Abstract
Former broadcaster and politician Martin Bell, he of the lucky white suit, says in his foreword to this compact volume of verse that it is as near to an autobiography as he will write. Most of the poems, he records, tumbled out of his head on to the page from the year 2009, triggered by giving evidence about the Bosnian War to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. That seemed to be his moment to start looking back in anger in verse. However, as few of the events referred to in the 150 or so poems are dated – nor indeed are the poems in chronological order – it struggles a bit as life story. One has to superimpose a personal and so possibly fallible memory of atrocities in the Balkans, the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Haitian earthquake, Tony Blair's reign as PM, cash for questions and duck-house scandals, right up to last summer's riots, with which the book opens.
What you do get, though, is a clear picture of what Martin Bell OBE gets worked up about. As he says, verse serves passions better than does prose. And, almost without exception, his anger serves his verse better than do the mundanities of life. As a result it's easy to dismiss his little four-line ditties about seagulls or toast racks as inconsequential. They are – and, unlike great poetry, they are rarely bigger than the sum of the four lines. Even slightly longer ones – about clichés, or not caring who Cheryl Cole is, or doting on his grandson Max – can seem no more than exercises in clever rhyming. But they are autobiographical and tell you a little about the private man, even if on balance the book reveals more about the man whose juices start flowing when thinking about war and politics and the people involved in them. These are the subjects that, at times, make his words click into place like a safebreaker tumbling the locks.
He points a particularly critical finger at the politicians with no military experience who start wars and vents much displeasure at what happened on Tony Blair's watch. The first stanza of “40 years on” includes:
He was indifferent to the point of deaf
To bugle calls and trumpets from afar;
He much preferred the sounds of his guitar.
And the poem closes on:
His attitude to war was different,
And for a while it helped his fortunes thrive;
The troops, however, did not all survive.
The theme of politicians exploiting military lives is developed in “Brief Encounter”:
Somewhere remote and safe, out in the sticks,
Amid a photo op of troops and tanks,
A politician walked among the ranks,
Expressing his condolences and thanks.
And so far, so smooth, until a regular soldier asks the Rt Hon Member how much he knows of soldiering and then of politics …
‘Not much again’ – he looked him in the eyes:
‘Except, I'm rather good at telling lies.’
The experiences of reporting from 18 war zones (he reveals in one poem), plus what he learned as a corporal with the Suffolk Regiment in Cyprus in 1958, have left Bell with enormous respect for both soldiers and the best of war reporters who risk their lives to document what is really going on. His verse pays homage to Reuters reporter Kurt Schork, killed in Sierra Leone in 2000, and to filmmaker Tim Hetherington, who died in a mortar attack last year while covering the Libyan civil war, for their unassuming determination to report the truth. And he showers opprobrium on unnamed correspondents who are all flak jackets and combat trousers, reporting miles from the actual conflict to newsrooms that dictate the angle they want the story to take.
He closes “Bad News” with the warning:
It is an issue worth attending to,
The incidence of electronic sleaze.
The scoundrels may be relatively few:
We used to think the same of our MPs.
Dishonour in politics, the ticket that won him a seat in the House of Commons, produces some of his more memorable verse (unlike, strangely, losing the Alternative Vote referendum, for which he was the Yes campaign's vice chair. His poems on that subject have the same lack of passion as did the campaign).
“Swindler's List” contains these truly entertaining lines:
Though my accomplishments were zero,
In fiddling I was next to Nero;
I was a self-philanthropist,
Master of the John Lewis list
He does have an enviable facility with rhyme, but the poems tend to read like reports in verse. They are not often “poetic”. On balance it's a pessimistic and entertaining aide memoir of recent history in which the “dark and light verse” of the title becomes the darker side of life looked at lightly.
And that goes for the future of reporting as well. For although he does confess to being lured on to The Weakest Link by Anne Robinson's wink, in his poem “Strictly” he's curmudgeonly about our celebrity culture and its grip on news:
Where will this end? Sometimes it seems to me,
If news continues down this road, consorting
With all the nonsense of celebrity,
The tinsel trappings and red carpetry,
It will turn into “Strictly Come Reporting”.