‘I had a weird childhood’: Jon Snow on class, covering wars, and Margaret Thatcher

I 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 anchoring Channel 4 News, almost two years ago, and now he can finally tell us what he really thinks about everything.

Broadcasters 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. Before he joined Channel 4, he was Washington correspondent for ITN, and before that, a roving international reporter. He joined LBC in 1973, one of its first hires, meaning that for 50 of his 75 years, he has been under contractual obligation to keep his opinions to himself.

He still expresses himself extremely carefully, even cannily at times, though, indicating strong disapproval (of Jeremy Corbyn, in this instance) with a scrunched up mouth rather than any words. All I’ve got on tape is me saying: “Don’t make that face! I can’t quote your grumpy face.” He says, of his elaborate discretion: “The transition from being enslaved to the free world is not very easy at my age.” Slavery is a strong term for being nationally feted across five decades for your sober, thoughtful clarity and colourful socks. But it’s certainly an unusual thing to have to forswear his point of view.

Thatcher was a joy ... She was a sparring partner and a flirt. It would be too strong to say there was something sexual in it, but there was something going on

There was always a hum of speculation in Snow’s case that he was a secret leftie, and, latterly, a remainer. In 2017, he was reportedly heard shouting “F**k the Tories” at Glastonbury, and after that Grant Shapps refused to be interviewed by him. I take all that with a pinch of salt: frankly, we’re in a period in which “F**k the Tories” is barely even an opinion, it’s just how we greet each other, and senior Conservatives will find any excuse not to be interviewed, but I am intrigued to find out a little more about his political leanings.

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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.

In person, he rows back on this pretty swiftly. “Obviously one’s being provocative,” he says. “No, Blair wasn’t literally Putin, for God’s sake. War in a foreign land is a very challenging issue. The more collective it is, the more international it is, the more it is tied into the United Nations, Nato, whatever, the more comfortable I feel. And it wasn’t in 2003.” I wonder if he wishes he had been able to say that at the time. “No, I felt empowered to ask the questions, which I did. I wouldn’t want to cross the floor. I didn’t want to become an activist.”

The only time he has ever joined a campaign was in 1975 – Michael Foot’s bid to keep us out of the EU. It’s a piquant detail, given his taint of remaineyness, that he waves off with, “I was naive, and trying to cleanse my public school past.”

The State of Us starts with the Grenfell Tower fire, and that tragedy is the lens through which he describes his politics, his motivation, everything he thinks is wrong with Britain. “Grenfell is utterly inexcusable,” he says. “It’s an excellent and important moment in history to guide us on our way: the idea that the richest borough in this country even had a Grenfell, how disgraceful. The whole ethos was horrible, horrible. Very few people looking at Grenfell in a dispassionate way could conclude other than that there was genuine and aware policy to let people rot up at the top of that tower, whatever happened. People should be held to account for it.” Does he think people will be held to account? “I don’t think there’s any danger of that at all.”

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 and, in the book, identifies housing as the “central strut that keeps the whole rotten structure standing”, tracing the problem directly to property being valued as an asset: it is basically a Marxist point, that the exchange value for investors has come completely unstuck from the use value.

“Those aren’t Marxist terms, those are terms learned on the road. I worked in a day centre for homeless and vulnerable teenagers for three years,” he says, robustly, and I counter that maybe Marxists also learned it on the road. “Well, they can have it, but I happen to believe it. That doesn’t make me a Marxist.” This sounds bad tempered (from both of us) but was actually very friendly: and it gets to the heart of his stance. He loathes inequality, feels the hardship of others keenly, yet also loathes the idea of upheaval or radicalism. He both decries the status quo and upholds it, like a secular bishop.

Which makes sense, as his father was a bishop. “Very academic. He’d been to Winchester, he taught at Eton. Went to Oxford. The whole thing went like an express train.” The childhood he writes about was extremely cosy and sheltered: log fires, public school, wealth; he checks his privilege so often it’s like OCD. But when he describes his upbringing, it sounds quite sad. “The home I was raised in was pretty odd. In retrospect, now that I’m a father myself and my older children are in their 30s, I think I had a very weird childhood. I had a nanny. I didn’t see much of my father, who was always writing sermons. My parents were quite distant, emotionally. Public school is a dreadful thing to do to somebody.” His mother had alopecia totalis, “so she had no hair at all. And no confidence among men. I was never physically close to her.” He has two brothers, whom he hasn’t seen in “a number of years”.

“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 (the national union of public employees, which became Unison in 1993). 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.”

If, in the book, he constantly circles back to how unintelligent he is, in conversation he emphasises this even more: “I’m not very bright. I got abysmal O-levels”; “My school report at about the age of 16 said, ‘He sets himself low standards, which he fails to meet.’” I don’t really buy this, either as a bald fact or a thing he truly believes; it doesn’t tally with the life he has had, or his ambition. I wonder if there’s some other explanation for his lack of academic success. “Like what?”, he asks, beadily. Literally anything: rebelliousness; ADHD; trauma (a servant tried to molest him when he was six, but was interrupted); maybe he was just sad, boarding schools are pretty brutal. “I didn’t exactly get any encouragement,” he says, “but I loved to be a chorister. It was another family. You had 16 brothers, who you saw every single day and sang with every day.”

