The morning after the Grenfell Tower disaster, Jon Snow arrived at the offices of Channel 4 News, the programme he had been hosting since 1989. Initially, he and his colleagues did not have much sense of the significance of a story that was just starting to become clear. But after he arrived at the scene having impulsively cycled across London, he realised that he was about to front his channel’s coverage not just of an unimaginable tragedy, but of glaring truths about the modern United Kingdom.
Fifty days before, Snow and the Microsoft founder Bill Gates had been the judges of a public-speaking contest organised by a charity called Debate Mate. The winner, by some distance, had been 12-year-old Firdaws Hashim, a student at the Kensington Aldridge Academy. Two days into a run of bulletins broadcast from Grenfell, he suddenly saw her image on a “Missing” notice. “This brilliant girl lived with her family on the twenty-second floor,” he writes. “I knew precisely what the poster meant … And at this moment, I burst into tears.”
