‘I may fail miserably’

Grief derailed Robert Peston after his wife died but now he has a new job – and a new Sunday morning TV series.

Robert Peston arrives 30 minutes late in a burst of scrambled energy that makes the air quiver, squeaks “sorrysorrysorrysorry” in a highpitched falsetto worthy of Freddie Mercury, before collapsing in a chair and immediately tilting himself backwards at a perilous angle.

His unusual broadcasting style has been often commented on but, in person, the way Peston talks, particularly initially, threatens to flatten you. Words unspool, without any pause for breath, in a drawl that manages to be simultaneously determined and lazy. His crumpled appearance, and slightly wild manner – fashionable clothes but a shirt that, when he stretches, escapes from his trouser waist to reveal a triangle of darkly hirsute flesh – is suggestive of a rock ’n’ roll roué after a long night of pleasuring by a cohort of groupies.

ITV’s new political editor (Peston’s first day in the office was the day his hero, David Bowie, died, on 10 January) is understandably preoccupied with the launch of his show, Peston on Sunday, only a week or so away when we meet. We cover a lot of ground in our time together – from dancing to Jewishness, vanity to football to grief – but first, we talk about why, in his opinion, the British public needs another political current affairs show on a Sunday.

Peston is gracious about the competition – Andrew Marr is BRILLIANT, and he is a HUGE fan of Andrew Neil. “I’m a very, very, very competitive journalist but I would never badmouth a colleague. Anyway, I think they’re all great and I’m not trying to be better than them, I’m just trying to be completely different – I hope that difference appeals to the public.”

Although, as he helpfully points out, he’s pretty good at thunderclap news stories – from Northern Rock etc’s collapse to David Cameron’s Blairmore Trust and inheritance admissions: “You notice that I interviewed the Prime Minister last week, where I did get an amazing story…” – what really interests Peston now is something more substantial than scoops. He wants to create an environment in which his guests – principally politicians but also other public figures – can lose their manufactured on-message glibness and reveal something deeper and more authentic about themselves. He was more pleased, he says (although I’m not sure I believe him), with the way Cameron talked about his father, “which I felt was genuine and it felt different from what he had said before” than with “the great, scoopy news”.

He loves journalism (“It’s in my bones”) and business and economics (in his ten years at the BBC he was editor of both) and is, as he says, “PASSIONATE that what goes on in politics, economics and business MATTERS to everybody, and I am passionate about getting people excited about things that get me excited and you don’t often get a blank piece of paper so that you can explain the world to people.”

His hope is that by somehow finding a way of getting his guests to open up and reveal what makes them tick, it will give the viewers a better understanding of the people who make decisions that affect our daily lives. “I am trying to create a space in which people who got out of the habit of speaking the truth and speaking confidently, can do both,” Peston says. “We want to try to get away from the horrible world where politicians feel they have to pre-prepare everything and that it’s too dangerous to actually say what they really think.” But when I ask him how he proposes to do what presumably every other self-respecting interviewer sets out to do, he shrugs: “I don’t know is the answer. I may fail completely miserably.”

Our discussion came on the back of me saying that aren’t all politicians boring now? Come to that, aren’t almost all public figures boring? Obviously there are notable exceptions, but the gulf between how interesting someone well known can be in a private conversation and the etiolated approximation of themselves on television seems to widen all the time. So how to deal with this blandification of our times?

Firstly, Peston agrees that politicians are far more interesting in private than in public – and over 30 years of talking to them, there have only been a very few “who I have thought completely useless and not worth talking to… no, I’m not going to name them.” Secondly, when public figures don’t play it safe, be it Germaine Greer or Stephen Fry, “then they get this incredible bucket of s*** poured on them, and so I think if we want people to say what they think, we’ve got to disagree with them in a less vicious and vindictive way. There’s nothing wrong with being courteous.”

