War Reporting for Cowards

3 THE LUNCH TUTORIAL

The lounge of the Red Lion was warm and dank, and the thick, blue-tinted air carried a strong odor of tobacco and salt-and-vinegar chips. It had just gone twelve noon and, as usual, we were drinking heavily. An aging waitress with a poor memory of both the menu and our orders occasionally clonked an unwanted pork pie or cold lasagna between the sodden beer mats. The date was early June 1997—nearly six years before The Times would send me to the Middle East.

“This can’t possibly live up to expectations,” I declared to no one in particular.

“Right,” said Jamie.

“Why not wait and see?” offered Georgina.

Me again: “Where is he anyway?”

There was a contemplative silence. Glasses clinked. Then Chris said: “He’s on deadline, probably. A busy man.”

“He’s more than busy,” snorted Jamie. “He’s a celebrity.”

All of us around the table were enrolled at City University’s postgraduate journalism school, a kind of Fame Academy for aspiring reporters. In fact, City regarded its only serious rival as Columbia in New York. Whether or not this was bullshit was beside the point: City was a brutal place to study, partly because of the matriarch called Linda Christmas who presided over the course (her second name was a gift to young writers with a flair for cruel puns), and partly because of the ferocious rivalry between the students, a fact we tried to hide with forced camaraderie. Between classes we would put on our fake smiles and discuss how much we loved our classmates. The competitiveness was unavoidable: All thirty of us wanted one of the handful of junior positions that came up every year on national newspapers.

The crowd at the Red Lion, the nearest drinking establishment to City’s redbrick entrance on St. John’s Street in North London, also had something else in common: We had all opted to take City’s financial reporting course work, which, in theory, meant we wanted to write about stock prices and corporate takeovers. That, of course, was a joke. No one still in their twenties, and broke, goes into journalism to write about money—a subject in which they have zero practical experience. Journalism students don’t get excited about GDP fluctuations or the price-to-earnings ratios of widget makers. No, they want to bring down the prime minister, meet Robert De Niro, or expose human rights violations in Guantánamo Bay. Under the Christmas regime, however, everyone had to specialize. Which was why we were in the Red Lion, waiting for Robert Cole, our finance tutor.

As far as I was aware, no one, apart from me, had taken financial reporting as a first choice. On the geek-o-meter, it was the equivalent of taking a night class in Klingon. Most of our group had been forced into the financial reporting by early indecisiveness and then a shortage of space in other, cooler courses, such as crime, fashion, or, most glamorous of all, foreign reporting. Unlike the other students, I had no interest in the latter whatsoever. I couldn’t speak a foreign language and I hated any kind of physical discomfort. I had flown only once before, on a high school skiing trip to Switzerland, and wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. The idea of covering a famine in the Sudan or a civil war in a failed Balkan state was enough to bring me into a hot, prickly sweat. I had never even been camping before—unless I counted one trip to a caravan park in France, or a couple of Cub Scout outings to youth hostels. There were many reasons for my lack of adventurousness, most of them physical: I had a sensitive stomach, for a start, and my forehead turned crimson if exposed to sun. It had been hard enough to endure my family’s annual vacation to France.

I was easily the least cool student at City. Part of the reason was my age—at twenty-one, I was one of the youngest—and another part was the fact that I had never lived in London before. I also looked a mess. My ginger hair, long and greasy when I was an undergraduate, had been cut into a failed attempt at a floppy Hugh Grant–style, and I sported a scruffy ginger beard, an incongruous throwback to the days when I wanted to look like Kurt Cobain. My eyesight, meanwhile, had recently deteriorated to the point at which I had to wear my glasses all the time. My specs were a nasty eighties design, with circular gold rims. I couldn’t yet afford to buy a new designer pair or, even better, switch to contact lenses. My clothes, like my haircut and beard, also confirmed that I was lost in a fashion wilderness somewhere between university and adulthood. I wore steel-capped boots with blue Levi’s and a patterned, designer-label work shirt, tucked in instead of out: an aspirational gesture toward grown-up respectability. My unfortunate concession to the dance music–inspired fashion of the time was a purple jacket, made from a rubbery waterproof material. The ensemble looked ridiculous. Needless to say I was single, and doomed to remain so for a long time.

