Jon Snow and his lifelong drive to give voice to those at the margins

In any case, here I am schlumping around the Mount Royal Hotel in Princes Street, Edinburgh. It’s become a hive of journalists, observers and news crews, pre-eminent among them being Channel 4 News.

The show has cued me up to face-off with the psychologist (and No supporter) Carol Craig. But I’ve just come from a flight then a soundcheck and I ask, weakly and generally, if there’s any way I can get a shower here...

“Of course, Pat! Use my room! Here’s the key!” Jon Snow, anchor of the show, brightly thrusts his card at me. I’ve been on the show several times before, once notably when I was on my game enough to give Jack McConnell, the then first minister, a mild indy monstering (I remember Jon’s glee at the exchange).

He asks me how things are looking for Yes (I give the verbal version of a shoulder-shrug) and with a big smile, he replies: “It could be a revolutionary moment, couldn’t it? The point is that people like me, from my class, have been running things for so long – and look how we’ve messed it up”.

I scan the faces in their temporary office, surprised to hear the anchorman reveal his agenda. The room, though knackered, is beaming smiles at him.

I tiptoe into his room (which I don’t give the once-over), dive into the shower and quickly get dressed. Before I leave, there is one inescapable and inimitable item that cannot go unremarked upon: an open travel bag with a cascade of iridescent ties, ready for selection…

Stories like this – blending kindness and idealism, manners and curiosity – are tumbling out everywhere, triggered by the news that Jon Snow will be retiring as the lead journalist on Channel Four News at the end of this year.

For viewers, especially in this polarising last decade of austerity, populism, constitutional upheaval and climate emergency, the show has exemplified the old cliché: news journalism should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”.

As UK Government ministers have boycotted the show, its investigations and focus have become more radical, more the view from below, whether that’s taken from the UK or globally.

I’m surely not the only person who clings more and more to its 7pm slot during the lockdown.

You hope to see some anger and critique of our increasingly unaccountable, duplicitous elites. You are usually satisfied.

And the journalist who displays that ethos most explicitly is Jon Snow. His 2017 James MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival gives the most biographical clues as to why he radiates such empathy and concern.

But before we anatomise that, a few more stories I’ve heard from colleagues past and present (“unattributed, OK?” Yes, OK) in the last few days.

There’s the time that Snow came into the 9am news meeting, accompanied by a homeless person he’d found outside the ITN offices on London’s Gray’s Inn Road (where Channel 4 News is based).

Jon announced: “I’m the chair of a homeless charity. How could I ignore him?” I’m told that the news team then sprang into action, eventually finding the man somewhere to sleep by the end of the workday.

READ MORE: Jon Snow to leave Channel 4 News after 32 years, broadcaster confirms

Another characteristic incident comes from 2014. One day the Channel 4 management were giving the Tory MP Philip Davies a tour of the Gray’s Inn building. Davies had been harshly critical of C4’s political correctness, including over “token” ethnic minorities.

“It seems to me that among your figures, the people who are under-represented at Channel 4 are white people”, the MP had already splurted to the Culture, Media and Sport committee.

As my correspondent continues: “It was meant to be a goodwill visit to mend the fences but the journalists knew nothing about it. Snow marched straight up to Davies, gesturing at various senior members of staff who were black or Asian and shouted: ‘Here you are, here’s some ethnic minorities – tell them how token they are.’

“A visibly distressed Davies fled the newsroom.”

There are two bits of Snow’s personal formation breaking through these stories. As a young man of 22, trying to break into journalism but failing, Snow took a job as the director of New Horizon, a day centre for homeless and vulnerable teenagers. (David Frost interviewed him about drug abuse on his show.)

Snow remained its chair for the next 45 years, throughout which it “informed my journalistic life” (while admitting “I was better at talking about what we did in the centre than actually doing it”).

His MacTaggart Lecture, given in 2017, is heavy with the topics of Brexit and Grenfell. Snow is harshly eloquent on how both that political shock and that terrible inferno humbles the pretensions of his profession.

“The explosion of digital media has filled neither the void left by the decimation of the local newspaper industry nor connected us any more effectively with ‘the left behind’, the disadvantaged, the excluded,” says Snow. “Never have we been more accessible to the public, nor in some ways more disconnected from the lives of others.”

The strength of C4 News’s reporting on how Covid has reinforced existing class and geographical inequalities is clearly driven from the centre and the front. Indeed, Snow was last in the headlines for claiming there was a “fair amount of bullshit which needed probing” during the pandemic.

“I think we’ve uncovered quite unsatisfactory situations. Everything from testing to Cummings, it’s been the media that has exposed it.”

The second anecdote places Snow as not just a liberal cosmopolitan, but someone actively interested in the subaltern and the non-Northern. His earliest adult experience was a year in Uganda with the VSO, where he came back “fired with an enthusiasm for Africa and for liberation – very much focused on South Africa and Nelson Mandela”.

Expelled from Liverpool University for his anti-apartheid activities, Snow eventually ended up interviewing Mandela for ITN where he got the leader to utter his famously healing statement “let bygones be bygones”.

There’s a moving section in the MacTaggart Lecture when Snow describes the loss of Firdows Kedir in the Grenfell fire. Kedir was a “remarkably poised hijab-wearing 12-year-old from West London” who Jon and Bill Gates had judged in April that year to be the clear winner of a national youth debating contest.

“I would like to believe that if Firdows had not passed away we would have one day heard her voice from a stage such as this,” says Snow. “We must turn this pipe dream into a reality for the very many others like her out there.”

The idea of an “anchorman/woman” is easily challenged these days, at both daft and serious levels. They’re vain, lushly tailored popinjays, only as smart as the news feed in their ears, according to Will Ferrell’s riotous portrayal in the movie franchise.

Or they’re establishment performers, raising a smokescreen of judiciousness and objectivity, which only shrouds a deeper framing of conventional wisdom.

Another version is Jon Snow – a liberal-lefty with all the well-spoken, well-grounded advantages of his class, who nevertheless over a few decades holds open an editorial space that tries to be the best fourth estate it can be. And seems very clear about the kind of person who should next take his place.

Thanks for the room, Jon. I hope we can answer your enthusiastic curiosity with the right result, next time.