Having flunked his exams, he went to Scarborough technical college to get some undistinguished A-levels, spent a year volunteering as a teacher in Uganda, went to Liverpool university, which his father facilitated (he met a law professor on the train and talked his son into a place) but wasn’t impressed by (“I think he barely knew that Liverpool had a university”), then got kicked out for challenging the chancellor, the Marquess of Salisbury, on his support for South African apartheid. “It was utterly traumatic,” he says. “We were not expecting that at all. More or less every university was having minor rebellion. It was par for the course.”

He moved to London and, through his cousin, Peter Snow, met the Earl of Longford, who gave him New Horizon (a homeless young people’s walk-in centre) to run, “aged 19 to 23 or whatever it was”. A funny era, the 60s; full of possibility and ideas and change, but still one in which a well-connected scion of the upper classes would find it impossible to do anything other than succeed.

It was there that Snow met Madeleine Colvin, a lawyer whom he was with for 35 years until they split up in the early 2000s. They had two daughters and didn’t marry. New Horizon instilled in him a kind of radical pragmatism. “Frank Longford didn’t interfere, he helped us raise the money and let us get on with it. Imagine somebody coming in and wanting an abortion. Where do you go from there? You certainly don’t ring up Frank Longford and say, do you mind if we find an abortion counsellor?”

But Snow didn’t want to be a social worker, he wanted to get into journalism and, again through his cousin Peter, landed a job at LBC. “I’m a nepo baby,” he says wryly. “I would have been nowhere, but for nepotism.” A pause. “I don’t think that’s true, to be honest. It wasn’t just independent radio news, everybody was generating posts for journalists. It was a wonderful time to come of age. Also, because I’d been a chorister, I had a good voice. Cadence and delivery are really important in radio.”

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.” He was and remains quite surprisingly scathing about American society – “It’s absolutely incredible, actually, that so rich a being as the United States doesn’t look after its citizens. It’s quite extraordinary” – but relished his time as Washington correspondent and, later, diplomatic editor.

He returned to front Channel 4 news in 1989, in time to catch Margaret Thatcher in her pomp. “Thatcher was a joy. She was a gift. She was a sparring partner and a flirt. It would be too strong to say there was something sexual in it, but there was something going on. It wasn’t just sitting in front of a prime minister. It was everything from a primary schoolteacher, to nanny to semi-royalty, you were never quite clear where you were. Everybody talks about Maggie Thatcher as being a rigid thing. She wasn’t.”

Snow can find something good to say about almost everyone in public life, which speaks partly to his gregarious nature, but partly, too, of this complicated, establishment sense, that anyone in power is there for a reason. Even Boris Johnson, whom he calls a chancer, “but a chancer must be given his chance”. Why, though? This has been a terrible chapter in British politics. “Well, he had his chance and he f**ked up.” “But it would have been better,” I insist, “if he hadn’t had his chance.” “Well, we can say that now.” “I could have said that then!” Finally, he concedes, “I agree. I think history would say, what on earth possessed a political party to produce a leader like Boris Johnson? Because he never made sense to me, and I don’t think it really made much sense to anybody in the country. You wonder whether the Etonian accent and the rest of it in some way still has some allure to the British public.”

He doesn’t, however, have any direct criticism of Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss, although he concludes, sadly, “I think politics has actually become less fun. I don’t know what’s taken the fun out of it. We seem to run out of steam.” We can’t just have run out of people, I counter. It’s impossible. “I didn’t say people, I said steam. There’s a distinction.”

Snow will be dedicating at least some of his retirement time to parenting. In 2010 he married the distinguished epidemiologist and entrepreneur Precious Lunga, and remarks: “I’m very proud to be married to my wife, I’m proud of her neuro-scientific capacity, her PhD. I’m proud of the fact that she is a Zimbabwean and I’m very, very proud of the fact we have a two-year-old boy.” There’s something defensive, not in his tone but in his formulation, as if he’s answering a question I haven’t posed, like “what on earth is a 75-year-old doing with a wife 25 years his junior and a two-year-old son?” (I would never ask that, it would be rude). But I do ask whether he is a different kind of parent this time around – there is an entire generation between his first family and his second, after all. “I’d need notice of that question,” he says firmly. I’m not completely clear on whether he means, “time to prepare”, or “time to decide whether I want to answer it or not”.

He is not leaving broadcasting entirely; he has made two documentaries which are yet to air, one about “blue zones”, areas of the world where people live to remarkable ages, although this doesn’t reflect a personal longevity quest. “I can’t say that living forever is one of my ambitions. I’d like to remain sane until I die. Nobody wants any rotting.” Then, out of nowhere, he adds: “I’m an old bore. I’ve bored the pants off you.” He is actually way too frustrating, complicated, arch and elegant in his delivery to be boring. But I think he knows that.

Even as he leaves his anchorman spot, which he clearly loved, it is impossible to imagine him ever fully retiring: the values of the job haven’t changed, in his mind, so its importance hasn’t. “News values are about compassion,” he says. “They’re about observation. They’re about inwardly determining where right and wrong part company, determining the truth and then telling it in a way that wakes the viewer up.”

The State of Us by Jon Snow (Transworld, £20) is published on March 2nd. To support the Guardian, order your copy for £17.60 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.