But even for me, the finance specialty was a compromise. I took it largely because I had a good contact on The Times’s business desk—a result of me winning a student essay writing competition, cosponsored by The Times, on the oxymoronic subject of business ethics. I won the contest almost out of default, because only a handful of other students had bothered entering. I picked up the three-thousand-pound prize from Lindsay Cook, The Times’s petite and fashionable business editor, at a surreal ceremony in London. My plan was to use the cash to pay for the City course, then beg Cook for a job on The Times’s business desk. If she gave me one, I thought, I could later decamp to a more interesting section of the paper.

It was, of course, a catastrophically successful plan.

The finance geeks, being the lepers of the City journalism course, stuck together. There was Jamie, a tall, curly-haired five-a-side footballer who looked like a cross between a Greek god and Jesus Christ; Chris, a scholarly and urbane wit with an intimidating arsenal of degrees from Oxford University; and Georgina, an English rose whom everyone fancied. The honorary member of the group was Glen, an acerbic public schoolboy from Sussex who had already managed to get himself into The Times’s graduate trainee program, allowing him to sit out the competitive shuffle of the other students. I admired Glen because he had a better Hugh Grant hairdo than mine, and also because of his devotion to a grungy Islington nightclub called The Garage, which he patronized every Friday and Saturday night without fail. Glen and I became good friends, sharing many a Garage night together and later a squalid apartment in Clapham.

There were upsides to being a finance geek. One of them was avoiding the dreaded “off-diary” classes given by Linda Christmas. The purpose of the classes was to teach students what hardworking reporters did when there were no scheduled press conferences taking place. In reality, of course, reporters get drunk and smoke cigarettes when there’s nothing to do. But Christmas would give each student a grid reference on a map of London, then instruct us to go to our location and find two “exclusive” stories. “Get out there and talk to people,” was her only advice on how to complete the task. “This is real journalism, folks. This is what you should be doing instead of rewriting press releases.” The grid reference always just happened to be in one of the most violent, piss-reeking slums of the East End. We had to get the stories, write them, and file them—all by 4:00 P.M. the same day. Some students gave up before even getting on the subway, knowing they would have to endure a “private talk” with Christmas—who always power-dressed in monochrome pantsuits—and also probably a public humiliation, in class the next morning. There were, however, more serious consequences to displeasing Christmas: She regularly had lunch with senior newspaper editors, who would quietly inquire about the performance of individual students.

To me, the jargon and statistics of finance reporting were infinitely preferable to Christmas’s “real” journalism. It might not have been a particularly glamorous form of reporting, but it seemed civilized and dignified—like a proper job. There was no way, I concluded, that a business reporter would end up being dispatched to anything more traumatic than a bankruptcy hearing.

“He’s here! The man himself!”

Jamie stood up and raised his pint glass as Robert Cole made his entrance. A low cheer went up from the table. Cole was in his usual outfit: wool suit, trench coat, and hat, the latter resembling a cross between a farmer’s flat cap and a French beret. He carried a leather briefcase. All this made him look like a 1930s Fleet Street caricature, and about a decade older than his real age, which was somewhere in the mid-thirties. The caricature was completed by the fact that Cole smoked Silk Cuts, twirled an umbrella, and affected an ironic Old Etonian accent, calling people “old boy” and “dear chap.” In fact, Cole had grown up in Surrey, and, like me, had gone to Hull University, a redbrick institution favored by socialist-worker types.

“Right-o chaps,” he said, removing his coat and sitting down. “Time to get this over with. Sorry I’m late: deadlines.”

