John Simpson: ‘My first home cost £10,500. I'm sure I overpaid'

Times

25-07-2025

John Simpson joined the BBC in 1966 and has reported from more than a hundred countries, covering war zones in Baghdad, Kabul and Libya and the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was left deaf in one ear after coming under friendly fire in northern Iraq — an attack that killed a member of his crew. Now 80, he is still the BBC's world affairs editor and presents Unspun World with John Simpson on BBC2. He has won an Emmy and three Baftas, and was made a CBE in the Gulf War honours list for his reporting. He has two daughters from his first marriage and now lives with his South African wife, Dee, their son, Rafe, and their Irish terrier, Cody, in Oxford.
Nothing, because I've given up carrying cash almost altogether, which poses a problem when I want to buy a Big Issue from a couple of sellers I like and admire. Yes, I can pay with a debit card but what they really want is a nice crisp fiver or tenner. In the days when I was criss-crossing the world as a foreign correspondent, though, cash was king. I'd often fly out of Heathrow with a great wad of notes, usually dollars, stuffed into a money-belt so as to grease whoever's palms needed greasing.
I once flew out to Uruguay during the Falklands War, with the intention of entering Argentina, with $150,000 on me. I remember looking down on the area of London where I lived, and thinking: 'I've got more money on me than my house is worth.' As late as the 1990s, I would have to pay $5,000 to $6,000 in cash to a local TV station in some places to send my pieces to London.
I prefer using a debit card because I just hate the idea of getting into debt without my knowing it; I'd rather pay for something with money I have in the bank. I also dislike the idea of being charged 14 per cent or 20 per cent interest, or whatever the rate is, if I forget to pay off my credit card. Occasionally, I have to use a credit card when I travel, though.
I'm more of a spender. I like to lead a pleasant, enjoyable life so I spend whatever I can afford to spend. It's a matter of living in the present. My life has shown me that you never know where you're going to be next Wednesday, so you might as well live a good life while you can. My last big expense? Dining out at Rules in London with my wife — and son — to celebrate our 29th wedding anniversary, which must have cost a few hundred pounds. I'm actually not that good with money. Dee, who was my TV producer, is much better at handling that side of things. Producers are like parent figures, leading us foreign correspondents by the hand.
The first property I bought was a terraced cottage in Greenwich, which I paid £10,500 for in 1970 — property prices were just starting to go up, but I was too embarrassed to tell people I'd paid the extra £500 because I thought they'd think I'd been conned. Within a couple of years, though, it had zoomed up in value. I went on to live all around the world and often spent weeks at a time living out of a suitcase while on assignment. Dee and I now have a delightful mews house in central Oxford, something rather special and unusual. Rafe comes back often from university and Cody thinks of his room as his kingdom. We're very happy here.
I had a comfortable enough upbringing, financially at least. I was an only child. My mother, Joyce, left my father, Roy, when I was about seven. I can't say I blame her because he was a difficult man to live with. Nonetheless, after they split up, I opted to live with my dad — a property developer and genealogist who only lived to 65 (my mum lived a fair bit longer) — at his big house on the Suffolk coast which he bought for £3,000 in the 1950s and sold for £6,000 in 1966. It's now worth millions.
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Enough to dine out at a good restaurant with my family and buy nice things that catch my eye.
Working as a sub-editor in the BBC radio newsroom when I was 22. I was so excited to learn that I was going to be getting paid £1,025 a year that I danced round my flat with my wife at the time. However, I absolutely loathed the job — I felt like I was in a prisoner of war camp and wanted to dig my way out. I managed to do that after 18 months, when I became a radio producer, which was much more fun. I've seen many 'crises for the BBC' come and go over the years. Some do certainly mean we should examine ourselves more carefully, but an awful lot are played up by newspapers which are in direct commercial competition with it.
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When I became the BBC's Europe correspondent, based in Brussels, in 1975. By then I was on a pretty good salary, though the price of everything in Belgium was staggeringly high. Things seem to have gone full circle, though, and I think living in the UK may now be more expensive.
Often. I got married in my last year as an English literature student at Cambridge and my then wife and I lived on £10 a week, after paying the rent. Every now and then, though, I'd have to call my dad and ask: 'Could you see your way to lending me a fiver?' I've since learnt that Samuel Pepys lived on £5 a week in the 1660s. I've no idea the minimum amount a week you'd need to get by now, but it ain't ten pounds.
Writing my book A Mad World, My Masters, which came out in 2000. It was about my life as a foreign correspondent but it spent six months on the Sunday Times bestseller list, going on to sell about a million copies. Mind you, I never got one big, fat cheque — it was more a case of the money arriving in dribs and drabs.
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Not really.
I'm not sure, to be honest, though I'm obviously old enough to get my state pension. But I don't have plans to retire anyway; I'd like to still be working at 99, like David Attenborough.
Becoming a foreign correspondent was the best thing I ever did, though it was really the BBC's decision rather than mine. It was something I'd wanted to do since I was a kid, and the foreign correspondent's life suited me. The highlights have included witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of South Africa's apartheid regime. But bad things happened too — I was taken prisoner, tortured and given a mock execution in Beirut in 1982.
My first car, a bright yellow MG Midget, which cost about £2,500, was great fun to drive. But I'm 6ft 2in tall, so how I fitted into it I just don't know. When I last tried getting into a Midget a couple of years ago, I seemed to be sticking out of it in all sorts of extraordinary ways.
I bought a magnificent vase from a reputable dealer in Beijing for a few hundred bucks some years ago. It was sold to me as a northern Song dynasty vase from the 12th century, and had pride of place in our house until I had it dated by experts. Guess what? It was a fake. I had always doubted whether it was genuine, but the dealer was so amusing I parted with the cash and I did like the look of the vase. 'You got took,' my son, Rafe, joked.
I spend too much money on books but owning a first edition of Dickens's David Copperfield, which I picked up for about £500, has given me a huge amount of pleasure. I spend a fair bit on travelling too.
Not extravagant as much as exotic, perhaps: a wonderful Tilley hat that I bought in South Africa for the equivalent of about £70, which I wore everywhere in the tropics. However, it was on the back seat of a car that got blown up by an American bomb in Iraq in 2003. A colleague rescued the hat, which had been shredded, and I sent it back to Tilley who mended it for me. You can still see the patches where it was shredded by shrapnel.
When you get to my age your priority is to just keep your head above water, financially and otherwise.
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I'm not into buying big houses, I'd rather just go on lots of nice holidays until the money ran out. I'd also continue donating money to homelessness charities and to Free the Wild, which rescues animals being kept in horrible conditions in zoos and circuses.
Never take it for granted.John Simpson's Leaders & Lunatics tour starts on September 11 until November 16; fane.co.uk