Robert Peston
on finding love again after the death of his wife
‘Well I am optimistic!” cries Robert Peston, with the highpitched outrage of a much-maligned man. “And yet I have this reputation for being Dr Doom! I mean, there are still people who think I was single-handedly responsible not just for the demise of Northern Rock but the whole of the British economy,” the 57-year-old broadcaster goes on. “Back in 2007, I felt as though I was almost the most hated man in Britain, because people didn’t like me for saying that we were heading for the buffers, and quite a lot of people wrote to the BBC and basically tried to get them to lock me up in a cupboard.”
By this point, ITV’S political editor and the presenter of Peston on Sunday has dropped his plaintive tone and started chuckling quietly to himself from his slumped position on a Groucho Club sofa, confirming my impression of him as a fundamentally upbeat guy. In the handful of times I’ve met Peston, he’s always come across as warm and sprightly, and never angry or embittered: not even when he was feeling “like the most hated man in Britain”; not when BBC and then ITV audiences sniped on Twitter about his sing-song delivery (which they still do); not even after the death of his wife, the writer Sian Busby, from lung cancer in 2012.
And although his book titles read with the gaining exasperation of those cartoon characters whose faces fill with blood from the bottom up – Who Runs Britain? in 2008, How Do We Fix This Mess? in 2012 and now WTF – and this latest offering is a bewildered lament about Trump (“an impulsive, superficial, narcissistic, sexist, borderline racist”) and Brexit (which will “make all of us poorer”), Peston not only pokes fun at himself as the “bruised, battered and besieged liberal-minded metrosexual” that he is, but accepts that he has been “blind”, “blinkered” and “not really… living in the United Kingdom, but in a privileged metropolitan bubble or ghetto.”
In the poignant and eloquently written letter to his father, Maurice Peston, that top and tails the book (the Labour peer and academic economist died, aged 85, last April) the north London-born, Oxfordeducated journalist makes it clear that he intends to adopt Lord Peston’s life mantra – because his father was right to insist that “agonising about spilt milk is as pointless when making economic and political decisions as it is in our personal lives.”
“And I am broadly an optimist,” he reiterates. “Charlotte is always saying how unbearable my optimism is.”
Ah yes, Charlotte. The journalist Charlotte Edwardes has been a friend since 2003, when they were both at The Sunday Telegraph, and although the pair have clearly become close over the past year, Peston has always refused to “come out” about her publicly. Can we now call her his girlfriend? “Yes.” Oh good. Are they in love? “I think I’m allowed to say that we’re in love – yes.” And he looks a little surprised to be saying it aloud. “Life is unpredictable,” he shrugs. “A year after Sian died, a very famous business person I won’t name came up to me and said: ‘Why haven’t you got a girlfriend?’ And it just didn’t compute as a question because at the time it felt inconceivable that I would ever fall in love again. I was suffering from quite severe trauma, and it took a long time… so this was and is a very nice surprise.”
Peston never discusses either of his two boys – Maximilian, 20, and Simon, 32, Busby’s son with her first husband, Kees Ryninks – but he will say that both “get on well with Charlotte, which is lovely.” Does he ever wonder what his late wife would have thought of her?
“I do, and although they’re very different personalities and they would probably have a pretty robust conversation, they’re also both very smart and inquiring and I think they would like each other.”
In the immediate aftermath of his wife’s death, Peston tried to stay
‘I was suffering from quite severe trauma – this was a nice surprise’
strong for his sons and, crucially, as busy as possible. “I took on everything at once and refused all help, never stopping to look after myself.” He lost a lot of weight and his joints began to swell up in an extreme form of arthritis – then one day, he collapsed. “I’d been pushing myself way too hard, and it was my body’s way of saying ‘time to stop’.” The realisation came when a grief counsellor Peston and his boys had been seeing together – who usually worked with children – asked them each to pick a toy from a box “to represent how you see someone else in the room.” “Simon picked up a shark and said: ‘This is Dad, because the thing about sharks is that, if they stop swimming, they die’.”
Talking about his late wife of 14 years isn’t any easier five years on, but Peston doesn’t regret opening up about his grief when it was at its rawest. “I wrote a very emotional piece about our relationship as a foreword to her book [the acclaimed A Commonplace Killing
– completed shortly before Busby died] and I got so many letters from people saying that it shouldn’t be taboo to discuss grief, and how comforting they had found it. So even though, as a Brit, I did worry that talking about it was self-indulgent, I was pleased that some people had found it helpful. I thought it was fantastic when [Prince] Harry opened up about his grief about his mother.”
Public emoting can become problematic in a professional arena, however, Peston points out in the book, generating as it does an excitement that cold hard facts don’t. “And for the journalist (me), that is seductive,” he writes, “almost corrupting. I won’t pretend I was not flattered when drivers stopped their cars to congratulate me on what I had said about Grenfell.” In a series of passionate tweets, Peston declared why the Grenfell tragedy “shames us all”, highlighting, as it did, the breach of “a social contract between those of us lucky enough to have voices that are heard and those who don’t, that we should not put them in harm’s way.” If you wince at him being openly flattered at the reaction he got, it only illustrates his point, he says. “Because all the pieces that get people going now are about emotion rather than facts or argument. So the things on social media that have got me gazillions of hits are always the ones where
I’m basically crying in public. And, thankfully, I’m a very boring journalist and my instincts are always to take myself back to the facts, but when you see that many people ‘liking’ you on the basis of something that’s emotional, it’s seductive and it’s corrupting.”
Television is, of course, both of those things, and a lot has been written about Peston’s hair and clothes over the years. But, again, he will readily admit to a certain amount of personal vanity: “Look I’ve always been interested in clothes. I care about how I look, and I don’t want to look ridiculous on television. What I won’t do, for some reason, even as I get older, is make physical compromises for TV,” he frowns, adding that women shouldn’t be pressurised into doing so either. “And I do think that women being discriminated against for their age in TV is just so grotesque. I haven’t aged any better than any woman in broadcasting that I can think of, so when they pension off older women, those broadcasters are making a terrible mistake, because the public only care about them being good at what they do. And because if you’re going to sack a woman at 50, I should have been sacked at 50.”
Remembering something, Peston barks out a laugh. “Just before I left the BBC, an executive there made a comment about me having to ‘sort out my appearance’ and it reminded me of being back at Highgate Wood comprehensive and being told by a teacher that my uniform was ‘a total disgrace.’ On both occasions my response was basically the same: ‘I’m a straight-a student. F--- off!’”
‘I’ve always been interested in clothes – I care about how I look’