Adventures in Correspondentland (5 page)

On other occasions that week, correspondents ran into difficulty through no fault of their own, entirely innocent victims of the broadcasting equivalent of friendly fire. To provide a radio commentary of Rabin's funeral, we naturally called on the resident Jerusalem correspondent, a reporter blessed with such a booming voice that it was often said he could broadcast to London merely by opening the nearest window. Unfortunately, the studio crossed to him just as the wail of sirens that marked the beginning of the funeral started to fade and mourners began to observe a two-minute silence. First, his boom was reduced to an uncharacteristic whisper, and then to silence as those around him threatened to carry out a lynching.

I made so many stuff-ups on that first foreign assignment that,
were there a penalty-points system for errant correspondents, I probably would not have been allowed back out onto the road. Fortunately, however, none of them made it to air, which is the broadcasting equivalent of a tree falling in an empty forest.

As we gathered for a celebratory meal at the end of the week, I felt that I could at least sit at the same table as the other correspondents, even if I was a long way from ordering the wine. That privilege went to our most senior man in the Middle East, a moustachioed correspondent with the debonair looks of a Spitfire pilot and the same raffish air, whom I would meet a few years hence in another corner of Correspondentland. We were both live on air from our studio in Washington on election night in 2000 when Al Gore first threw in the towel and then suddenly wrenched it back. Our friend the self-styled ‘complete pilchard' was at the restaurant as well, proving that he could also drink like a fish. So, too, was the correspondent who came with his own sonic boom, who would later become one of my dearest colleagues. Six years later, after becoming Washington correspondents, we both suffered the most exasperating day of our careers on what should have been our finest hour. That was 9/11, a story for later on, and perhaps the only time I have covered a more consequential story than Rabin's assassination.

As the Israeli Merlot started to work its magic, I smugly congratulated myself on the rapid progress of my career. In the space of less than a week, I had gone from Piers Morgan's office to Yasser Arafat's beachside compound, and from the Docklands Light Railway to the Temple Mount. Sunni Muslims believed this to be the place where the prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven. I, too, left Jerusalem feeling things were on the up.

Such was the state of dazed disbelief, so overindulgent was the emotional excess, that my homeland felt more like a foreign country in the seven days after the death of Diana in 1997. It was a strange and unrecognisable place. Just about the only thing that seemed instantly familiar to reporters was the orderliness of the queue outside St James's Palace, where mourners lined up uncomplainingly, sometimes for as long as 12 hours, to sign the book of condolence.

Though late-twentieth-century Britain could hardly be described as a place of unfeeling stoicism or wholly constipated sentiment – a
Guardian
headline that week, ‘Nation Learns to Grieve', implied some kind of congenital defect that had previously barred Britons from any form of public lamentation or private tenderness – it did exercise a certain emotional control that was now, in the wake of the news from Paris, almost completely absent. The normal, unwritten protocols of grief, founded on restraint and reserve, had been entirely disregarded.

Planeloads of flowers had to be flown in from as far as Thailand and South Africa. An extra five million red roses were imported from Israel alone. Churches observed record attendances. Helplines run by groups such as The Samaritans reported much heavier than usual call-loads.

Though Australians could normally be relied upon to bring a sense of proportion on such occasions, the country's finest wordsmith, Clive James, came close to completely losing it. ‘No,' he shrieked at the start of every one of his 24 paragraphs in a eulogy penned for
The New Yorker
.

Neither could we rely on members of the Scotland football team, not normally the most tender-hearted of men, who threatened to strike unless their Saturday-afternoon World Cup
qualifier with Belarus was moved to the Sunday to avoid a clash with Diana's funeral.

Even the
Daily Telegraph
, whose reporters were usually recruited because they represented the quintessence of old-style Britishness, had the wobbles. Dispatched to provide a colour piece on the crowds of mourners thronging The Mall, Tom Utley, a
Telegraph
traditionalist, reported instead from within himself. ‘Quite a few people, and I must include myself, thought her pretty awful at times – and many have been amazed, as I have, to discover how terribly we miss her now.'

As journalists pondered what had happened to their country, the country could just as reasonably have asked what had happened to its journalists. Nobody wanted to be out of sync with the emotional zeitgeist, which amplified things even more. It took Boris Johnson, then one of its scribes, to resume normal
Telegraph
service, by accusing Britain of ‘undergoing a Latin American carnival of grief'.

As with the assassination of Rabin, the first, patchy reports came through late on a Saturday night, and even though I was now sufficiently senior to have been issued with my very own bleeper, I was at a wedding in Dorset and did not at that point of the evening possess the necessary sobriety to make full use of it.

Oddly, I happened to be surrounded by Parisians, many of whom were catching a flight back to the French capital early the next morning. But by the time I responded to the bleep, the news was that the car crash was nowhere near as bad as first feared and there was now no need to make a dash over the Channel.

In the scramble for information, CNN had put to air an interview with an eyewitness, an American in Paris, no less, who
said he had been driving in the opposite direction along the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris when the Mercedes had ploughed into the concrete pylon. For ten minutes, he provided what must have been riveting testimony, then ended his account with the words ‘Baba Booey'. The BBC, when it started replaying this account, simply edited out the mystifying pay-off. Unknown to any of the production team in London, Baba Booey was the nickname of a producer working for Howard Stern, the American shock jock, who encouraged listeners to play hoaxes at moments of breaking news. Everything he had said was complete fiction, the cruellest one at that.

