Since he left a big rainbow-striped hole in the Channel 4 newsroom at the end of 2021, Jon Snow has been contemplating what he learned in nearly 50 years on the frontline of television reporting. The starting point for those conclusions is the event that haunted him most from those decades: not the interviews with the dictator Idi Amin in Uganda, or his reports from Iran on the hostage crisis – but the sight of smoke on the horizon in London on 14 June 2017. Having arrived at the Channel 4 studios that morning and seen horrific images from Grenfell Tower, Snow characteristically jumped on his bike and pedalled over to west London.
He arrived while the fire was still being fought and spent much of the next four or five days there, talking to survivors and locals, presenting news from under the blackened skeleton of the building. It was only a couple of days into this reporting that he discovered, among the photographs of the missing, a face he recognised. Twelve-year-old Firdaws Hashim had, a few months earlier, won a nationwide public-speaking competition. Snow, alongside Bill Gates, had been a judge at that event – entranced by the schoolgirl’s eloquence. Firdaws, who lived on the 22nd floor at Grenfell, died in the fire along with her two siblings and her parents.
