Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a journalist after After what he's termed a serene upbringing in Suffolk, he did national service but failed to make officer grade, an early indication he believes of his suitability for his later profession.

Cambridge and a double first led to the BBC and a distinguished career as a reporter in Northern

Ireland, Vietnam, America, the Gulf War and Bosnia where he was famously wounded. Four years ago he found himself

in the public eye for a very different reason as the white-suited MP who stood

against sleighs and won. He promised he'd give up the seat after one term and this he's done.

63 this summer, having failed to win a different seat in the general election, he's technically unemployed, but his strong sense of justice,

stirred into anger by his experiences in the Balkans,

is still at large after his time in the Commons.

I have, he says simply, strong feelings about things. He is Martin Bell. Martin how

strong are your feelings about being unemployed? I'm enjoying being

unemployed it's never happened to me before I thought I might

get kind of antsy and not happy with it but I cannot remember ever having been

happier in my entire life than I am at the moment you did talk talk, you have talked, you've written in fact,

about being close to tears in what you call the soft dawn of June the 8th when you didn't

win Brentwood and Ongar. You realized the adventure was over. What tears were they? Were they

tears of loss, of nostalgia, of humiliation? Not really that. I felt a sense of hurt on behalf of the

people who had worked with me and for me. of the

sense of hurt on behalf of the people who had worked with me and for me. And it was the young people who came on board.

It was so inspiring and I felt that by losing, although narrowly,

I'd let them down.

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