Review - Jon Snow (From Stroud News and Journal)

Review - Jon Snow

OF that famously impromptu live interview with a finger-jabbing Alastair Campbell, Jon Snow recalled seeing his career flash before his eyes.

It was one of those occasions, he said, where if you did a bad job everyone would remember, if you did OK no-one would.

The veteran reporter and Channel 4 News anchorman, who was in town to promote his book, Shooting History, held a packed Cheltenham Town Hall enrapt on Tuesday with an engrossing account of a life in journalism and frontline view of our ragged world.

He did not pull any punches either, winning spontaneous applause when he asked his audience exactly what former BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan had got wrong.

The dossier was "sexed up" and Campbell was the culprit, he said.

Dismayed by how emasculated the UN has become in the wake of the Iraq war, a solution, he ventured, would be for world leaders to elect the most able of their cabinet members to be shut away in conference to create the United Nations anew - a kind of second Versailles.

Deceptively youthful Snow, now into his 50s, exuded passion for news. Journalism, he said, remains one of the few careers where you can do anything so long as you really want to.