meet Jon Snow in Penguin’s new offices in south London, where everything is hushed and plush, uncorrected proof copies of Snow’s memoir-cum-polemic, The State of Us, piled neatly next to finished copies of Prince Harry’s Spare. Snow announced his retirement, after 32 years anchoringBroadcasters are supposed to be impartial – a standard that not just Ofcom but millions of keyboard warriors everywhere insist on – and Snow has been a broadcaster most of his working life.
His book represents a break in a half-century of silence; and it is trenchant in surprising ways. He makes a direct comparison, for instance, between Blair’s war in Iraq and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “Despite the difference in the two political systems,” he writes, “the result is the same.” Innocents dying, at the command of distant men in authority who will never have to live with the consequences.
The issue is close to his heart, not just because he had met a girl who perished in the fire – 12-year-old Firdaws Hashim – at a debating competition two months before. He explicitly decries inequality “There’s no mutual interest in meeting up. And why, necessarily, should there be, actually? My older brother is extremely political, and was a trade union official for Nupe . I was anathema, because I’d gone absolutely straight, broadcasting to the nation. I wasn’t leftwing enough,” he says, adding drily: “Though, within my own terms, I was adequately leftwing.”
By the 80s, he was a roving reporter for ITN, and these were some of his happiest times, covering “the wars in Central America: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, not places that anybody really remembers anything about at all, I loved being there. I loved being in America for Reagan. I didn’t agree with him at all. But there was something avuncular and quite charming about him.