A political conversion

"MY parents can't stand cigarette smoke, so I can't smoke at home," Yvonne Ridley says as she lights up what will turn out to be the first of four cigarettes during a 50-minute interview. "I've got hardly any vices left now," she adds by way of apology.

Three years ago, it's not hard to imagine that she had a lot of vices. She was the hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-nosed journalist, chief reporter on the Sunday Express, a hack who had made it to the top in Fleet Street by being one of the lads. She was determined to get her story, whatever it took.

Then, less than three weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Centre, she donned a burqa and smuggled herself into Afghanistan, looking for her scoop on how the Afghans were bearing up under the US bombardment. Instead, she was rumbled and imprisoned by the Taliban for ten days. She feared for her life every day but was released unharmed, although the experience was to change her life.

Now, she is a committed peace campaigner, a veteran speaker at anti-war rallies across the world. She converted to Islam and worked for a time for the Arab TV station Al Jazeera, before she was sacked, apparently for trying to win better rights for the journalists. Now she's standing in the European Parliament elections as the lead candidate in the North-East for Respect, the anti-war coalition.

It's the election that has brought her back to live with her parents, Allan and Joyce, just outside Stanley in County Durham, giving rise to her smoking anxieties. And it is the election which sees us in the Dun Cow in Sedgefield yesterday, an appropriate venue for the launch of Respect's campaign: it was the Dun Cow where Tony Blair entertained George Bush on the US President's visit to the North-East last November.

She admits her own political awareness is a recent phenomenon, dating back to her incarceration in Kabul. "For nearly 40 years, everything had been about me, and I just thought I really wanted to give something back," she says.

She joined the Labour Party, but quickly became disillusioned by Blair's support for Bush, and the failure of the anti-war movement to change the Prime Minister's mind - "I just realised that our voice was being completely ignored," she says. "So when the anti-war movement became political, I jumped at the chance."

The change in her outlook she puts down to her experience at the hands of the Taliban, and to one night in particular, when she went from being a fairly dispassionate observer to a passionate participant.

"The Yvonne Ridley before 9/11 I would have said probably would not have cared that much. I was able to cover wars and then move on," she says. "But it suddenly hit me, on October 7, 2001, when I was sitting in a cell in Kabul Prison and America and Britain dropped 50 cruise missiles on the capital.

"I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before, but I suddenly realised that these bombs can't discriminate between military and civilian targets. Anybody who is in that situation where they're being bombed will know the feeling of helplessness and fear. It had such a profound effect on me that I actually didn't have the bottle to go to Iraq before the outbreak of war."

That's something of an admission from someone who seemed to pride themselves on their ability to be as tough as any man, but she's quite dismissive of that person, the one she was before Kabul.

"I had a very good time. I had quite a hedonistic lifestyle, but my existence was probably quite pointless," she says. "I was able to do things through my work as a journalist, but I just wished that I had become politically active a long time ago.

"I don't know what happened in Afghanistan but I came out with a huge social conscience. It was as though I had lost my rose-coloured spectacles somewhere in Kabul. It was quite a transformation," she smiles, lighting another cigarette.

Beyond this, she finds it hard to say exactly what it was about her experience that changed her so completely, but within weeks of her return she was speaking at anti-war rallies. At first she found it terrifying, but now she says she's used to it.

"I just thought, if I can use my 15 minutes of notoriety, celebrity, whatever it is, to the good, then I will, so I continued," she says.

Ridley, 46 today, converted to Islam last June, after reading the Koran following her release. She says she had been a Christian beforehand, going to church twice a month, but didn't like to advertise the fact in the cynical world in which she moved. She seems similarly reluctant to talk about her new faith, beyond saying: "It is very important to me. It is a good way of life and has a good code of ethics."

A verse from the Koran is inscribed on a silver pendant around her neck, picked up in Turkey 25 years ago because she liked the look of it, but now taking on a greater significance, although she laughingly admits she can't remember what it says. She also wears a Palestinian scarf in memory of the refugees in the Jenin camp massacred by the Israelis in May 2002.

I'm probably much more serious than I used to be, but at the same time I'm much more fulfilled and happy with what I'm doing," she says. So wasn't she happy before? "I was, but it was an alcohol-fuelled haze," she laughs, although there's probably some truth in it. But there's no doubt that however her transformation happened, she acts on her beliefs.

"There was a National Front march in Newcastle last Saturday, and a few years ago I probably would have been fairly apathetic, but now I was really angry to see that scum marching on my streets. I was calling them Nazi scum - I probably would never have done that a few years ago."

She seems as surprised as anyone at what's happened to her, but while it's true that her aims for the election campaign don't run much beyond getting elected and "raising awareness", she shows a real passion for the cause. Her entry into politics taps into that side of the journalist in her which wanted to help people - she uses a story about the pleasure she got from forcing the council to fix a pensioner's sink when she was on the Stanley News to illustrate this - and she has taken to being the one interviewed instead of the one doing the interviewing.

But her celebrity hasn't been without its cost. She's been subjected to a fair few personal attacks, principally that by entering Afghanistan and putting her life at risk she was somehow being a bad mother to her daughter Daisy, now 11. She says the criticism doesn't bother her, although it does upset her mother. "She gets very irritated by reports that get personal, but I'm made of good northern stuff - I just roll with the punches," she says, although it's hard to believe that she doesn't take any of it personally.

"The biggest achievement of my life is my daughter," she continues. "She read a particularly critical comment on the Internet and she said: 'But you're the best mother in the world', and as long as she thinks that, why should I worry about what some bitch in Fleet Street thinks?

"The harder people kick me, the stronger I get. I had ten days where every day I thought it was going to be my last, and just when there was light at the end of the tunnel I was bombed by America and Britain. That makes you incredibly strong and fearless to a certain extent. So if anybody wants to take a pop at me, then bring it on," she says, lighting another cigarette.