For Whom the Bell Tolls

Light and Dark Verse

Martin Bell

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781848313217
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.'

London’s Burning

One night in Tottenham we crossed a border

Into a land of riot and disorder,

And it’s our land. We law-abiding Brits

Are now the authors of a home-grown blitz.

We steal, we smash, we torch that bus,

No one’s to blame for it but us;

Our sense of who we are is shot to bits,

And wild-eyed tribesmen in Waziristan

Speak sadly of the savage Englishman.

From the dry tinder of a single shooting

Stores are burning, predators are looting;

Across the violent, vicious state we’re in

We see the rule of law is wafer-thin:

Our hellfire burns without a fire wall.

The anarchy of mobs and riot-makers

Throws this our capital into free fall;

A nation of shop-keepers? Not at all –

A nation of shop-breakers.

Riotous Illiteracy

In the rioting that spread across London in August 2011 only the bookshops were left untouched.

They looted clothes and trainers, mobile phones,

All goods of glitz and value and utility,

But never even paused at Waterstones,

Seeing its books as objects of futility:

Shakespeare’s undrinkable,

Kipling’s unthinkable,

Milton’s unwearable

Wordsworth’s unbearable

(This one at least we’d make allowance for,

The Sage of Lakeland being such a bore).

And as for our inflammatory writers,

Trotsky, Karl Marx and Chomsky – all in vain.

Not even they attracted London’s rioters,

Being judged not worth a broken window pane.

So here’s the Law of Lawlessness immutable:

Books are declared redundant and unsuitable,

Their words unread, their worth unsung,

Unwanted and unlootable,

By these our feckless and illiterate young.

Murdochracy

The operations of the Digger

Were such that, as his power grew bigger,

The moral jeopardy was graver

For those who sought his Sun-lit favour:

To their advantage or to his? Go figure.

Lachlan, Elisabeth and James,

These were the competing names

Of the next generation

Of Murdochisation,

And useful to know:

But again, Cui bono?

And those who were willing

To pocket his shilling

Had a name for his fee,

Which they called the Rupee.

The Lesson

Iraq, Afghanistan, now Libya too,

We learned one lesson and we learned it well:

Going to war’s the easy thing to do,

But getting out of it is hard as hell.

False Prophet

We followed him, as the half-blinded must;

He was our light – and what the prophet saith,

With eyes ablaze, we tend to take on trust.

We were beguiled. His truths were but a wraith,

His myths of mass destruction turned to dust.

Impenitent, he cut a fateful swathe

From peace to war and then from boom to bust;

And told us falsehoods, always in good faith.

He had this self-belief, and never hid it,

That what he did was right because he did it.

He went for it, pursued the chosen course

And never showed a flicker of remorse.

But in the end the fever in those eyes

Showed something else – and that way madness lies.

The Chilcot Committee

Three mandarins and two professors

Sit around a table:

They are the Iraq War assessors,

So far as they are able.

Let only their j’accuse impress us.

It was fought on a fable.

Principal Witness

‘Please...