.'
'I've been around much, much more for my son, and if he's as nice to me as my daughters have been I'm a lucky man.'
Simpson's son is 19 and he's finding the experience of fatherhood quite different from when his daughters were born in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For one thing, his son has introduced him to the world of football. 'I'm now as fanatical a supporter of Chelsea as he is,' he says. 'Fatherhood has been, I think, the most exciting and profitable thing that I've done. To have children and to [see] the world through their eyes. It's just we've got this slight desert at the moment because he's at university ... and I haven't got anybody to talk to about Chelsea'.
John Simpson's
The Leaders and Lunatics Tour
comes to the National Concert Hall on Thursday,
November 6th, 2025
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