LITMIR.BIZ

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for the Guardian. ‘Christine is Dead’ was published on 8 June 1973, and it was my first piece of proper journalism. I was emotionally drained, exhausted, and most definitely better at writing about the work than doing it. This traumatic insight into the country in which I had grown up transformed my outlook on life, as Uganda had before. But I had to move on.

      There were builders everywhere, carpenters putting up partitions, electricians laying cables. It was hard to find where my interview was supposed to take place. I was standing in the bowels of the building in Gough Square, off Fleet Street, where Britain’s first commercial radio station, the London Broadcasting Company (LBC), was to start broadcasting in eight weeks’ time. It’s an incredible thought these days, but as late as 1973 there was no legal radio alternative to the BBC. Radio Luxembourg had beamed in from across the Channel for years, and there were a number of illicit ‘pirate’ stations like Radio Caroline with seasick operatives broadcasting from outside territorial waters, but otherwise there was only the Beeb. A year earlier, Prime Minister Ted Heath finally changed the law, breaking the BBC’s monopoly and allowing the development of commercial radio. Now the race was on between LBC and Capital Radio as to who would be on air first. LBC was looking for a hundred or more journalists to run a twenty-four-hour news station.

      I suspect that I secured an interview purely on the basis that Peter Snow, by now established as a correspondent at ITN, was my cousin. They were also looking for someone who had some sort of handle on social issues. Rather riskily, LBC was going to pioneer late-night ‘phone-ins’. Experience in America had revealed that a lot of people with serious problems phoned in, and any responsible programme would have to have someone available to deal with them. In the event I seemed to fit the bill, and was hired for a salary of £2650, double what I had been earning at New Horizon. Better still, I was veering towards a career in journalism. Maybe this would prove to be the route back to Uganda.

      Two days before we went on air, the station had failed to appoint any newsreaders. Given that there was to be a news bulletin every half-hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, this was a bit of an omission. The managers had a problem. Very few people from the BBC had applied to work at LBC. Most BBC staff seemed to think that our commercial venture would be short-lived, and they preferred the safety of where they were. Hence a good number of Canadian and Australian voices had been hired, but very few Brits. The existing employees were all summoned for voice trials, and somehow I got the job. The welfare back-up for the phone-ins was abandoned, and I was scheduled to make my first broadcast on the first day of transmission.

      Six a.m. on 8 October 1973 was an electric moment. The station hit the air running. At 10 a.m., with embarrassingly upper-class vowels, I delivered the news. ‘Israeli tanks are heading for the Golan Heights …’ We had come on air at a real instant of history, amid the Yom Kippur war, the last Middle East war in which it was possible to imagine that Israel’s very existence was at stake.

      The whole style of LBC was fresh, the journalism was keen, and we were constantly running rings round staid old Aunty. But it couldn’t last, and within a few months of opening the station ran out of money. Advertisers were cautious about whether commercial radio would ever catch on. People had to be sacked, and the management went for the most expensive first. I survived, but the new editor Marshall Stewart, who’d been poached after successfully reinvigorating the BBC’s Today programme, called me into his office. ‘You can go on reading the news until you drop,’ he said, ‘but if you want to make a difference in life, you’ve got to get out onto the road.’

      The road in 1974 was becoming increasingly cratered. The IRA had already started its bombing campaign on mainland Britain, and for what was almost my first reporting adventure I was sent to Northern Ireland. I arrived in Catholic West Belfast on 17 May 1974, during the Protestant workers’ strike that was to bring the attempt to allow Northern Ireland to govern itself to an end. I was stunned by what I saw. I had had absolutely no prior sense of the scale of the deprivation and discrimination suffered by the Catholic population. But the poverty proved undiscriminating: the squalor and sense of hopelessness on the Catholic Falls Road were matched on the working-class Protestant streets around the Shankill Road. I’d never seen so many Union flags. Those who wished to remain British had a sense of Queen and country that I couldn’t even begin to identify with. ‘Pig’ armoured cars careered around the streets, and groups of British squaddies patrolled with automatic rifles at the ready.

      As the strike ended on 29 May, I remember standing outside the Harland & Wolff shipyard watching the exclusively Protestant workforce returning to their jobs. Not only had they destroyed a courageous attempt to share governing power between the two religions, but they passed through the factory gates as if nothing in their lives would ever have to change to accommodate the 40 per cent of the population who were not of their faith and not of their workforce. I could not believe that my own country had sustained and encouraged such a grossly unjust state of affairs.

      I had always used a bicycle in London, and now my reporting life began to depend upon one. There were no mobile phones in those days, but we had clunky Motorola radios, which within five miles of the office could transmit a just-about viable signal. So when on 17 June 1974 an IRA bomb went off in the confines of the Houses of Parliament, while other reporters were clogged in the back-up of traffic caused by the emergency I was able to hurtle through on my bike, sometimes broadcasting as I pedalled. I could dash under the police tapes that closed off roads, and be in mid-broadcast by the time the police caught up with me. This meant that throughout this year of mainland bombings LBC was almost invariably first on the secne, and developed a kind of ‘must-listen’ quality that radio in the UK had never enjoyed before. The bomb in question had gone off against the thousand-year-old wall of Westminster Hall – you can see the scorch marks to this day; the stonework remains a discoloured pink. Eleven people had been injured in the blast.

      The IRA clearly wasn’t going to go away. Resolving how to reach an accommodation with people the state regarded as terrorists was to be another feature of the unfolding story. The low point of the IRA’s wholesale killings of civilians came later that year, with the bombing of pubs in Guildford and Birmingham, in which twenty-six people were killed. The state responded by jailing the wrong people for both bombings.

      Among all the bombings, two general elections were held in 1974, one in February followed by another in October. Amazingly, I found myself co-anchoring the second. Only one year in journalism, and I was already interviewing politicians from both front benches. It was an intense and ‘on the job’ introduction to journalism. Neither then nor at any time later did I ever receive a single day’s training. I swotted up on the constituencies, the names and faces of the politicians, and the swings needed to take each seat. Harold Wilson’s Labour Party scraped in in the first election, although they failed to win a majority of seats in the House of Commons until the second election, eight months later. There were suddenly people in government that I had worked with at New Horizon. David Ennals was Secretary of State for Health and Social Security: he and I had been trustees on the Campaign for the Single Homeless, a grouping that brought all the projects working with single homeless people under one umbrella and which survives to this day, renamed Homeless Link. My contacts were growing, and rather against my will I found myself creeping onto a lowly rung of the British Establishment.

      In between those two elections I was dispatched to northern Portugal. Revolution had taken hold, a revolution that was going to have a huge effect in Africa. One of the seeds of the ‘new world disorder’ was being sown before my very eyes. Yet at that moment I could see no downside. Liberation it was, and heady was it to be there. I arrived on the morning of 5 April, hours after the fifty-year dictatorship of Salazar and his successor Caetano had been overthrown. All planes to Lisbon were full, but there was one seat left on a flight to the northern Portuguese town of Porto, so by mid-afternoon I found myself in the northern town of Braga. An industrialised concrete place, it proved to be an excellent vantage point from which to observe this most noisy and joyous of revolutions. I had hoped to grab a sandwich and then go looking for the revolution, but revolution was all around me. The streets were heaving with people; women pushed carnations into the barrels of soldiers’ guns. At one moment there was an enormous explosion, and I said to my translator, ‘Here comes the killing spree.’

      ‘No,’ he said,

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