With the hoaxer finally rumbled, the tone of the coverage changed in an instant. Our Paris correspondent was picking up dark rumblings from his local contacts. Even bleaker news came from the Philippines, where the British foreign secretary Robin Cook was on tour. He told the BBC's diplomatic correspondent that Diana had been killed, but he placed the interview under strict embargo so the news would come first from the French Government.

For years, the BBC had been planning for the death of the queen mother, with regular royal-death rehearsals and a thumping great compendium of guidelines that editors were expected to memorise. Now, though, it was overtaken by a much larger and wholly unexpected drama, which the normal set of rules found hard to fully accommodate. Under their strict letter, the BBC could not report the death of a member of the royal family without the news first having been officially confirmed by Buckingham Palace, whose on-duty press officer that weekend had left the office on Friday night without a mobile phone. However, although the news from the Philippines had been
handed to our correspondent under embargo, it was inevitable that someone would soon break it.

Sky News, often the nippy speedboat up against our hulking carrier fleet, was already reporting rumours that Diana was dead. Not only were there now competitive pressures to weigh but also a moral dilemma. The BBC was wilfully reporting something that we knew to be untrue: that Diana was alive.

This point was made most forcefully by our distinguished royal correspondent, Paul Reynolds, who found himself fighting a behind-the-scenes battle in between long stints live on air. The author of one of the most searing lines of that troubled decade for the British royals, ‘the knives are out for Fergie at the Palace', Paul was simply too honourable a journalist to continue with this charade. Finally, the Press Association broke the embargo and announced at 4.44 am on Sunday 31 August that Diana had died. Eventually, we followed suit and marked Diana's passing, as the guidelines decreed, with the playing of ‘God Save the Queen' – a gesture that would seem ridiculously incongruous by the middle of the following week.

Like many of my compatriots, I had gone to bed thinking that Diana was still alive and awoke to the jolting news of her death. Unlike many of my compatriots and colleagues, I failed completely to grasp its magnitude, and I compounded this lapse by not even bothering to rush back to London. Returning much later along the motorway, again with little haste, we listened to the stream of interviews with Aids patients, landmine specialists and the homeless, which did so much in those early hours to produce the instant revisionism on Diana's contribution to national life. Still, it was only when we reached Kensington and saw for ourselves the police outriders blocking the traffic so that the black hearse
carrying her coffin could continue unimpeded that its impact started to more fully register. Even then, however, there was little hint of the unreality about to unfold.

Arriving home, I retrieved from the wardrobe my most sombre dark suit and headed immediately for Buckingham Palace. Mourners had already made a start on one of the many carpets of flowers that would appear at the royal hubs of grieving. As I watched them descend on the palace late into the night, I remember thinking that the first waves were made up of the types of people you would have expected to make the journey: Elizabethans and arch-monarchists – the sort who would line The Mall for the trooping of the colour and purchase small Royal Doulton tea sets to mark the great regal jubilees – and a sprinkling of American tourists, who found themselves eavesdropping on Britain's day of mourning.

As the vigil went on, however, and journalists were confronted by this great ‘outpouring of grief', to redeploy the overworked phrase of the week, the character of the crowd changed. Multi-generational, multi-faith and fabulously multi-ethnic, this polyglot patchwork of people looked much more like modern Britain. It helped explain why emotional gears that had been hitherto held in check were raced through so very quickly. More than that, it reminded us that those dog-eared national stereotypes were woefully out of date.

For me, two encounters with members of the public linger still in the mind. One afternoon in the middle of that week, as I was driven the short distance from Buckingham Palace to Kensington Palace in the back of a black cab, the taxi driver started telling me about the death of his own mother, a bereavement that had been dragged back to the forefront of his mind. By the time we reached the Royal Albert Hall, he was in tears. A few hundred metres
later, as he set me down opposite the flower-bedecked gates, he could hardly read the meter.

Odder still was a conversation with a local parish vicar in north London on the morning of Diana's funeral. I asked him to sum up the mood of his parishioners, which I thought was a fairly perfunctory line of questioning, but it unleashed a stream of comic-strip tears. Nothing more aptly illustrated the weirdness of that week than to have a 60-something parish priest crying on the shoulder of a 20-something journalist.

By now, of course, Diana had been appropriated by the masses, who had taken their cue from the British prime minister, Tony Blair. Casting himself as the country's grief counsellor, he had described her – touchingly, haltingly and with great theatricality – as ‘The People's Princess'.

Whereas Blair grasped immediately the public mood and started to tap the well of hyper-emotion, the royal family followed so far behind that they appeared to inhabit not so much a parallel universe as an entirely different epoch. That morning, when the queen, Prince Charles and the royal princes gathered for morning service at Crathie Kirk parish church near Balmoral, Diana's name was not even mentioned, and the tragedy was dealt with in an oblique reference during one of the prayers. Then there was the cold grammar of the Court Circular, which dealt matter-of-factly with her death: ‘… the royal family learnt this morning with great sadness of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Divine service was later held …'

At the start of the week, there was a fierce backlash against the press, the supposed accomplices of the Paris paparazzi. By Wednesday, however, the anger had been redirected towards the royal family. Britons remained sufficiently deferential to put up
with the social exclusivity of the monarchy but not its emotional aloofness. Scapegoated to begin with, the tabloids could hardly believe their luck and now started to harness the mood of rebelliousness against the monarchy.