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.
That tragic coincidence leads Snow into the broad theme of this book: his outrage that the growing inequality of wealth and opportunity in Britain means that some lives appear to be worth far less than others; that the postwar compact in which he grew up – he was born in 1947, just months before the NHS – has fractured before all of our eyes. Snow was, of course, far from alone in making Grenfell the symbol of that breakdown. In the days after the fire, he was moved to lay the blame for the death of Firdaws and 71 others squarely at the door of the Tory Kensington and Chelsea council and its perceived indifference to, and neglect of, its poorer constituents. It is a frustration of this book that Snow does not question that first assumption a little more, in light of the Grenfell Tower inquiry, which has, in five years, revealed a more complicated picture of culpability – not only that simple binary tale of the council concerned more with the rich than the poor but, moreover, a scandal of multinational building corporations willing to rig for profit a weakened, outsourced and underfunded regulatory system dating back through several governments.
Part of Snow’s emotional response to Grenfell is a kind of mea culpa that is another thread in this book. His belief is that British media remain too white, too male, too privileged to ever properly reflect the state of the nation. He goes out of his way to express how, by background, he was on the wrong side of that debate: his father was the bishop of Whitby; he attended Winchester Cathedral’s Pilgrims’ school as a chorister; he hardly saw a Black face until he was in his late teens and, cloistered from the “real” world, had no idea of the struggles of less gilded lives. He has spent the last 60 years trying to repent of those sins of omission; his first awakening was as a Voluntary Service Overseas teacher in Uganda – realising that his pupils, though sometimes brighter than him, would not have his chances to have an effect on the world. On his return to Britain, he got a job – probably “because of my posh voice” – running a homeless charity for the Earl of Longford, and came to a similar conclusion. Journalism, a desire to expose these inequalities, followed naturally.
Snow has been an inspired reporter and news anchor – quick to see the crux of issues, an empathic and robust onscreen interviewer. Some of the best passages here describe the tactics employed to rattle the suavest ambassador or politician. What he is not, by his own admission, is a close reader of social history or political philosophy: “Mine is more an animal intelligence rather than the bookish sort of some of my peers.” That characteristic creates more limitations on the page than on screen.
There is no doubt that Snow’s argument about inequality is the defining one of our times, but his interest in the roots and mechanics and detail of it sometimes seems, here, to resist fully complex engagement. I remember, for example, being stopped short listening to him describe on live TV a pro-Brexit march and saying, bluntly: “I have never seen so many white people in one place.” His comments were investigated by Ofcom and he was exonerated of any breach of the broadcasting code. He uses that controversy here, however, not as the prelude to an examination of the divide between metropolitan communities and the rest, different expressions of inequality between citizens of somewhere and nowhere, or even to examine his own thought process in that moment, but only to praise the regulatory system: “I’m glad that [complaints] were taken seriously, and I’m glad that my conduct was held to the high standard that people expect.” You sense that there should be more to be said.
One of the curious things about this book, for a man so profoundly curious about the world, is the absence of any real underpinning of data or secondary sources to support his impressions. Snow moves between any number of laudable liberal statements – he is against Brexit, for the BBC, in favour of immigration – but his wider analysis often rests more on the sentiment of a campaign leaflet than on fine-grained experience. “I am hugely optimistic about social media, the internet and the pursuit of truth in the long term,” he will write, in the face of evidence, or: “I believe it is too late to reawaken the racial tiger in this country.” Or: “Power and wealth gravitate towards themselves … But that is a trend that can be, and has been, bucked.” There is only sketchy thought given to the knotty means by which such aims might be achieved, beyond a likable faith in the human spirit: “I like people, I think they tend to be good, and that by and large they want to take control of their lives.”
I’d listen to Snow bring almost any subject to life on the screen, appreciate his ability to react in the moment, speak truth to power. Reading his analysis of the state of the nation is too often to be reminded, however, that the persuasive rigour of the best-written journalism – the ability to bring the full nuance of stories alive on the page – represents a quite different skill set from directing the team-led, in-the-moment drama of the best news presenters.
• The State of Us: The Good News and the Bad News About Our Society by Jon Snow is published by Bantam (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
