In June 2015, The Sunday Times sent their chief foreign correspondent, Christina Lamb, to Calais. The Jungle, the refugee and immigrant camp, was at its peak. French port workers were on strike, causing a tailback of trucks. Migrants were sliding into the back of the vehicles, hoping to slip across the Channel. Lamb spent a night with them. In the morning, her editor called. There had been a beheading in the south of France. He wanted her in Lyon. On the train to Paris, Lamb spotted social media reports that British tourists had been killed on a Tunisian beach. She asked the editor if she should go there. No, he said, they had it covered. On the next train, her phone rang. They wanted her in Tunisia after all. She had to get the train back to Paris to catch a flight. She only just made it.
Lamb got to Tunis at midnight and drove to Sousse, the scene of the massacre. Then, she heard from her editor: they wanted her article on Calais. “I thought everybody would have lost interest in that by now,” says Lamb. She wrote the piece, abandoned any hope of sleep and got stuck into the new story. As she spoke to people on the ground, she fielded calls from editors in London telling her to go to this hospital and that hospital, thinking they knew best. Today, Lamb says, one thing particularly rattled her about her multi-stop trip and harrowing reporting: “I had nothing to read,” she says. “It drove me mad. That is the worst thing for me: to be stuck somewhere without a decent book.” She likes to read novels by writers from places she is going to. Andrey Kurkov, the Ukrainian author, has recently been on her list.
Landing a scoop
The snapshot of Lamb’s life also shows her dedication to the job, part of the reason Women in Journalism has just given her their Lifetime Achievement Award. It comes swiftly after Lamb was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the 2024 Society of Editors’ Media Freedom Awards. Lamb’s teenage self, she says, would be “very surprised” at her career. Growing up, she had never met a journalist and only considered journalism at university. After graduating, she interned on the foreign desk at the Financial Times: “I saw all these correspondents coming back from their trips with these old, battered satchels full of newspapers. They had suntans and spoke in different languages, and I thought they were very exotic.”
At the FT, Lamb attended a lunch and sat beside the secretary general of the Pakistan’s People Party. She was then given the chance to interview Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader of Pakistan. Bhutto would invite Lamb to her wedding, providing an entry into Pakistani politics.
A scoop followed the year after Bhutto’s wedding, when Lamb was freelancing in Peshawar. After months of negotiation, the Afghan mujahideen had agreed to take her into Kabul. “I was nervous because we were going all the way to the Afghan capital, the headquarters of the Soviet occupation,” Lamb recalls. She went to a friend’s house to get some vodka. He didn’t have any, so Lamb persuaded him to go to the market. “He came back ten minutes later and said he’d just heard that General Zia had been killed in this air crash with all the top army brass,” says Lamb, who was one of the few foreign journalists in the country. “There I was suddenly with this huge story.”
Lamb called the FT. First, she had to dial the international operator on an old rotary phone. “I dialled that number over and over. I was in tears because I couldn’t get through,” she says. “By the time I spoke to the foreign news editor, I was in a state. We were so worried about not getting a phone line that we kept that line open. It cost a fortune.” The episode sticks in Lamb’s mind not for her exclusive, but because of the challenges of her role in the late eighties. “Ninety per cent of my job was finding a way to get the story back,” she says. “Now, you can file from anywhere, which isn’t always a good thing because you have less time to think about things.”
Journalist or activist?
Some of Lamb’s most vital work has been reporting on sexual violence. Her recent win at the Media Freedom Awards was partly for her work covering October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militant groups attacked Israeli communities. It’s this body of work — across conflict zones from Israel to Iraq — that she is most proud of. “It was so hard to write about it a few years ago,” she says. “Male editors often said, ‘Nobody wants to know about this.’ I had to fight to get people interested.” Covering — and uncovering — the extent of sexual violence has changed how Lamb sees her job. “I feel so angry about it and so shocked at how difficult it is to get justice that I’ve become more of an activist,” she says. “It’s very important to me.”
