Never one to be too bothered about image (or so she says), the first thing Kate Adie wants to do is borrow a comb. Although in most respects she looks thoroughly groomed — careful highlights, pink suede jacket and an expanse of suntanned cleavage — the lack of any means to tidy her hair before being photographed conveys the message that the fripperies of life do not concern her.
Instead she flips her fingers through her hair, crying “Fluff, fluff!”, much as she must have done in the deserts of Iraq during the first Gulf war, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan and everywhere else that conflicts occurred during her years as BBC war correspondent.
Soldiers used to say that the fighting hadn’t started until Kate Adie arrived. And she has earned her spurs; one ankle is held together by pins and she has a toe full of shrapnel.
In Tiananmen Square her arm was grazed by a bullet that killed the man next to her and she had to knee a policeman in the groin in the dash to get her video tape back to base. Loud, direct and sometimes imperious, she dominated the news with her clipped, upper-middle-class voice.
Now 57, having been left out of the BBC’s line-up for Gulf war two, she presents From Our Own Correspondent on Radio 4 and writes books. Although she was clearly angry at the time — she quit her job as a frontline reporter two days after the BBC’s Gulf team was announced — she is putting a graceful gloss on it. “I had a great run,” she says, “and I wanted to do other things.”
She has just finished a history of women in war, Corsets to Camouflage, to coincide with an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum filled with profiles of women rather like her. The determined, bossy Englishwoman who swapped crinolines for breeches and went off to do men’s work was alive and well long before feminism was invented.
Given her own reputation for coolness under fire, one would imagine Adie might approve of women in the front line. But she is highly sceptical. The drive to get women into battle is fuelled by an obsession with political correctness, she says, plus wishful thinking about the nature of war.
“There is a dearly held wish in America that war should become so technologically clinical that you don’t need war on the ground,” she says.
“The trouble is, nobody told the enemy. The politically correct argument says that you don’t need physical body weight, you don’t need to be able to strangle people or whatever, but things are not going like that if you look at the kinds of things that American soldiers are running into in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s pretty basic stuff.”
Women, in general, don’t have the same body strength as men, so in America the army has lowered the strength required so as to let women in. “It is having a severe impact on the American military and I wonder how long they can go on doing it,” says Adie. “The lowering of combat efficiency is inevitable. The argument that there’s something about fighting that’s special — that needs a sort of male bonding, a ‘band of brothers’ thing and women disrupt that — I’m not sure of. But women are meant to civilise an army. Well, that’s all right for its day-to-day interaction, not so good when you stick it on a battlefield. There’s nothing civilised about going out to kill people.”
The illusion that women are playing any real part in warfare is media-driven, she says: “Picture editors have always been obsessed with pictures of women with guns.” And the army isn’t above using women to get media coverage: “Take the rescue of Jessica Lynch. It showed an extraordinary degree of sexism. There were several people captured but they rescued the pretty blonde.”
That Adie was once herself a pretty blonde, which might have got her noticed in the newsroom, one dare not mention. The triumph of looks over ability in television news has become one of her hobbyhorses.
She always says she just got lucky, and to a certain extent she did. She happened to be the junior reporter on duty on a bank holiday Monday during the Iranian embassy siege when a body was pushed out of the front door and “things hotted up”. She is entertaining about her early exploits, in the days when “real” reporters were mavericks. Latterly, it was whispered that that became her downfall. She would not take orders or come back with the slick, pre-arranged package that the newsdesk required for 24-hour news.
She has never hidden her contempt for the changes that took place at the BBC under John Birt, when journalists used to receive memos starting “Dear Operative”.
She caused a furore last year when she gave a speech saying that programme makers wanted reporters with “cute faces and cute bottoms and nothing in between”. It was assumed that she was having a go at her female colleagues but she says now that the remark was taken out of context: “I was talking about the kind of people hired of both sexes.”
She says it’s no reflection on anyone’s ability, it’s just that talented people who are also easy on the eye are increasingly the ones who make it. She won’t comment on colleagues but one cannot help thinking of Rageh Omaar, whose doe-like features dominated the BBC’s Iraq coverage (he is now being touted as the new Dimbleby) and Ben “pretty boy” Brown, who so often graces the hot spots that were once Adie’s domain.
In the field she was treated as an honorary “bloke” and back on civvy street she comes over in the same way. She has seen many horrors but they don’t seem to have left a mark. She scoffs at the idea of post-traumatic stress. “I had parents who went through six years of the second world war and I never heard their generation talk about readjusting,” she says.
Her breezy dismissal of the emotional effects of war makes her seem one-dimensional and thick-skinned. One wonders if she really is as blasé as she appears. “I had a happy childhood and I’m an optimist and that helps,” she says, “I am just a down-to-earth person. I don’t go in for self-analysis.”
She is single and childless and certainly, after the Gulf war, she was in some turmoil. She had always known that she was adopted nd happy about it — but realised, when she was given a next-of-kin form to fill in, that she had none. When she returned to London she set about tracing her mother, Babe Dunnet, to whom she dedicated her autobiography.
Dunnet, who was married, had become pregnant during the war by another man and gave Adie up. It is wonderful, she says, to have become part of a big family: “I still haven’t counted all my cousins.” She accepts that her mother’s decision was just another of those things that she has come across so often: the hard realities of life.
