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Concept
John Simpson (journalist)
Summary
John Cody Fidler-Simpson (born 9 August 1944) is an English foreign correspondent and world affairs editor of BBC News. He has spent all his working life with the BBC, and has reported from more than 120 countries, including thirty war zones, and interviewed many world leaders. He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English and was editor of Granta magazine.
Simpson was born on 9 August 1944 in Cleveleys, Lancashire, but was taken to his mother's "bomb-damaged house in London" the following week. He says in his autobiography that his father was an anarchist. He spent ten years growing up in Dunwich in Suffolk. He was educated at Dulwich College Preparatory School and St Paul's School, followed by Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English and was editor of Granta magazine. In 1965 he was a member of the Magdalene University Challenge team. A year later Simpson started as a trainee sub-editor at BBC radio news.
Simpson became a BBC reporter in 1970. Early in his career, the then prime minister Harold Wilson, angered by being asked whether he was about to call an election, punched Simpson in the stomach.
Simpson was the BBC's political editor in 1980–1. He presented the Nine O'Clock News in 1981–82 and became diplomatic editor in 1982. He had also served as a correspondent in South Africa, Brussels and Dublin. He became BBC world affairs editor in 1988 and presented an occasional current affairs programme, Simpson's World.
Simpson's reporting career includes the following episodes:
In November 1969 he interviewed the exiled King of Buganda, Mutesa II, hours before the latter's death in his London flat from alcohol poisoning. The official cause was suicide but some suspected assassination. Simpson told the police the following day that the king, a fellow-graduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge, had been sober and in good spirits, but this line of enquiry was not pursued.
He travelled back from Paris to Tehran with the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini on 1 February 1979, a return that heralded the Iranian Revolution, as millions lined the streets of the capital.
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