How ‘chaos’ keeps following Robert Peston’s busy career
WHERE ROBERT Peston goes, chaos reigns – at least, that’s the way he sees it. Following a career in newspaper journalism, he joined the BBC as its business editor and was almost immediately pitched into reporting on the financial meltdown – then, only months after becoming ITV’s political editor in 2016, the UK voted for Brexit, Donald Trump became US president and both of Britain’s chief parties changed leadership.
“Some would say it’s not amazingly great for the country,” Peston laughs. “But obviously it’s jolly nice for me because it keeps me busy.”
His attempt at understanding how society can find a way out of chaos – a book titled, provocatively, – will bring him to Sheffield’s Off The Shelf festival later this month, and he has phoned to talk from the ITV studios during another frenetic day.
He’s looking forward to taking questions in Sheffield, a city that voted for Brexit.
The audience can expect some outspokenness – he was in the headlines this month for saying the BBC was not impartial enough during the EU referendum campaign. The seismic poll result was the reason he wrote in the first place. “I’ve been a journalist for 30 years since the early 1980s, and my stock-in-trade has always been trying to predict the big trends, as it were. And I got Brexit wrong,” Peston admits.
He assumed people would vote to remain in order to achieve ‘the outcome that wouldn’t make them a bit poorer’, and was ‘genuinely shocked’ by the stance of those who wanted to leave – ‘a majority of people on below-average incomes, people who live in council housing, the unemployed’.
“I wanted to understand why they were so angry, why they looked at what David Cameron and George Osborne were saying and just took the view it didn’t matter to them. Having learned my lesson over Brexit, I did anticipate Americans would vote for Trump.”
Less affluent people are ‘rebelling’, he believes, because their wages have stagnated for years. “It would be completely rational for many of those people to conclude that the likes of David Cameron or Tony Blair had not been running this place for them.” In the book, Peston sets out some potential solutions – one of which is a ‘wealth tax’, an annual levy of one per cent on all net assets greater than £500,000.
Now 58, the broadcaster became a household name with his exclusive on the collapse of Northern Rock in 2007 and for explaining the ensuing recession to viewers of BBC News. He worked as a stockbroker before switching to reporting on the markets, eventually spending nearly a decade with the His early days at the BBC were marked by comments about his broadcasting style and he remembers the credit crunch as an ‘unbelievably intense’ time. “That was seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”
Things are a little different now, with his weekly ITV politics show recently moving from Sunday mornings to Wednesday evenings – something he says allows him to see more of his family. His partner is journalist Charlotte Edwardes; he has a son, Maximilian, with his late wife the author Siân Busby, who died of lung cancer in 2012, leaving her son from a previous marriage, Simon.
In November, Peston will become chairman of Hospice UK, taking over the role from Lord Michael Howard, the former Conservative party leader.
“If you’d asked me at any point in my life was I ever likely to succeed Michael Howard in any job whatsoever, I would have found that hysterically funny,” he says. “It turns out life is stranger than fiction.”
Robert Peston appears on Monday, October 22, at 7.30pm in Sheffield University’s Octagon Centre. Tickets £10 in advance. Visit www.offtheshelf. org.uk.