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Evo, Didier, Tony, Lucy and Martin - memories of 2006

• Paul Mason
• 31 Dec 06, 10:13 AM

I'll end 2006 with memories of some the extraordinary people I've met this year (plus a couple who I did not meet but made an impression on me):

1) Evo Morales. I got to interview the new president of Bolivia during my trip there in March - it was touch and go because his press operation is not very attuned to outlets by the 成人论坛 but one night, after an attack of Boliivan lurgy, my producer dragged me out of bed to go and see a lecture by thevice president, on the pretext that if we met him,we might secure an audience with the main man. In the end, the vp did not show, disappointing an entire hall full of Catholic students, and my heavily perspiring and dizzy self. As we packed our cameras up our fixer took a mobile phone call. "It's on for tomorrow, you have your interview with Evo," she said nonchalantly: "We need to be at the palace by 5.30". Brilliant I said - a whole day to prepare for it. "No," she said, "They mean 5.30am"....

...At the apponted time Evo turned up but we were not ready; the presidential palace really did feel like something out of a movie about revolutions - all the panoply of state was there: red-coated guards, portraits of Simon Bolivar, echoing marble and rococo chairs. But Evo is there in his leather bomber jacket looking slightly bemused and asking me about Manchester United.

2) Didier Drogba: Newsnight, for some reason, segued effortlessly into covering the World Cup. I wrote a blog here that touched a nerve about Sven and even got responses from within the football glitterati. Its encouraged me to pontificate wildly about football so here is some more. Drogba is, I think, the world's greatest footballer. If he was white and English, British football would have hailed him as the greatest centre forward ever. I am thinking not only of his play for Cote dIvoire in the WC, but for Chelsea - a team I loathe, like all Man U fans. Yes, I know he is a divemeister general, but that is his tragic flaw: Bobby Charlton had bad hair, Joe Jordan used to nut people etc...you have to have a tragic flaw to be a great striker.

3) Tony Blair: In September I covered the government's near meltdown, as Gordon Brown's supporters demanded that the PM signal he would not, as previously signalled, cling on to office beyond mid-2007. "Lets do the event at a school," someone must have said to Tony Blair, "the head supports us and they are model pupils". Maybe they did at some point consider that about a third of pupils at Quentin Kynaston are Arab or Muslim... Anyway when I got there, with the rest of the press pack, there were kids streaming out of the school bearing home-made placards protesting at Blair's stance on Lebanon and the whole thing turned into a PR fiasco. When Blair made his statement, behind closed doors to a selected TV crew, Spectator editor Matthew D'Ancona told me "That was like a man resigning from the Labour Party". When Blair left the school there was stony silence; fearing there would be a clamour of shouted questions I shouted mine at the PM quick, but strangely nobody else decided to shout questions at him, so mine fell on the silent scene of limos and security men. The whole thing was surreal, as reflected in a lot of the sketch columns the next day. It was a reminder that, as I think Trotsky once said, when history turns against you, you start making mistakes - and he should know.

4) Lucy Ndilai is a Masai woman, a teacher, who you'll see on my Newsnight film about mobile phones in Africa, on 9 Jan 2007. We'd gone to Kenya to chronicle how mobile phones are rapidly and unpredictably changing people's lives. I'd met slum-dwellers, blinging rappers and loads of small business people who stood up what I said, but my journey to the bottom of the Great Rift Valley was supposed to show what it's like when your'e off the network. But when we got there, and I jumped out of the SUV to ask if anybody had a mobile, Lucy produced hers and proceeded to regale me with stories about how fundamentally the informaton revolution is changing the life of this venerable African nomad tribe. Are there any down-sides? I asked. She thought for a moment and said: "The husbands have learned to scroll through their wives' incoming calls list and they ask who was this? who was that? and there have been quarrels". Welcome to the 21st century, I thought.

5) Martin Adler: I wrote a short obituary here for Martin on the day he was shot dead in Mogadishu. This extraordiary broadcaster - he was not a "cameraman" any more than George Orwell was a "typewriterman" - was a massive loss to our profession, because he - along with a few others - kept to the faith that simply going to the worst places in the world and shooting footage and turning the camera's unflinching gaze onto the unpalatable truth is the essence of journalism. I got to hear about his death in realtime, over the "wires" that drop onto my desktop at the 成人论坛. When I saw the tagline "Advisory - Martin Adler" my stomach churned. It was a reminder that every one of the violent deaths that pop up on the wires, second after second it seems these days, has ten, twenty, maybe fifty people on the other end of it feeling that stomach churning moment.

Happy New Year to all readers of the Idle Scrawl. I'll be back, as will Newsnight, on 2 January.