Presenter of ITV's Peston on Wednesdays
Robert Peston is a journalist and presenter for ITV, born in April 1960 to a Jewish Family. He associates himself as culturally rather than religiously Jewish. His father Maurice Peston was an economist and Labour life peer, and Robert also is a Labour supporter.
He was brought up in North London and went to Highgate Wood Secondary School and then to Oxford University where he gained a second class degree in Philosophy Politics and Economics. He then went to study in Belgium at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
He briefly worked as a stock broker for Williams de Broe, before going into journalism working on the Investors’ Chronicle in 1983. Three years later he joined the Independent at its launch. In 1989 He briefly left the Independent to become the Deputy City editor of the short live Sunday Correspondent, before returning to the Independent 1990 to take up the role of City Editor of the Independent on Sunday.
From 1991 to 2000, he worked for the Financial Times. At the FT, he was – at various times – Political Editor, Banking Editor and head of an investigations unit[8] (which he founded). During his time as Political Editor, he memorably fell out with the then Downing Street Press Secretary Alastair Campbell, who regularly mimicked Peston's habit of flicking back his hair, and once responded to a difficult question with the words: "Another question from the Peston school of smartarse journalism." He became close friends with fellow journalist, now PR man, Roland Rudd, where the two were known as the "Pest and the Rat". His last position at the FT was Financial Editor (in charge of business and financial coverage).
In 2000, he became editorial director of the online financial analysis service Quest,[8] owned by the financial firm Collins Stewart. At the same time, he became a contributing editor of The Spectator and a weekly columnist for The Daily Telegraph. In 2001, he switched allegiance from the Telegraph to the Sunday Times, where he wrote a weekly business profile, Peston's People, and left The Spectator for the New Statesman, where he wrote a weekly column. In 2002, he joined The Sunday Telegraph as City editor and assistant editor. He became associate editor in 2005.
In late 2005, it was announced that Peston would succeed Jeff Randall as BBC Business Editor, responsible for business and City coverage on the corporation's flagship TV and radio news programmes, the BBC News Channel, its website and on Radio 4's Today.
While no impropriety on the part of Peston was implied, it was claimed in The Observer on 19 October 2008, that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) could enquire into the source of one of Peston's scoops which, in September 2008, in the fraught atmosphere of the global financial crisis, revealed that merger talks between HBOS and Lloyds TSB were at an advanced stage. In the minutes before the broadcast, buyers purchased millions of HBOS shares at the deflated price of 96p; in the hour following it, they could be sold for 215p. The Conservative MP Greg Hands had written to the SFO about this.
On 4 February 2009, Peston appeared as a witness at the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee, along with Alex Brummer, (City Editor, Daily Mail), Lionel Barber (editor of the Financial Times), Sir Simon Jenkins (The Guardian) and Sky News Business Editor Jeff Randall to answer questions on the role of the media in financial stability and "whether financial journalists should operate under any form of reporting restrictions during banking crises."
On 28 August 2009, Peston had a highly publicised row with James Murdoch, following the latter's MacTaggart lecture. More recently, he repeatedly broke stories relating to News International's involvement with phone hacking at times which were perceived as advantageous to the company, leading to criticism that he had become a Murdoch stooge.
Peston is the founder of Speakers for Schools, a pro-bono education venture which organises speakers from the worlds of business, politics, media, the arts, science, engineering and sports to give talks for free in state schools.
On 17 October 2013, Peston was appointed Economics Editor of BBC News, replacing Stephanie Flanders who was appointed as Chief Market Strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management. He continued as Business Editor, as well until his replacement Kamal Ahmed took over the post on 24 March 2014.
On 4 October 2015, it was announced that Peston would leave the BBC to join ITV News as their Political Editor, replacing Tom Bradby who became the main presenter of News at Ten. Peston made his last appearance on BBC News on 25 November 2015, and his first appearance on ITV's News at Ten on 11 January 2016. He had a significant scoop in April 2016, when Prime Minister David Cameron stated in an interview he had profited from his father's offshore Blairmore Holdings trust, after information about the trust had been disclosed in the Panama Papers release.
He presents ITV's new weekly political discussion show, Peston on Sunday, which started on 8 May 2016. In 2018, the programme moved to a Wednesday night timeslot, rebranded as Peston.
In December 2019, Peston apologised for incorrectly tweeting, without verification, that a Labour activist had punched a Conservative Party adviser. Footage was soon released showing that this was not true; he later apologised for his remarks and retracted them. In 2020, he said that Boris Johnson's government had become socialistic, and was "more Castro than Castro".
Books
Peston published his biography of Gordon Brown, Brown's Britain, in January 2005. It details the rivalry between Brown and the then Prime Minister Tony Blair. Brown's Britain was described by Sir Howard Davies, former director of the London School of Economics, as "a book of unusual political significance". The cover of the book describes how "Peston was given unprecedented access to Gordon Brown and his friends and colleagues." Having told Brown's side of the Blair/Brown power struggle, it is believed that Peston used the relationship then built up with Brown for many of his later financial news story "scoops" at the BBC.
In February 2008, Hodder & Stoughton published Peston's book Who Runs Britain? How the Super-Rich are Changing our Lives. In The Guardian, Polly Toynbee said of it: "Reading Peston's book, you can only be flabbergasted all over again at how Labour kowtowed to wealth, glorified the City and put all the nation's economic eggs into one dangerous basket of fizzy finance."
In September 2012, Hodder & Stoughton published How Do We Fix This Mess? The Economic Price of Having it All and the Route to Lasting Prosperity. The Observer described it as "A must read...mandatory reading for anyone who wants to have a voice in where we go from here."
His book WTF? was published by Hodder & Stoughton in November 2017 and charts the events that led up to the 2016 Brexit referendum. Whistleblower, his first novel, appeared in September 2021. The protagonist is a lobby journalist (political reporter) for the fictional Financial Chronicle and the colourful background to the story, set at the time of the 1997 general election in Britain, reflects Peston's detailed knowledge of his subject.
Private Life
Peston was married for 14 years to a former school friend - British-Canadian writer Sian Busby. Sadly she died of lung cancer in 2012. He has a step-son from that marriage Maximillian.
He is an ardent Arsenal fan and lives in Muswell Hill, North London.