For Whom the Bell Tolls: Light and Dark Verse

By Martin Bell

Martin Bell OBE has been many things – an icon of BBC war reporting, Britain's first independent MP for 50 years, a UNICEF ambassador, and 'the man in the white suit' – a tireless campaigner for honesty and accountability in politics.

But as For Whom the Bell Tolls reveals, he's also a poet of light verse, and here Bell's poems continue his war by other means on duplicitous politicians, our all-consuming media, the venality of celebrity culture and much more.

Bell presents poems on Tony Blair and Iraq, on Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, on his hero, Reuters reporter Kurt Schork, and colourful episodes from his work and life, from being starstruck by Angelina Jolie, to a mordant epitaph on Margaret Thatcher, to his being a guest at Idi Amin's wedding:

'… that by God / Was well worth doing, if distinctly odd.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Icon Books
• Release date: Oct 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848313217

Martin Bell

Martin Bell, OBE is a former BBC war reporter and Independent MP who is now a British UNICEF ambassador. After leaving school he served as a national serviceman and was posted to Cyprus during the emergency. He then took an English degree at Cambridge and joined the BBC where he established a reputation as a leading war reporter covering conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, Nigeria, Angola, Northern Ireland and the Balkans. After leaving the BBC he was elected as the Independent MP for Tatton. His books include In Harm's Way, An Accidental MP, Through Gates of Fire, The Truth That Sticks and A Very British Revolution.

Book preview

Front coverTitle page artwork

This expanded edition published in the UK in 2013 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [e-mail]

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, Somalia, 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