Sleaze and the truth that sticks

It would be almost disappointing if Martin Bell were to arrive at the Oxford Literary Festival from a holiday break in the Cotswolds or book signing in Cheltenham. The man in the white suit quickly put any such fears to rest. "I will be flying in from Somalia," he cheerfully declared. "I'm going out with Unicef. Because they can't send celebrities there, they send me. So if I'm speaking twice at Oxford, I'd better survive."

Bell, despite being a familiar face on BBC news for 33 years covering assignments in more than 80 countries, does not regard himself as a celebrity. Not even his time as the country's best-known backbench MP, after being elected on an anti-sleaze ticket, could dent his view of himself as a journalist.

Bell, 70 this year, will certainly be in good company at this year's festival where speakers include James Naughtie, Max Hastings, Mark Tully, Roy Greenslade and Robert Fisk.

His new book, The Truth That Sticks: New Labour's Breach of Trust, draws on his personal experience of politics and war, partly amassed from his seat in the House of Commons. Ultimately, his book was inspired by a visit to another literary festival, at Dartlington Hall in Devon.

"I was looking for a book that explained how we had got to where we were, in terms of parliamentary sleaze and fighting an illegal war. I could not find one. So I decided to write the book myself."

It is a blistering indictment of New Labour, with troops sent to fight "an unwinnable war" by politicians living in a dreamland of their own "like Disney with gun turrets". Blair is held up as a man who ordered the armed forces to war on the basis of a grand deception.

"The proclaimed cause of war was a falsehood," Bell thunders. "If a government could not be trusted to tell the truth on a decision as important as sending the armed forces to war, which is the most serious decision it ever takes, what else could it not be trusted on?"

In Bell's view, the former Prime Minister's character was crucial.

"I think he practised politics as a performing art. He appears to have no sense of history. We had been in Afghanistan and Mesopotamia before. And, like everyone else in his Government, he had no military experience. I believed he liked playing the military card, being photographed with soldiers on the front, basking in their reflected glory, without any awareness of the level of slaughter or the fact that you cannot change people's hearts and minds with high explosives."

The book, perhaps inadvertently, reveals much about Bell himself. Unlike the likes of Geoff Hoon and Jack Straw, the broadcaster did serve as a soldier. He served in the ranks after failing the War Office Selection Board's intelligence test, eventually being posted to his battalion's intelligence section, where he "moved pins on maps and wrote subversively for the regimental magazine".

His affection for the armed forces shines through."I like hanging out with them. For me they are the best of British." The Government's betrayal of the armed forces is set out in the book's most passionate chapter entitled Broken Soldiers.

He recalls a flight home from Basra in a civilian aircraft alongside 200 soldiers, which had to be diverted to Newcastle. Seeing their weapons, the authorities went into a mode of obstruction.

"They seemed embarrassed by the uniforms and couldn't cope with the encased weapons that the soldiers had in their checked baggage," Bell recalled. "The soldiers were kept waiting for hours as flight after flight of holiday-makers and businessmen came and went, looking the other way. The soldiers bore it with patience. They were used to being treated like second-class citizens."

For the old soldier the incident was indicative of the way we fail to give even equal treatment to those who risk their lives on our behalf.

But his book also sets out to dissect New Labour's misdeeds at home as well as abroad: from Bernie Ecclestone to cash for peerages and the David Blunkett scandal, they are all here. It comes as no surprise to find he has already written an extra chapter for the paperback edition to include the likes of Derek Conway, the MP who made improper payments to his teenage son, and the controversy surrounding the Speaker Michael Martin's expenses.

He believes the number of controversies swirling around the head of the Speaker are now in danger of sparking a constitutional crisis. It would be greatly in the public interest for a new Speaker to be in place by the autumn, or better still spring, argues Bell.

It's a miserable picture. Yet Bell's assessment of his old trade is equally depressing. He believes that the death of war reporting is an inevitable consequence of the increasing dangers, with practitioners singled out for kidnap and execution. It has meant war correspondents must retreat into fortified compounds, emerging occasionally for 15-minute "news raids" into the real world.

They are in the area but not on the scene, he says. "It looks like news and sounds like news, but bears a much relation to news as fish paste does to caviar."

Bell recently wrote an an introduction to a new edition of William Howard Russell's Dispatches from the Crimea. "I believe that the readers of The Times in 1854 were better informed about the war in the Crimea than the readers of any newspaper, or the viewers of any TV network, about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today."

Coming from the man in the white suit, that it is a truly dark thought.

A dinner with Martin Bell is at Christ Church on Friday, April 4, and he will be speaking in the festival marquee on Saturday, April 5.