It’s also important to Lamb to return to stories. In 2014, when Isis tried to kill the Yazidi people of Iraq, it emerged that Isis fighters were taking women as sex slaves. “They’re still living in camps in Iraq,” says Lamb, who visited them last year. “They can’t go home. They’re deeply traumatised.” It is both “a curse and a blessing” that she can stay in touch with people she has interviewed through WhatsApp. “It’s mostly good, but you can never get away from the story.” Lamb finds it hard to explain to people she interviews why their situation hasn’t improved. But awareness, she says, is the first step: “I’m quite idealistic. I hope that it does make a difference telling these stories. It might just take a long while before things change.”
Lamb wants to show the human cost of war. There are now more female correspondents, helping to shift the narrative: “There is less of this gung-ho, I was shot at, blood and gore journalism, and more nuanced pieces about what it’s like to live through a war. It’s much better.”
Sometimes, the greatest challenge is returning home. “It’s easy running from one conflict to another because you get caught up in the story, but coming back can be really difficult,” Lamb says. She remembers being in Afghanistan after 9/11: “People were so hungry. Parents were burying their children.” She got a cargo flight out of Kabul on Christmas Eve so she could be at home with her family for Christmas. Her son was two. “We went to my mum’s and I was horrified at all the food and the presents,” Lamb says. “I got quite cross with my son because he didn’t eat very much. Then I thought, ‘This isn’t right. I can’t bring the war home to other people.’”
Bravery beyond borders
Pages could be written about Lamb’s own war stories, when she almost didn’t make it back. Once, she was embedded with British soldiers in an Afghan village and was ambushed by the Taliban as soon as they left: “We were under fire for a long time. We were really lucky to escape.” Then there was the time, in 2003, when she was covering the fall of Basra in Iraq. Lamb remembers driving to the city and it feeling “really weird”. She had heard reports of a bridge being destroyed but couldn’t see any evidence. She turned back. On her return, she passed a vehicle heading the way she had just come, carrying the ITN journalist Terry Lloyd. “I said to him, ‘I think we’re ahead of the frontline’,” says Lamb. Soon after, she heard Lloyd had been killed. “That could have been me.”
The job does have its lighter moments. Lamb recalls one occasion in 2017, when Robert Mugabe had just been removed as president of Zimbabwe. A group of British foreign correspondents were waiting at Johannesburg airport for the flight to Harare and asked Lamb, who had been travelling to Zimbabwe undercover for months, how she had entered the country before. “I said that I went as a tourist,” she says. “I had a travel guide and wore a silly orange straw hat. When I got to the gate, I saw all these foreign correspondents wearing silly hats and clutching Lonely Planet guides.”
Lamb seeks out unusual stories, too: “I’m always trying to find positive things in bad places, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do the job.” A few years ago, she was in a remote community in the Amazon in Brazil. The village was under threat from gold miners, loggers and the government, who wanted to build a train line. What struck Lamb was how the young women were fighting back: “They were using a drone to map what was happening in their area. It was fascinating.”
The women were also using social media. Instagram and TikTok videos from ordinary people on the ground can offer valuable insight, says Lamb, but it isn’t a replacement for what she does. “Sometimes, when things happen, like the war in Ukraine or October 7, people turn to traditional journalism,” she says. They see it as reliable. And yet, as the mother of a 25-year-old, Lamb recognises that traditional journalism has a limited audience: “We do have to find a way of telling our stories differently.” Is she about to pivot to social media? “There are people asking me to make TikTok videos, but I think other people do it better,” she says. “What worries me is that if I did it, it would dilute from what I do well. I think there is still an interest in long-form journalism.” It is an interest Lamb intends to capitalise on for as long as she can. “I’m very nosey, so to be able to speak to anybody, whether they’re somebody on the street or a dictator is amazing,” she says. “I’ve been doing this job for 37 years and I’ve never been bored.” It helps when she packs a good book.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