I sucked on my pint of warm Stella Artois and felt my forehead become flushed with alcohol. I was a terrible boozer: a one-pint wonder. But it was important that I fight off the drunkenness. Today’s lunch, after all, was business, not pleasure. It was the culmination of nine months of tutorials, assignments, and disappointing grades, scrawled in red ballpoint across inkjet manuscripts.

Cole, a portly and sometimes moody fellow with a bald pate and round bookish glasses, was a senior financial editor of London’s Evening Standard. He was one of City’s “visiting” tutors, which meant he was a professional journalist who took one day off a week to teach a specialty class. Cole was also our hero. We read his columns in the Standard with awe. Cole’s technique was to tackle tedious money matters using the matey first-person persona of a pub raconteur. He used man-of-the-people metaphors and a slap of irreverence to make complex, technical arguments. Cole’s populist writing style had even produced a book, albeit one with the rather off-putting title of Getting Started in Unit and Investment Trusts. To us, Cole was a genius. He was also a celebrity. And we all desperately wanted his attention.

Like many journalists, Cole was an odd mixture of self-confidence and insecurity. Both traits, I later learned, are necessary in a good writer. Without the former, you would never believe your thoughts worthy of publication; without the latter, your thoughts would never be worthy of publication. Cole was also a Catholic who saw it as his duty to stand up for the private investor—the “little man.” I even suspected that he was a bit of a class warrior, what with his ironic “old chaps” and the fact he once referred to investment bankers as “those marble-halled bastards.”

On the first day of classes, Cole had blustered into our Victorianera lecture hall and scratched the names of some of his former students onto the blackboard. All of them were writers on national newspapers. Having expected finance reporting to be a career junkyard, our mood improved. Cole then told us that if we turned up for his weekly lectures and handed in our assignments on time, our names could also one day appear on the blackboard. And then came the best part: Cole said he always gave his favorite students a special end-of-term tutorial—which, to mark the occasion of our imminent graduation, would be held in the Red Lion.

No one skipped Cole’s lectures. The end-of-term tutorial, meanwhile, became our own private folklore. Word came back from other graduates of Cole’s class that it involved an all-day boozing session. Others said it held the secret to getting a job at a major paper. The subject, however, remained a mystery. We would spend entire shorthand classes speculating about its content.

The end-of-term tutorial, Cole promised us, would be a practical, hands-on “‘workshop,” unlike any of the other lectures he had given. It would be a guide on how to extract stories from secretive billionaires, arrogant bankers, and nerdish stock market analysts. The very thought of it made me shudder with excitement. If I became a journalist, would these business behemoths really want to meet me? And would they really give me “exclusive” stories? I had yet to learn that, if used correctly, a career in journalism can be a license to meet anyone, or do anything, if it takes your interest. In journalism, no expertise is required. In fact, I don’t think I truly understood that concept until I ended up in the Iraqi desert.

Eventually, the week before we were due to graduate, Cole came clean and told us what our final lesson would be. Clearly it would be a momentous occasion—the curtain call of The Robert Cole Show to which we had become so addicted during our time at City. “So, you ’orrible lot,” he announced one Friday at lunchtime in his best faux Dickensian sneer, “my effort to educate you is, thankfully, about to come to an end.” We listened in blank silence, notebooks and pens quivering with anticipation. “That means you’re ready for the final tutorial.”

Cole crushed a piece of chalk into the blackboard, then dragged it. After his loopy handiwork was complete, he used his umbrella to point to the white letters he had formed. He cleared his throat. “In this, your last lesson, the date and location of which you already know, you will learn the primary information-gathering technique of the successful business reporter,” he said. “After this, you will be able to go to your future newspaper employers with confidence—knowing that you can cajole and bully a story out of even the most hardened, miserable bastard of a business executive. Chaps, you’re finally ready. See you down the pub.”

With that, he picked up his briefcase and left.

We stared at the dusty letters Cole had just drawn on the blackboard. They spelled out the words, The Lunch Tutorial.

