Journalist Jon Snow travelled the world as a foreign correspondent before he became the face of Channel 4 News. Yet it appears a story at home in London affected him the most. The intensity of Snow’s anger and grief over the Grenfell Tower disaster that killed 72 people in an inferno in 2018 is one of the most striking aspects of The State of Us, his new book.
“I’ve been to disasters before, I’ve reported from war zones, but nothing, nothing, jarred like this did. The collision between wealth and poverty defined the whole event. It was an extremely emotional experience,” he writes. His book, a 250-page treatise on inequality, turns into a rallying cry for change, albeit one that ultimately is light on the specifics of how to bring it about.
Snow cycled across town to Grenfell on that June morning as Britain woke up to its worst residential fire since the second World War. He writes of his horror at the devastation he met and the anger of residents, who had warned of the building’s danger but were ignored. The firetrap council tower was inhabited mostly by lower-income families, yet sat in the middle of the wealthiest borough in Britain, Royal Kensington & Chelsea.
The disparity between the rich, whom Snow could never imagine living in such an unsafe building, and the poor who did and died because of it, sparked “a profound change in my outlook”, he writes. Snow came to view Grenfell as the “archetypal story of inequality”. His anguish overflowed when he learned someone who had previously moved him was among the victims.
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“In one drastic failure in one tower block, we see the essence of inequality horrifically exemplified.”
Throughout his long career at Channel 4 and particularly in the post-Brexit years leading up to his retirement in 2021, Snow was often accused by his critics on the right wing of politics and media of being biased towards lefty causes. In 2017 he was even alleged to have chanted “F**k the Tories” after being swept up in a moment at Glastonbury music festival.
In The State of Us, Snow untethers himself from the ropes of broadcasting impartiality and finally lets fly his opinions on everything from government spending to Boris Johnson to the Iraq War started by Tony Blair. In doing so, he confirms a badly kept secret of British media: Snow is and always has been a socially-conscious liberal with fairly orthodox left-wing views.
The book is not a behind-the-scenes tell-all in which Snow titillates the reader with ripping anecdotes and gossip. It uses stories he has covered and reflections on his privileged upbringing to build a platform upon which to mount his charge against social injustice. “Inequality is the story behind so many stories. It is the key issue at the heart of everything that is going on today,” he writes.
It’s serious stuff, yet there is also a deftness to Snow’s writing. It is unfussy and unpretentious, sure of what it wants to say. But Snow overdoes it at times with performative self-deprecation that may be a form of inverted vanity or insecurity. He wants a little too much to be liked by his readers.
In his assessment of issues such as the need for more public investment in housing, or the failures of Brexit, or the dynamics that have turned Russia into the menace that it is today, Snow is coherent and consistent: that a blithe acceptance of inequality is the cause of many ills.
While he remains generally disciplined about not dishing too much salacious dirt from his long career as a journalist, he does indulge in some pithy verdicts on most of the UK prime ministers he has interviewed over the years. He reveals a mutual affection between himself and Maggie Thatcher, who used to flirt with him even though they disagreed politically.
He dismisses Johnson as a “chancer”, and David Cameron as ultimately “superficial”. He admired Gordon Brown’s social conscience but considered him a “slightly tragic figure” due to his failure to break ranks and oppose the Iraq War.
Snow only occasionally falls into the trap of accusing those with whom he politically disagrees of having moral failings, or of being driven by bad-faith motives. Sometimes people simply have different ideas on the best way to achieve things.
For all his skill at identifying society’s problems and his genuine desire to create a better world, Snow still falls down the hole into which so many other well-meaning liberals stumble. Ultimately, he gives little insight into how to go about fixing things beyond a vague call for change. He argues passionately that society must do this or that, but rarely does he say how.
As the book’s title suggests, Snow is adept at describing the state that Britain is currently in. This good book would be better if Snow was able to lay out in more detail how to plot a navigable route to a better future.
Mark Paul is London Correspondent of The Irish Times
