Anne Leslie
Reporter, Daily Mail
Perhaps the most versatile
journalist ever, Leslie has reported – with attitude – on anything
from pre-teen beauty contests to genocide. She was present at almost all
the late twentieth century’s major events, and has filed from more than
70 countries.
Most of Leslie’s stories were not plump fruit hanging from official
trees waiting to be picked by anyone who could read a handout (never,
probably, has a reporter written so much and used the word ‘spokesman’
so less). They had to be mined, sometimes under cover, sometimes by
presenting herself as the world’s least likely-looking foreign
correspondent, or by assuming her boom-voiced daughter of the Raj persona.
Her resourcefulness enabled her wangle hr way onto Death Row, find and
interview Castro’s illegitimate daughter, get to the North Korean border
and illicitly talk to victims of that terrible famine, confront one of
Russia’s most feared ‘businessman’ about a contract killing; and, in
Tehran, disguise herself in a burka to meet dissidents at night. This, as
with her walk alone into Jerusalem’s sniper-filled alleys, was after
three serious operations which left her needing to take medication for the
rest of her life.
And, in the stories she filed, always the economical, waspish, pen –
whether it was something as light as the shenanigans of TV evangelists Jim
and Tammy Bakker:
'If you pray for a camper,’ Jim roguishly urged his flock, ‘be sure to
tell God what colour!’ He made God sound like a celestial mail order
magnate – but instead of sending your savings or your welfare cheques to
heaven, you mailed them to Jim and Tammy Bakker.”
Or as dark as Haiti in 1994:
“Night after gun-punctured night, I can lie in my bed in the ghostly
Oloffson…and listen, as Graham Greene once listened, to the distant
staccato sounds of the poor killing the poor in the interests of the
rich.”
