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.”
Snow’s appreciation of what all this signified was at the heart of the MacTaggart lecture he gave at the Edinburgh TV festival that August, in which he charged the media with standing “comfortably with the elite, with little awareness, contact or connection with those not of the elite”. This uneasy realisation – Snow is open about his own privilege, rooted in a private education – obviously festered. Now, just over a year after his exit from Channel 4 News, he has developed it into a 288-page exploration of inequality, and the kind of social and cultural changes that might reduce it.
His tone is that of someone suddenly liberated from the restraints of supposed impartiality. Snow mixes autobiography with polite polemic, and tumbles through a range of subjects and locations: education, housing, the reform of parliament, apartheid South Africa, Iran, the invasion of Iraq and its long slipstream – and, in the book’s second half, the media, and the narrow range of perspectives it presents. In a ranking of the most powerful media figures published in 2019, 43% came from privately educated backgrounds: here, he rightly suggests, is a big part of the reason why so much news seems to take the people who deliver it by surprise.
But even if he now feels unbound, some of his own arguments are proof of those same limitations. He presents the House of Lords as the embodiment of so much of what he decries, but can only propose “an independent commission to look at what would be the best solution”. His analysis of recent political history finds him being too generous to David Cameron and George Osborne, and overly kind to post-Thatcher Conservatism more broadly (is it really true that “racist language” is not “in the tradition of the party” and that Nigel Farage sits outside the parameters of Tory politics?). In general, he hangs on to a Whiggish optimism that sometimes fails to stand up to scrutiny. He also has a habit of extending his criticisms of the media’s highest-profile elements to journalism as a whole. Before the Brexit referendum, he says, “I do not believe any part of the media appreciated the scale of the citizenry’s economic woes”. Some of us did.
The oversights are occasionally maddening, but Snow is usually redeemed by the self-awareness that underpins most of what he says. The essence of his talents as a news anchor came down not just to his unquenchable interest in his fellow humans, but an urbane, unrufflable disposition traceable to an early life spent among “giant doors, vaulted ceilings and esoteric codes of conduct”. In the future he seems to want, voices like his would recede, leaving the news to be delivered by people closer to their audiences. At that point, perhaps, the “us” in his title might at last mean what it ought to.
• The State of Us: The Good News and the Bad News About Our Society by Jon Snow is published by Bantham (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
