Why I can still be an energetic new dad aged 75
Legendary broadcaster Jon Snow tells hannah Stephenson how he made the late switch from chasing scoops to childcare
It’s hard to imagine awardwinning news journalist Jon snow chasing a toddler around his London home little more than a year after his retirement from Channel 4 News, which he presented for 32 years.
Two years ago, he and wife Dr Precious Lunga, a Zimbabwean epidemiologist, had a son via surrogate and doesn’t see his age as a barrier to fatherhood. Now 75, Jon, who has reported from war zones
and revolutions during his career, doesn’t fear being an older dad – he has two grownup daughters from a previous long-term relationship.
And while he’s no longer jumping on his bike to whizz through the capital to chase a story, in many ways he hasn’t really slowed down.
He seems to be thoroughly enjoying fatherhood with Tafara – Zimbabwean for “we are blessed”.
He said: “He’s not a difficult child in any form.”
Jon said he wouldn’t describe himself as a totally hands-on dad. “There’s a lot of chasing,” he said. “His mother is a very hands-on mother but I play my part. I’m an attentive dad. We get on very well, we play a lot.”
He added: “Despite the fact I’m 75, I don’t feel it. I still feel full of energy and zest and interest. I’m sure one can talk one’s way into elderly life but I have failed to do so, so far.”
He trains every day, cycles wherever he can and walks a lot with his dog and the baby, so considers himself fit. He doesn’t like to think what the situation will be like in 10 years’ time.
“I don’t think there’s any point worrying about what it’s going to be like in my 80s. I’m enjoying being in my 70s and having a really good time with him. “Hopefully he will have a long and lovely relationship with me. What could be more joyous than to have a very plugged in, very clever, very attractive, very active young man in the house?”
Jon says it took him about a year to ease into retirement in 2021 after his five-decade career, from getting thrown out of university for protesting apartheid to interviewing every prime minister from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson.
He said: “If you get up at the same time every day and get on your bicycle at half past eight, get in for the editorial meeting and hit the road five days a week, when it stops it’s definitely a big jump.” He had been reporting for ITN before presenting Channel 4 News, covering Iran during the revolution and South America in Reagan’s presidency. So leaving news was a huge transition. He said: “The way I coped was to write a book, which was very absorbing, and also the feeling that I could now write anything I wanted.”
The book, The State Of Us, is part memoir, part rallying cry to tackle inequality, fight injustice, diversify politics and recover our sense of community.
It begins with a story in which Jon discovers that a 12-year-old from London, who had won a debating contest judged by him and Bill Gates, had died weeks later in the Grenfell Tower fire.
The story, and the fact Grenfell is in Kensington and Chelsea, home of upper-middle classes in crescents just streets away – is just one of a number of recollections which looks at class inequalities.
“If Grenfell had been occupied by bankers and people from the upper echelons of society, you sense that there would have been fire alarms, self-sealing doors and sprinklers,” he wrote.
Jon’s father was a bishop and headmaster of a public school, his mother a pianist.
The youngster was in the cathedral choir at Winchester and went to public school. He ended up scraping some A-Levels at Scarborough Technical College before working with VSO in Uganda and later for New Horizon, a charity for homeless young people, of which he remains a patron.
He said: “I encountered people less fortunate than myself. That played a part in the way I approached my journalism. I was always trying to look at the whole picture and recognise that a great deal of it was about inequality.”
He misses the Channel 4 News team but he’s adjusted and has kept his hand in with the documentary, How To Live To 100, screened earlier this year on Channel 4.
“I’ve got lots of of clues and I’m sure I’m going to make it,” he said.
● The State Of Us by Jon Snow is out now, priced £20.
Despite the fact I’m 75, I don’t feel it. I still feel full of zest