JON SNOW: Unafraid to stick his neck out
He has 100 of them at any one time and wears them up to 12 times each on television. Then they go to charity auctions, where they sell for hundreds of pounds. What else could we be talking about but Jon Snow’s ties? Yet, in a moment of coruscating honesty, Snow has admitted that he sees no future for the tie, and that off air he rarely wears one.
Snow, widely lauded as the perfect newsman for his intelligence, clarity and lack of ego, would squirm at the thought of being regarded a celebrity, and this makes it all the more important to tell him that this tie thing will upset a lot of Channel 4 News watchers. People trust him, and appreciating his exuberant and classy ties is a harmless enough habit. But Snow is fearless. “My preference would be for Iranian collarless shirts, which can be rather beautiful,” he says.
Snow’s aesthetic sense was honed when, as a Winchester chorister, he found himself bored by sermons and distracted by the textures within his impressive surroundings. The middle son of a bishop, he was sent to boarding school at 7 and grew up largely apart from his parents, whom he barely knew. The result, he says, is that he had no sense of family, though he went on to have one of his own: he has two daughters by the human rights lawyer Madeleine Colvin. Earlier this year, a newspaper retracted bizarre allegations that a young freelance journalist had had an affair with him, and Snow gracefully accepted the apology.
He prefers to present himself as an unexciting man – a perfectly reasonable way of protecting his privacy – and his power as a broadcaster is that he can convey excitement about a story without showing emotion. Not that he is prone to analyse what he does, and that lack of vanity, combined with his liberal credentials, only enhances his appeal.
Advertisement
But however dull he would like us to believe him to be, he has had his moments. At Liverpool University he failed to finish his law degree because he was suspended for taking part in an antiapartheid protest. His journalistic career began at LBC radio and moved to ITN, where he turned down an approach from the intelligence services, which wanted him to combine reporting with spying. He has been at Channel 4 since 1989, and has every intention of continuing way past his 60th birthday this year. Ethiopia, El Salvador, Afghanistan, Kosovo: you name it, and he’s been a foreign correspondent there. But he still pitches up at morning meetings in his bicycle clips, does his evening stint and slots his committees and charities in between. He turned down an OBE and never boasts, although he did once claim to be very good at boiling eggs.
He is a force, which doesn’t mean that we know him, but does mean that we respect him. Not a bad place to be.