“Incandescent with rage”, was a recurring self-description by Stephen Jessel, the former BBC foreign correspondent, as he encountered the uncooperative in the far corners of the earth and back at Broadcasting House. This was, however, the cover not the book. Stephen tempered his worldview with a warm heart, a self-deprecating sense of humour and a sly way of turning a critical piece on its head.
Just as it seemed the new EuroDisney experience in Marne-la-Vallée near Paris, in 1992, was in for a nightmare review – “humour without wit”, he snarled, “light without shadow, the present without a past, sound without echo”, the soi-disant Mr Grumpy hinted in closing that he might be tempted to admit he had rather enjoyed it.
Stephen, who has died aged 81, was one of the finest exponents of From Our Own Correspondent, that weekly showcase of five-minute overseas essays on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, in which the correspondent has a chance to breathe, freed from the shackles of attempted impartiality, live broadcasting and “Who, what, where, when, why?” FOOC best traces his story, from Paris to Beijing to Brussels and back to Paris in the last quarter of the 20th century.
He was a master of appearing to tell the listener one thing, but registering another. Thus, in a dispatch about the French “Yes” to the Maastricht treaty in September 1992, Stephen recalled how exactly 200 years earlier the revolutionary French had defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Valmy, possibly, he said, because of a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Prussian commander – “It was never quite clear why, at his death, precious stones from the French Crown were found among his effects. Maybe it was an early form of European Monetary Union.” Stephen added: “That same day … France abolished the monarchy. The monarch himself was abolished later.”
In 1995, the BBC removed Stephen from Paris and from the staff, as was the untimely form then. Gillian Reynolds, doyenne of radio critics, writing in the Daily Telegraph, castigated the BBC for getting rid of him “for being a bit old (ie 50) and too good at his job”.
Born in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, Stephen was the son of Robert Jessel, defence correspondent of the Times, and Penelope (nee Blackwell), of the renowned Oxford publisher-bookshop family, a lecturer in social administration at Plater College, Oxford, and active in national Liberal party politics.
Stephen attended the Dragon school in Oxford, then Shrewsbury school, and Balliol College, Oxford (1961-65), where he studied classics. He then went to the Times, where he was a general news reporter then education correspondent. It was there that he met Jane Marshall; they married in 1970. He moved to the BBC in Broadcasting House in 1972 as a radio reporter and presenter of Newsdesk and The World Tonight, and was education correspondent during Margaret Thatcher’s 1970-74 spell as education minister.
Stephen’s first foreign posting was to Paris, in 1977, which he made his home from then on, apart from his professional excursions to Beijing (1981-84), to Brussels for three years and then, after a brief spell in Washington, where he pined for Europe, back to Paris in 1997.
His professional years were by no means exclusively observations from a metropolitan height. On the Turkey-Iran border among the dispossessed Kurds, in 1991, he was moved by the youthful inspiration and dedication of the French aid workers of Médecins Sans Frontières, spiritually grounded as he saw it in les événements, the youthful political uprising of more than 20 years earlier. In austere but emergent China in 1982 he saw the now prime minister Thatcher stiff-armed by Deng Xiaoping over the expiring Hong Kong lease (it is said that she fell down the steps of the Great Hall of the People immediately after recognising Stephen among the press).
In early 1979, after months of door-stepping Ruholla Khomeini of Iran in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château, he was a passenger on the Air France flight that returned Khomeini to Tehran and the unfolding Iranian revolution. He covered the Olof Palme assassination in 1986, a dramatic break from the Euro-machinations back at base in Brussels. He was in Zaire for the last days of Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, waking up one morning in a car full of hand grenades.
In 1981, the China of the post-Mao era was a testing post for Stephen, Jane and their new daughter, Miranda: a world of watchers, spies, servants, residential compounds, little good food and even scarcer burgundy, yet a national, cultural and economic upheaval he relished reporting. After he left, in 1985, swearing never to return, he broke his promise many times, increasingly impressed at each visit: in 2006 he wrote, “Kunming, capital of Yunnan, had been a sleepy provincial town of wooden shop houses – lights out at 21:00 – now it had become Hong Kong: designer boutiques, neon, teenagers on their mobile phones.” (Characteristically, he left the listener guessing which one he preferred.)
Though Paris was his home, a well-lubricated lunch his arena, perhaps after a Tuileries stroll with his hound, and his love and knowledge of the French language profound, Stephen was no besotted Francophile. He viewed France and the French with affectionate suspicion. Describing a battle within the French linguistic establishment, after the Superior Council of the French Language recommended the abolition of the circumflex accent, Stephen wrote: “It was as if the Athenaeum were being ravaged by a pillow fight.”
Stephen loved travel, and he and Jane kept it up, especially to east Asia, until a traffic accident in Turkey in 2013, after which his health deteriorated.
He is survived by Jane and Miranda, by his two grandchildren, Eleanor and Franklin, and by his brother David.
• Stephen Jessel, journalist, born 9 August 1943; died 7 March 2025
