Jon Snow Reveals Secret Alzheimers Battle

In more than 40 years of friendship, I’ve visited my former colleague Jon Snow and his wife, Precious, at their charming thatched cottage on the North Wessex Downs countless times. 

As I ring the doorbell, I can hear the unmistakable tinkle of a grand piano. Within moments Precious – a neuroscientist – answers, ushering me inside. 

And there he is, the instantly recognisable, always colourfully dressed 6ft 4in figure of ’s longest-serving newsreader. 

The man who reported on everything from the Iranian Revolution to the Covid pandemic, in an era when the evening TV news really mattered, is interpreting Bach with his usual grace and fluency. 

Leaping up he greets me affectionately in a lime-green jumper, the multi-coloured socks viewers so loved peeking out from beneath his trousers. 

‘Dear girl, how wonderful to see you,’ he bellows in the same authoritative tones that announced to TV viewers the fall of the Wall and the election of . 

‘Have you been here before?’ he asks, arms gesturing expansively around his cosy living room. 

There it is. The dawning realisation that dear Jon, at whose home I have spent many jolly weekends, might not be entirely certain who I am. 

As a journalist, Jon has spent his whole life charming people and making complete strangers feel like he is their best friend. 

I know he’s capable of using his impeccable manners to cover for the fact that he doesn’t recognise people because I’ve watched him do it countless times at parties. 

And the reason I suspect he is doing it now is that Jon has been privately battling Alzheimer’s disease for four years. 

The titan of the newsroom, one of the nation’s best-loved broadcasters and a member of the Snow broadcasting dynasty (reporter Peter is his cousin, historian Dan his first cousin once removed) has been struck by that cruellest of diseases, one which robs a phenomenally clever man of his great intellect, bit by agonising bit. 

He has invited me to his home this afternoon to reveal the devastating diagnosis, publicly, for the first time. 

There was no big eureka moment, just a collection of small peculiarities, memory blanks and processing difficulties that together became impossible to ignore, despite Jon’s acting abilities. 

After more than three decades on Channel 4 News he reluctantly agreed to retire and broadcast his last bulletin in December 2021, at the age of 75. 

His deterioration began almost immediately. Without the stimulation of the newsroom, he sank into a deep depression and appeared to lose his appetite for life. 

‘I used to make his favourite food like prawn linguine or scrambled eggs, and he would surreptitiously throw it in the bin when he thought I wasn’t looking,’ says Precious.

His friends tried to rally round, meeting him for lunch in his favourite north London cafe, cajoling him to do more painting, writing or playing the piano. He didn’t want to hear. 

‘Nobody ever rings. I’m forgotten,’ he would intone. It wasn’t true, of course. 

When you’ve worked in war zones and in the high-pressured environment of a newsroom, colleagues become like family. I checked around with the old gang; Sarah Smith, now based in the US for the BBC, Lindsey Hilsum at Channel 4 and Katie Razzall, also at the Beeb. 

They’d all been in touch, but Jon would forget that they’d rung him.

For that first year after his retirement Precious was unsure how much the changes in her husband were down to his depression or something else. 

But then, ten months after that last bulletin, he woke one morning and told her he was late for work. When she gently reminded him that he had retired from Channel 4 News, he looked crushed. 

As an epidemiologist with a PhD in neuroscience (her thesis looked at how the brain changes under stress), Precious knew that getting an early diagnosis can make a material difference. 

There is no cure, but new drugs have been found to slow down memory loss and mental decline in people with early onset Alzheimer’s. They’re not yet available on the NHS, but there are now around 130 drugs in clinical trials taking place around the world and there’s an urgent need for more patients to take part.

Initially, Jon was reluctant to see a doctor, insisting there was nothing wrong, even when everyone around him knew that wasn’t the case, and Precious was becoming ill with the strain of covering for him. 

‘Friends kept asking me if Jon was all right and I would have to lie and say he’s fine, but I knew he wasn’t,’ she tells me, recalling the chest pains and panic attacks she developed around the time.

Finally, in early 2023, Precious persuaded her husband to see a specialist. ‘He was given what’s called a mini-mental state exam and he aced it. He got 29 out of 30,’ she recalls with a wry smile.

‘It was only later, when they did a brain scan, that we got a diagnosis.’

The news would be devastating for anyone, but for Jon it was something he had actively feared, having seen it destroy his mother, killing her in her 80s after more than a decade with the illness. 

As the middle of three sons born to George Snow, a former Bishop of Whitby and his concert pianist wife Joan, Jon was particularly close to his mother, and wrote of their bond in a 1996 collection of essays entitled Sons And Mothers. 

‘I was the apple of her eye,’ he wrote. When Joan became too ill to live alone and had to go into care, Jon told an interviewer: ‘It is a horrible disease because she is still physically your mum. She sounds like her, but you can’t have a conversation with her.’ 

In Jon’s case, the first step after diagnosis was getting him on to a clinical trial in 2024. ‘Partners have to take part as well, so we started discussing it with each other and the medical team and that really helped both of us come to terms with what was happening inside his brain,’ says Precious.

