For Whom the Bell Tolls Read online

  This expanded edition published in the UK in 2013 by

  Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

  39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

  email: [email protected]

  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’.