Nobody Will Shoot You If You Make Them Laugh review – Simon Murray’s lifetime of adventures

Nobody will Shoot You If you Make them Laugh by Simon Murray (Unicorn), £25.

The first time I met Simon Murray was when interviewing him for the Financial News about the mega-billion pound investment fund he had recently set up with high-powered friends in high places.

We didn’t get around to talking much about the fund. He was much keener to talk about how exhausted he was after sleeping out on Dartmoor in a bin bag. He had also been dragging tyres from a rope tied around his stomach for miles as part of his training for pulling a 23 stone sledge uphill for eight hours a day.

This was in 2004, and he was training for the 1,200km trek to the South Pole with polar explorer Pen Hadow. His wife, Jennifer, had more or less trapped him into doing the walk by secretly inviting Hadow to stay a weekend with them and to subtly warm him up to the plan.

She had already flown around the world solo in a helicopter – the first woman to do so – and wanted to fly from the South to the North Pole as well. So her plan was to fly to meet them for Christmas, as you do.

As she knew he would, Murray rose to the bait and was now practising for the trip of a lifetime, or should one say one of his many trips of a lifetime, but potentially his riskiest to date (At 63, he was the oldest man to make it unassisted to Antarctica).

Taking risks runs deep in his blood. Aged 19, he left England to join the Foreign Legion, spending five years fighting in the Algerian mountains during the war of independence from France. If that was not enough adrenalin, he has since climbed Kilimanjaro, trekked up to Everest, ran the 242 km Marathon des Sables race across the desert in Morocco aged 60 and abseiled down the Shard at 72.

Ten years later, we met again when I was working for The Independent, and I interviewed him about his new role as a troubleshooter at Gulf Keystone Petroleum. Murray had just been parachuted in as chairman to help sort out the oil producer that operates in war-torn Kurdistan in northern Iraq. 

This time we did talk a little more about business. But once again, there were stories galore, his latest escapade being a hike through the Aurès, a rugged mountain range in north-eastern Algeria, with a group of friends and a local guide. 

They were stopped by military police, guns to their heads, who demanded to know what they were doing in such a remote place inhabited mainly by terrorists. The police were convinced they were spies, looking for military installations.

Murray explained what happened next: “When you are in a tight spot like that, what you need is a good joke to tell – a conjuring trick works too. To break the ice, I told the gendarme in charge he looked like Daniel Day-Lewis – which he did.”

“He asked who he was – we were speaking in French. I told him he is a famous, handsome English film star. That did the trick, and gave me the time to explain that I had come back to visit the mountains as I had been there 53 years before as a young legionnaire with the French Foreign Legion.“

“I knew this was a gamble: the legion was fighting against the Algerians in the bloody war for independence.”

In a second, the Day-Lewis lookalike had saluted Murray, warning them that the mountains were treacherous. He gave the party an escort for the next 50 km. Murray added: “And when they left us, he turned to me and said to me: ‘I love you.’ I guess it’s all he knew in English.”

The third time we met was in 2015 with a group of former French Legionnaires in Paris to celebrate Bastille Day. Murray had invited me to join him and his fellow legionnaires – who are given a special seating area close by the President’s podium – for the celebrations on the Champs-Élysées to watch France’s military march by.

How could I say no? Driving with Simon Murray, a few generals and ex-legionnaires through Paris on the morning of the celebrations was spooky; the city appeared deserted, cordoned off for the parades with military personnel hovering at every corner. I couldn’t help looking out for snipers hiding on the balconies as The Day of the Jackal came to mind.  

After the parades, we were whisked off to a tiny backstreet restaurant to eat and drink, and of course, sing. And boy, could they sing. Now in their 70s and 80s and from all walks of life and every nationality, many of these ex-legionnaires had not seen each other for years. 

But they could remember the song’s word perfect in French that must have kept them going through their hair-raising adventures. It was otherworldly. 

Then out of the blue, some months later, Murray called, explaining that he had written his autobiography and would I take a look. As you can imagine, his manuscript wrote itself. 

But there were many surprises. His life as a derring-do soldier, explorer and then businessman had not come easy: his father, who was born into a wealthy minor aristocratic family, abandoned him, his brother and his mother when he was only a few years old. 

Unable to cope, his mother, a publican’s daughter from Worksop, sent them to what amounted to an orphanage, and then – with the help of his wealthier relatives – to a strict boarding school. 

Little wonder he escaped to the Foreign Legion, an experience he wrote about in his best-selling book, Legionnaire, which was turned into a film, The Deserter in 2002, starring Paul Fox and Tom Hardy. Legionnaire makes for hard reading: Murray writes about carrying chopped heads in sacks, working for hours on end in quarries, being forced to do La Pelote – a punishment where the soldier’s heads were shaved, then made to wear steel helmets and, with a sack of rocks on their backs held with wire shoulder straps, forced to run for two hours. 

Yet those gruelling years set the stage for the most astonishing business career. After the Legion, he narrowly missed out on working in “intelligence” and instead sought his fortune in Hong Kong. After working for Jardine Matheson, he jumped ship to Hutchinson Whampoa, starting the Orange mobile phone company. Along the way, he has been a director of Vodafone, Tommy Hilfiger, Vivendi Universal, Usinor, Hermes, General Electric, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, Macquarie Bank, N.M. Rothschild and sat on the Advisory Board of Imperial College. That’s only a few of them.

Lockdown gave him time – he is 81 – to finish his latest book which is, fittingly, titled Nobody Will Shoot You If You Make Them Laugh. You too will laugh – and maybe even weep. Life, he writes, should be like a funfair in which we should try all the rides. Even the ghost train.