The clinic advised them to put plans in place for the future. But again, it was not a conversation Jon wanted to have. 

The couple had hoped to travel when Jon retired, spending time in Africa or the US, where Precious – 27 years her husband’s junior – could continue her work in public health and Jon could look after their young son. 

In his 2005 memoir Shooting History, Jon frequently expresses regret about being an absent father to his two daughters Leila and Freya (now in their 40s), and leaving their mother Madeleine, his former partner of 33 years, to mind the homefront while he was off covering wars and revolutions. 

When he married Precious in 2010 and welcomed a baby via surrogacy in 2021, the pair had hoped that parenthood might be different this time round and that, with retirement, Jon could be a hands-on father. 

Of course, Precious was aware that starting a family with a much older man was not without its risks. ‘I work in the health field so I knew the statistics, but he was very active, he cycled everywhere and exercised, barely drank, was a healthy eater, and all these factors protect you against dementia.’

And although he’s only five, Precious has told me that their little boy is aware that something is happening to his father and has become a little carer himself. 

Father and son play the piano and paint together and Jon (a passionate cyclist) has taught his son to ride a bike. Instead of reading the news every evening, he now reads his little boy a bedtime story.

‘When Jon is tired, he gets less coherent, so our son will say, “Dada, you need to rest”,’ says Precious. 

On the day I visit, I am unsure what new version of Jon I will encounter. In the past few years I’ve watched my friend change from someone who was passionately interested in discussing news and world politics to becoming disengaged. 

He’s still warm and friendly, but our conversations are circular and limited to small talk. His questions are repetitive because he doesn’t remember the answer I gave him ten minutes earlier. Some days he’s more lucid than others, but every time I see him, a little bit more of the old Jon has slipped away.

Sinking into a large comfy sofa, Jon’s artwork filling the wall in front of me, I chit-chat before gently asking him to describe the impact of his diagnosis. His reply is stilted. ‘I don’t know really. I don’t feel disabled in any way.’

His voice trails off. ‘I mean sometimes I doubt whether I’ve really got it. I don’t know if it’s widespread knowledge.’

He looks me in the eye with a cheeky smile trying to make light of my question. ‘Have people said anything to you about me being bonkers?’ 

I reply in the same vein, joking that he’s always been bonkers but, yes, his friends had noticed him becoming increasingly forgetful. ‘That’s normal at the age of 79, isn’t it?’ he retorts rather firmly.

Precious gently interjects. ‘I think you are feeling quite happy today. You’re in a good mood because Kirsty is here so you don’t feel there is anything wrong, but there will be other mornings when you wake up very anxious because you’re aware that things are not well in your brain. I can tell because you bite your nails when you’re anxious.’

My heart aches for my handsome, dapper friend. In almost 40 years of knowing him I’ve never seen him unkempt, and the thought of those elegant fingers, more usually seen clutching his TV script, gnawed to the quick, is jarring. 

I first became aware of Jon as a roving ITV reporter in the early 1980s when I invited him to speak at the London School of Economics Students’ Union, where I was an undergraduate. 

After being thrown out of Liverpool University for student activism, he’d taken a circuitous route into journalism, eventually reaching ITN in 1976 where his cousin Peter already worked, followed by Channel 4 in the late 1980s. 

Tall, blond and effortlessly posh, he cut quite a dash onscreen reporting from the world’s hotspots. At that time, a civil war was raging in El Salvador, and Jon was there dodging bullets and uncovering mass graves. 

Some years later, as a correspondent and his co-presenter on Channel 4 News, I would watch him in morning editorial meetings and marvel at his Tigger-like enthusiasm and endless curiosity. 

Never jaded or cynical, he is one of the most passionately committed journalists I know. Reporting the news runs through his veins like a life-giving force and in his more lucid moments he talks about the fight for early Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis in much the same way he would expose a murderous regime or a corporate cover-up. 

‘If I don’t speak out, who will?’ he asks. 

In England, more than a third of people with dementia don’t have a diagnosis and, despite being one the country’s biggest killers, dementia research lags way behind cancer research. According to the Alzheimer’s Society, for every 45 patients taking part in late-stage cancer clinical trials, just one person took part in dementia trials. 

‘Life doesn’t end with an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, but it changes dramatically,’ says Precious. The fact that people were quick to write off her husband continues to anger her. 

‘You can have Alzheimer’s and still be a valuable member of society, but you need support to navigate it.’ 

After some thought, the couple decided they could best help raise awareness through film. They turned to director Laura Warner and producer Ben de Pear, a personal friend and the former editor of Channel 4 News.

Initially, the plan was to make a documentary about living with Alzheimer’s disease, but then something happened that changed the direction of the project.

While the family were on holiday at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, where Precious grew up, Jon fell into conversation with a local woman who told him about a major environmental disaster in neighbouring Zambia where a dam belonging to a Chinese-owned copper mine had collapsed, releasing millions of litres of toxic, acidic waste into the river and surrounding land.