John Simpson

• BBC’s most senior international corespondent as its World Affairs Editor.
• Five decades of facing conflicts and interviews of countless international leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Nelson Mandela.
• One of the world’s leading journalists who delivers a fascinating and informed inside view of current affairs and world politics.
• Noted for his front line reporting from the Gulf War; the fall of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran and reporting Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, escaping death in Baghdad and the recent uprising in Ukraine.

John Simpson CBE is recognized as the BBC’s most senior news broadcaster, devoting his entire working life to the media.

John started working for the BBC in 1966 as a sub-editor in radio news before becoming a World Affairs Correspondent. His career has involved tackling some of the most globally influential and dangerous news stories that have occurred over the past fifty years.

He has reported from almost every major conflict and from 140 countries, interviewing public figures including international leaders and game changers; names such as Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein and King Abdullah of Jordan, Bashir al-Asad, Colonel Gadaffi, Nelson Mandela, and Robert Mugabe. Simpson is one of the world’s best known British and international broadcasters, with a decorated career in the media industry.

Simpson was honored in 1991 with a CBE as part of the Gulf War Honors list. He has won two BAFTAs, an International Emmy and twice named the Royal Society’s Journalist of the Year.

Faced with some of the world’s most defining moments and truly life threatening scenarios, Simpson has relentlessly continued to break stories from across the globe, putting his life on the line in the name of journalism. He has been on the Berlin Wall, dodged bullets in the Tiananmen Square massacre and survived an explosion in Iraq – a major moment in his career of which the translator escorting Simpson lost his leg and unfortunately died soon after.

Other momentous moments of Simpson’s career include reporting the fall of Kabul in 2001 following a series of visits to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan; witnessing the rain of missiles on Baghdad in the first Gulf War; his stationing in Northern Iraq as part of the second Gulf War, and his visit to Tehran with Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iranian revolution.

John Simpson was brought up in Suffolk and educated at St Paul’s School and Cambridge University. He now resides in Dublin.

Speaking

John Simpson has almost fifty years of commentary amassed from reporting worldwide from global events that have made history. He can address regional stability from Europe, Asia, Russia and the Ukraine to the Middle East. An eloquent speaker Simpson has interviewed many of the worlds great leaders as well as it’s tyrants and an expert speaker on geopolitical landscapes.

In an ever-changing journalistic landscape, Simpson now concentrates on Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, China, Russia and Ukraine.