Cole raised his pint glass and ignited a Silk Cut. This was it—the moment we had been waiting for. “Let’s begin,” said Cole. We leaned in over the table, desperate to hear his wisdom over the din of a Kylie track.

The business lunch, Cole told us, was the key to financial journalism. The best tables at London’s best restaurants were our workstations. The waiters and sommeliers were our technicians, helping us work on our raw material—our billionaire dining companions—until we had extracted the precious stones of information within. We could spend as long as we wanted polishing those stones back in the office, but it was at the lunch table that we had to dig for them. “Never underestimate how much someone will tell you while stuffing a salmon blini into their face,” said Cole. “Especially after they’ve drained a bottle of 1990 Gevrey-Chambertin.”

I was nervous, however. Since the age of eighteen I had been suffering from panic attacks, the main symptom of which was a powerful tide of nausea. I spent one entire term at college making jackhammer convulsions into the philosophy department’s toilet bowl. What if that happened at lunch?

“Just follow these simple rules, chaps,” Cole told the table. “You sit down and make small talk. Discuss the weather, the traffic, the bloody route you took in the cab; whatever. Order the starter. Make more small talk. Talk about the news, the book you’re reading, anything you want. Move onto the serious stuff over the main course.” Cole extinguished his Silk Cut using an empty wineglass. Then a thought struck him: “Oh, and if you’re having lunch with anyone in public relations, always order the most expensive thing on the menu, because PRs always pay. For your guidance, anything lobster-related is generally at the top of the price list. Oh, and don’t ever order skate. Too many bones. Impossible to eat. I nearly choked to death on one of those fuckers once. And no one wants to give a choking man a story.”

And that was it: lesson over. Thus educated, I made an appointment with Lindsay Cook at The Times. She didn’t give me a job, of course. But she did the next best thing: She invited me in as an intern.

4 “YOU HAVEN’T GOT A BLOODY HOPE IN HERE…”

Before we move any further toward the blood and the horror (it won’t be long now), I should probably tell you what happened on my first day as an intern. My plan was to stride through the door to the business section as confidently as possible and proceed immediately to Cook’s office, in the hope that her familiar face would help calm me down. After tripping over the step, however, and launching myself into an undignified recovery dance in front of a row of grimacing subeditors, I noticed that the door to Cook’s office was shut. Damn.

When I looked again, I realized why the subeditors were looking so downcast. Behind the blinds of Cook’s office, I could see the flickering outline of the business editor, a tissue pressed to her face. With her other hand she was shakily transferring the contents of her desk into a brown cardboard box.

To this day I have no idea what happened. But Cook, my best Fleet Street contact and perhaps my only chance of getting a job on a national newspaper, was gone. As I trudged downstairs to the office vending machine, wondering whether or not to go home, I almost collided with Robert Miller, The Times’s banking correspondent. I didn’t know it at the time, but Miller, a dapper city gent with a street-brawler’s build and a rhinoceros-hide complexion, was one of Cook’s closest office allies. “Still want to be a journalist, son?” he sneered, brushing past me.

In fact, I did. Having blown my prize money on tuition fees and paid for more than a year’s worth of living expenses with the kind of high-interest debt that would make a South American central bank nervous, I had no Plan B. The only free accommodation available to me was four hundred miles north, in Wooler, but I didn’t much fancy a return to Sheepsville. I had wanted to be a journalist because it seemed like the closest thing to being a rock star without having to be either good-looking or talented. As a petulant, hormone-saturated teenager living in Wooler, the only thing that kept me sane was my family’s daily delivery of The Guardian. It was the only proof I had that there were other people in Britain who read the same books, watched the same films, and bought the same records that I did. I might not have managed to get an internship gig at The Guardian’s arts desk (a task I considered impossible), but I had come close with The Times—albeit via the Most Boring Section. It seemed too depressing to give up now, having come so near to career nirvana.

