Martin Bell

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For the British poet of the same name, please see Martin Bell (poet).

For the British skier of the same name, please see Martin Bell (skier).

Martin Bell's book Through the Gates of Fire, 2003.

Martin Bell, OBE, (born 31 August 1938) is a British UNICEF Ambassador, a former broadcast war reporter and former independent politician.

He is the son of author-farmer Adrian Bell, and the uncle of weblogger-banker Oliver Kamm, who served as his political adviser during his term as an Member of Parliament (MP). His sister is the translator Anthea Bell.

Bell was educated at The Leys School in Cambridge and Cambridge University. He failed to obtain a commission during his two-year national service and served out his time as an acting corporal.

1 BBC correspondent
2 Independent politician
3 Post "retirement"
4 See also
5 References

[edit] BBC correspondent

Martin Bell joined the BBC as a reporter in Norwich in 1962 as a twenty-four year-old, following his graduation from King's College, Cambridge with a first-class honours degree.

He moved to London three years later, beginning a distinguished career as a foreign affairs correspondent with his first assignment in Ghana. Over the next thirty years, he covered eleven conflicts and reported from eighty countries, making his name with reports from wars and conflicts in Vietnam, Middle East, Nigeria, Angola and Rwanda, and in Northern Ireland (the "Troubles").

He won the Royal Television Society's Reporter of the Year award in 1977 and 1993, and was appointed to an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1992. While covering the war in Bosnia he was seriously wounded by shrapnel while recording a report. He is often noted for wearing a white suit.

From his long experience, Bell came to believe that the tradition of neutral reporting of armed conflicts did a disservice to the viewers where it was clear that one side was committing atrocities, and wrote a book outlining his belief. He remained an official BBC correspondent, although from the mid-1990s he filed relatively few reports.

[edit] Independent politician

In 1997, twenty-four days before that year's British General Election, Martin Bell announced that he was leaving the BBC to stand as an independent candidate in the Tatton constituency in Cheshire. Tatton was one of the safest Conservative seats in the country, where the sitting Conservative Member of Parliament, Neil Hamilton, was embroiled in "sleaze" allegations. The Labour and Liberal Democrat parties withdrew their candidates in Bell's favour.

Martin Bell was elected an MP with a majority of 11,000 votes – overturning a Conservative majority of over 20,000 – and thus became the first successful independent parliamentary candidate since the Second World War.

He did not often speak in the House of Commons, and when he did, it was mostly on matters of British policy in the former Yugoslavia and the Third World. He was initially supportive of the incoming Labour government of Tony Blair though on some issues, such as backing Section 28, he aligned himself with the Conservatives. He was urged by large numbers of his Tatton constituents to stand again in the 2001 general election, but stuck by his promise that he would serve for one term only.

In 2001, Martin Bell was nonetheless persuaded to stand as an independent candidate against the Conservative MP Eric Pickles in the "safe" Essex constituency of Brentwood and Ongar, where there were accusations that the local Conservative Association had been infiltrated by a Pentecostal church. However, he was not successful in the 2001 election, and announced his retirement from politics, saying that "winning one and losing one is not a bad record for an amateur".

[edit] Post "retirement"

Bell made a brief return to television news in 2003 when he provided analysis of the Iraq invasion for ITN's Channel Five News. The short films he compiled from the daily video footage brought a unique historical and humanitarian perspective to the events that was starkly in contrast to the sensationalist coverage of much of the mainstream media.

Bell reversed his previous decision and stood for the European Parliament in the June 2004 elections, but was ultimately unsuccessful as an independent candidate in the UK's eastern region, winning only 6.2% of the vote (see European Parliament election, 2004 (UK)).

For the 2005 election he founded the Independents Network to promote independent candidates (its most prominent candidate being Reg Keys in prime minister Tony Blair's Sedgefield constituency).

Bell now acts as an ambassador for UNICEF and as a critic on the state of journalism today, although he describes himself as "too old" for both journalism and politics.

In April 2006, Scottish National Party MP Angus MacNeil asked the Metropolitan Police to investigate whether any law had been broken in the Cash for Peerages scandal. Bell wrote jointly with MacNeil to Prime Minister Tony Blair calling for all appointments to the House of Lords to be suspended.^[1]