Martin Bell - BBC correspondent, Independent politician, Post "retirement"

Television journalist and politician, born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, EC England, UK. He studied at Cambridge and joined the BBC in 1962, becoming overseas reporter (1964–76), diplomatic correspondent (1976–7), chief North American correspondent (1977–89), Berlin correspondent (1989–93), Vienna correspondent (1993–4), and foreign affairs correspondent (1994–6). Awards include the Royal Television Society's Reporter of the Year (1976, 1992) and the Radio and Television Industries Club Newscaster of the Year (1995). He fought an ‘anti-sleaze’ campaign in the 1997 general election, and was returned - much to his own surprise, describing himself as an ‘accidental MP’ in his maiden speech - as Independent MP for Tatton. He failed to repeat his success in Brentwood and Ongar in the 2001 general election. In 2004, following an unsuccessful attempt to become an MEP, he was made an ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund.

Martin Bell, OBE, (born 31 August 1938) is a British former broadcast war reporter and independent politician.

He is the son of author-farmer Adrian Bell, and the uncle of weblogger-banker Oliver Kamm, who served as his political adviser during his term as an Member of Parliament (MP).

Bell was educated at The Leys School in Cambridge and Cambridge University.

BBC correspondent

Martin Bell joined the BBC as a reporter in Norwich in 1962 as a 24-year-old, following his graduation from King's College, Cambridge with a first-class honours degree.

He won the Royal Television Society's Reporter of the Year award in 1977 and 1993, and was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1992.

From his long experience, Bell came to believe that the tradition of neutral reporting of armed conflicts did a disservice to the viewers where it was clear that one side was committing atrocities, and wrote a book outlining his belief.

Independent politician

In 1997, just 24 days before the British General Election, Martin Bell announced that he was leaving the BBC to stand as an independent candidate in the Tatton constituency in Cheshire.

Martin Bell was elected an MP with a majority of 11,000 votes – overturning a Conservative majority of over 20,000 – and thus became the first successful independent parliamentary candidate since the Second World War.

Bell was noted as an extremely effective constituency MP.

In 2001, Martin Bell was nonetheless persuaded to stand as an independent candidate against the Conservative MP Eric Pickles in the "safe" Essex constituency of Brentwood and Ongar, where there were accusations that the local Conservative Association had been infiltrated by a Pentecostal church.

Post "retirement"

Bell made a brief return to television news in 2003 when he provided analysis of the Iraq invasion for ITN's Channel Five News.

Bell reversed his previous decision and stood for the European Parliament in the June 2004 elections, but was ultimately unsuccessful as an independent candidate in the UK's eastern region, winning only 6.2% of the vote (see European Parliament election, 2004 (UK)).

For the 2005 election he founded the Independents Network to promote independent candidates (its most prominent candidate being Reg Keys in prime minister Tony Blair's Sedgefield constituency).

Bell now acts as an ambassador for UNICEF and as a critic on the state of journalism today, although he describes himself as "too old" for both journalism and politics.

In April 2006 Scottish National Party MP Angus MacNeil asked the Metropolitan Police to investigate whether any law had been broken in the Cash for Peerages scandal.