Adventures in Correspondentland by Nick Bryant Read Free Book Online

record attendances. Helplines run by groups such as The Samaritans reported much heavier than usual call-loads.
    Though Australians could normally be relied upon to bring a sense of proportion on such occasions, the country’s finest wordsmith, Clive James, came close to completely losing it. ‘No,’ he shrieked at the start of every one of his 24 paragraphs in a eulogy penned for The New Yorker .
    Neither could we rely on members of the Scotland football team, not normally the most tender-hearted of men, who threatened to strike unless their Saturday-afternoon World Cupqualifier with Belarus was moved to the Sunday to avoid a clash with Diana’s funeral.
    Even the Daily Telegraph , whose reporters were usually recruited because they represented the quintessence of old-style Britishness, had the wobbles. Dispatched to provide a colour piece on the crowds of mourners thronging The Mall, Tom Utley, a Telegraph traditionalist, reported instead from within himself. ‘Quite a few people, and I must include myself, thought her pretty awful at times – and many have been amazed, as I have, to discover how terribly we miss her now.’
    As journalists pondered what had happened to their country, the country could just as reasonably have asked what had happened to its journalists. Nobody wanted to be out of sync with the emotional zeitgeist, which amplified things even more. It took Boris Johnson, then one of its scribes, to resume normal Telegraph service, by accusing Britain of ‘undergoing a Latin American carnival of grief’.
    As with the assassination of Rabin, the first, patchy reports came through late on a Saturday night, and even though I was now sufficiently senior to have been issued with my very own bleeper, I was at a wedding in Dorset and did not at that point of the evening possess the necessary sobriety to make full use of it.
    Oddly, I happened to be surrounded by Parisians, many of whom were catching a flight back to the French capital early the next morning. But by the time I responded to the bleep, the news was that the car crash was nowhere near as bad as first feared and there was now no need to make a dash over the Channel.
    In the scramble for information, CNN had put to air an interview with an eyewitness, an American in Paris, no less, whosaid he had been driving in the opposite direction along the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris when the Mercedes had ploughed into the concrete pylon. For ten minutes, he provided what must have been riveting testimony, then ended his account with the words ‘Baba Booey’. The BBC, when it started replaying this account, simply edited out the mystifying pay-off. Unknown to any of the production team in London, Baba Booey was the nickname of a producer working for Howard Stern, the American shock jock, who encouraged listeners to play hoaxes at moments of breaking news. Everything he had said was complete fiction, the cruellest one at that.
    With the hoaxer finally rumbled, the tone of the coverage changed in an instant. Our Paris correspondent was picking up dark rumblings from his local contacts. Even bleaker news came from the Philippines, where the British foreign secretary Robin Cook was on tour. He told the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent that Diana had been killed, but he placed the interview under strict embargo so the news would come first from the French Government.
    For years, the BBC had been planning for the death of the queen mother, with regular royal-death rehearsals and a thumping great compendium of guidelines that editors were expected to memorise. Now, though, it was overtaken by a much larger and wholly unexpected drama, which the normal set of rules found hard to fully accommodate. Under their strict letter, the BBC could not report the death of a member of the royal family without the news first having been officially confirmed by Buckingham Palace, whose on-duty press officer that weekend had left the