So I spent the rest of the day just hanging around. I didn’t have a desk, so I shuffled my feet by the newspaper rack; drank frothy, muddy tea from the vending machine; and sat quietly beside the shelves of index cards that served as a kind of pre-Internet database. I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to stay, or to go, assuming that if they wanted to get rid of me, they would tell me. Every hour or so I would go downstairs to see Glen, who was at that point working on the foreign desk and designing an elaborate graphic of an exploding volcano on Montserrat Island. With his Hugh Grant flop, brilliant white shirt, Greek island tan, and posh drawl, Glen was a Times natural. I, on the other hand, had suffered a catastrophic breakout of stress-acne, and my pale skin seemed to have become paler from shock. Anyone in the newsroom could have identified me as “the intern kid” from four hundred feet away. If Glen hadn’t been downstairs, I’m not sure I would have had the guts to stay all day.

Eventually, at 6:00 P.M., I left The Times’s office—then located in a windowless former rum warehouse inside the News International printing compound in Wapping—and began the lonely, miserable trek to the Tower Hill tube station. From there I made three connections until I ended up back at my tiny, disgusting apartment on Caledonian Road. The next day I turned up for another unwanted, unpaid shift. The day after that I did the same again.

Finally, on Thursday, I was busted.

“Jesus Christ, are you still here?”

Oh no. I dropped the newspaper in my hand and turned to face Martin Barrow, The Times’s deputy business editor. During my week as a ghost in Rupert Murdoch’s machine I had already learned all about Barrow. He was infamous on the business desk for his relentless sarcasm, delivered in a nasal sneer that could puncture the most inflated journalistic ego. He was, I would later learn, the opposite of the “other” Martin: Martin Fletcher, the foreign news editor. While Fletcher was a well-bred scholar, fond of debating government policy and fine-tuning his correspondents’ work to emphasize intellectual points, Barrow was a workaholic with no formal university education who enjoyed ridiculing the pretensions of his colleagues. One of the many ways he did this was by using tradesmen’s terms for what many considered the sensitive art of writing stories. “Could you bash me out five pars while I shovel some more copy through the system?” was a typical Barrow request.

Later, much later, I would ask Barrow whether he had many friends who were journalists. “Nah,” he said. “They’re all plumbers and cab-drivers.” If anyone else had said it, it might have sounded like inverted snobbery. But with Barrow, whose bullshit detector was one of the most powerful on Fleet Street, it seemed natural. If Barrow thought an article was shoddily written, he would say so, often directly to the author’s face. “Mucky—very mucky,” he would tut with a slight downward curl of his upper lip. “Do you want to have another go at it, or shall I clean it up?” In Barrow’s universe, there was nothing worse than mucky copy.

It was obvious that Barrow relished his job as The Cleaner: the journalistic equivalent of The Wolf character played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. His ability to “tidy up” copy was all the more impressive given that he was brought up in Peru and spoke Spanish as his first language. His appearance matched his role: With his Marine buzz cut and rectangular, steel-framed glasses, he had the slightly sinister look of an MI5 bureaucrat. During my week of invisibility, I noticed that Barrow spent his lunch hours taking five-mile runs around East London rather than eating lobster on the expense accounts of obsequious PRs. Barrow, clearly, had never been given the Lunch Tutorial. When he returned from his noontime exercise break, saddlebags of sweat visible through his gray T-shirt, Barrow seemed to snap and fizz with static from his high-voltage energy. He was always in good humor in the afternoon—the kind of good humor, at least, that a drill instructor might have after ordering you to do three hundred sit-ups. Perhaps Barrow was happy because he was pumped up with endorphins while everyone else was trying to sober up after their three-hour sessions in Coq D’Argent and Pont de la Tour. At 3:00 P.M., the foreheads of the business desk reporters, almost hidden behind their egg-shaped computer monitors, glistened with boozesweat.

