The gentleman of the press

Acceptance' is a word that plays heavily on the mind of John Simpson, the indefatigable BBC world affairs editor. His unconventional upbringing, which saw him choose to live with his bullying father over his mother at the age of seven, his regular attendance at church despite a disbelief in God ('I don't think many of the vicars and bishops ... really believe in God either. I go because I like the old church and the sense of peace it brings'), two marriages, parenting, getting old and countless experiences reporting the happenings of a complex, violent world - none of it seems to sit comfortably with him.

Anyone about to interview Simpson, however, must accept that compiling suitable questions is like conducting a duel against embarrassment. Just what do you ask one of the world's most recognised and authoritative roving reporters, who's been there, seen that and covered it all - once infamously dressed in a woman's burqa - and has the war wound and awards to prove it?

One way around the conundrum is to stick the South China Morning Post under his nose and ask him to 'discuss'. The globe-trotting, news-gathering machine has covered a wide range of topics during his long career as a foreign correspondent. Indeed, he briefly wrote a foreign-affairs column for the Post in the early 1990s, 'but it wasn't very popular', he says.

He travels with a walking stick these days because of the war wound - he's covered 37 conflicts and, as well as rupturing knee tendons, he has a piece of American shrapnel in his posterior, which, to the consternation of his bosses, he nicknamed George W. Bush; it was 'a pain in the arse' - and there's a slight limp as he walks over to receive his newspaper-bearing interviewer at the BBC offices in Wan Chai.

Approaching with a welcoming smile and eyes rimmed red from jet lag is a large - more than 180cm tall - barrel-chested, stocky, white-haired man with soft features who looks like an archetypal 'English gent on his hols', dressed as he is in blue-and-white-striped boating blazer, yellow cotton summer shirt, white chinos and brown, polished Oxford brogues.

The delivery is unmistakable. Low in tone, deliberate, amiable, confident and ever so gracious; small wonder he charms despots and desperados into candid exposes on camera. To a trained ear, the lilt might smack of the dusty rooms of Cambridge University, where Simpson read English literature. He has British public-school airs and graces that are almost, but not quite, fustian - more thespian perhaps.

'Hello. John Simpson. Lovely to meet you,' he says, sweeping a large arm towards a waiting chair. He's in Hong Kong for six days, he says, 'to meet people, have a look around, have a new suit made, eat dim sum, do some PR for the BBC.'