Barrow, meanwhile, looked taut and tanned. Every so often his villain’s cackle would echo through the newsroom. When Barrow laughed, I thought, it didn’t seem like anyone was very happy about it.

As Barrow stood in front of me and laughed until the veins on his forehead started to tap dance, I definitely knew there was nothing for me to be happy about. “What’s your name again, son?” he asked eventually.

“Ugh, A-Ayres,” I told him, with a worrying stammer.

“Okay—Urquerz…? Follow me.”

Barrow sprint-marched me back toward his desk, his long, stiff arms swinging like a sergeant major’s. He sat down and began thumping and slapping his way through a pile of faxes. Finally he held up a press release with an unfamiliar logo at the top that read Pressac. The fax didn’t seem to have any words on it at all; only numbers, pound signs, and what looked like computer code.

“Here you go… erm, mate,” said Barrow. “Write this up as a nib. Hundred words? Shout when you’re done.”

With no further explanation, Barrow went back to his copy-cleaning, his long, thin fingers attacking the computer keyboard with urgency, as though he were programming the flight trajectory of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Before I could ask a question, a pretty, motherly secretary seized me by the arm and led me toward an unmanned computer terminal that looked as though it predated the mircowave oven. She sat me down, switched on the green LED screen, and patted me on the shoulder. “Here you go, love,” she said in a Northern accent as thick as gravy. “You’ve got to get used to Martin, he’s very busy, y’know?”

I felt relief wash over me like warm Mediterranean seawater. This secretary was the first person I had met at The Times who didn’t have a terrifyingly posh accent. I almost wanted to call my mother and tell her that everything was okay. I gripped my press release tightly and began to fantasize about the Pulitzer Prize I would win for the thrilling, witty, and brilliantly researched piece of broadsheet journalism I was about to produce. It would surely be the best nib ever published by The Times! Then a thought struck me. I turned and called out to the retreating seam of the secretary’s blazer. “Excuse me, erm, miss, but what’s a ‘nib’?”

She stopped dead, and I thought I could hear her heels grind into the carpet as she turned. Her face looked very different now.

“If you don’t know that, you haven’t got a bloody hope in here, have ya?” she said. “Nib means news in brief. Duh!” She rolled her eyes, turned 180 degrees, and stalked back toward the news desk.

“You’ll never guess what!” I heard her screech as she sat down. “The bloody intern kid just asked me what a nib was!” Again, Barrow’s cackle echoed.

This is the nib I filed to Barrow:

PRESSAC, the electronics group, is set to make another major move forward in the automotive industry with the purchase of Italamec, the Italian mechanical and electronic components manufacturer, for £20.7 million. The acquisition will be funded through a one-for-three rights issue of up to 12.5m new ordinary shares, priced at 180p each. Existing shares rose ½ p to 215 p yesterday.

The nib had taken me the best part of three hours to write, and I didn’t have a clue what it meant. I had, however, managed to translate some of the computer code into English using a red manual called How to Read the Financial Pages. Robert Cole had ordered all his students to buy the book during his first class at City. I remembered the class well because it was then that Cole also ordered me to shave off my beard before setting foot in any Fleet Street newsroom. “Is anyone else going to tell him, or shall I?” asked Cole, as Jamie, Chris, and Georgina snickered. “Ayres, get that bum-fluff off your face, old chap,” said Cole. “No one trusts a man with a beard. Just look at Richard Branson. And he’s got a billion pounds. You don’t have diddly squat, dear boy.” Cole mimed a shaving action. “Time to get rid of it,” he said.

Cole’s advice—on both the book and the facial hair—appeared to have worked. But wasn’t a job on the business desk supposed to be more glamorous than this? Why hadn’t I had lunch with a billionaire yet?

“Cheers for that,” said Barrow as I headed toward the door at 6:00 P.M. “That was a pretty clean nib. Not bad at all. See you tomorrow?” There was no mention of pay, or any kind of job offer, but at least I had survived the week. In fact, I was already well on my way to becoming a war correspondent.