When I ask him which parliamentarians he admires, he mentions Jeremy Corbyn – for his unspun authenticity. “Whether you love him or hate him, he does say what he thinks, OK? And not only that, he won’t talk to a crowd that is hand-picked by spin-doctors – he’ll talk to pretty much anybody.”

Peston’s desire for authenticity chimes with the rise in politics of characters who are out of the mainstream – from Nigel Farage to Corbyn, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US. “The big trends that are driving the popularity of these individuals is the belief that they don’t spin and, secondly, the other thing that has gone completely wrong for mainstream politicians, is that millions of people are still poorer than they were before 2008,” his voice rises, “and therefore they just feel let down by the establishment.”

Peston on Sunday, he hopes, will have the same sort of relaxed urbanity as an American chat show. There will be a comedy element – what he refers to as “the dangerous thing” – where comedians will come in and ask him, “the supposed expert”, questions about issues of the week: “It could work, or it could be a disaster.”

The one-hour show, which will go out at 10am, will have a main interview lasting 15 minutes or so – broken into two chunks – the hinterland section, and the more newsy part. In an ideal world, he would have Jose Mourinho as the second guest, and any of the top politicians – from Cameron to Corbyn – as the first. If he can’t land his dream guest Angela Merkel, he’s thinking of inviting Tracey Ullman on as the German Chancellor (the funniest impersonation of the comedian’s recent series).

Allegra Stratton, previously Newsnight’s political editor, now at ITV, will be what Peston describes as his sidekick on the show. His producer is Vicky Flind, wife of BBC news presenter Huw Edwards, whom he lured away from the corporation to join him.

Peston’s departure from the BBC was a torturous affair. He ping-ponged between the two until ITV’s director of television, Peter Fincham, offered him what proved to be the clincher, his own TV show – “a programme in my own image” – and the decision to defect was made a mere 15 minutes before the BBC was going to put out a press release announcing Peston’s own Newsnight show on Thursday evenings.

His late wife, the writer Sian Busby, who died of lung cancer in 2012, would have had long conversations with him, one imagines, about leaving the BBC. Peston must have missed her dreadfully while he was agonising over the decision (he still has bereavement counselling every couple of weeks). “Yes, of course,” he says, “so I talked to my boys instead [Max, 19, and his stepson, Simon, 31]. And they both said, originally, ‘You can’t leave the BBC! We love the BBC!’ Then I told them the reasons why I was doing it, and asked them what they thought and, wonderfully, they then said ‘OK, we get it – you’re completely right,’ which was amazing.” Do you think Sian would have said the same thing? “I think so, because she would see that there was an opportunity to do something serious.”

Sian died in September 2012 and three months later, Peston became incredibly ill. He was taken into a hospital and told that he might have cancer. “It was revolting. There were many tests and, in the end, they diagnosed something called reactive arthritis. What happened, we think, is that I had some kind of infection that triggered an auto-immune reaction, which meant that all my joints swelled up and I was in incredible pain and very run-down, and couldn’t really move. And then it just went away.”

I wonder if it was the physical manifestation of heartbreak, but he sees it as a consequence of organising everything and looking after everyone, still working, and his body rebelling. It was the illness, losing a stone or so in weight and going down a couple of trouser sizes, which led to an image change – longer hair, Elvis Costello specs, cooler clothes – that seemed to fascinate the nation. “I’ve wondered why I changed my look so much,” he says. “I think some of it was an inevitable new start kind of thing. You’re feeling absolutely shitty, miserable, everything’s ’orrible, and I think I sort of reclaimed a look I had – believe it or not – when I was a teenager. I suspect I was trying to reclaim happier times in some bizarre way.”

For a while, he didn’t think he would ever find happiness again and now says, slightly woodenly (the whole subject is mortifying for him): “I can imagine now being happy with another woman.” It’s a subject on which Peston is uncharacteristically reticent.

In his book Who Runs Britain?, Peston refers to his homoerotic feelings about David Bowie growing up. Just how homoerotic were they, Robert? “I fancied him,” he says. He woke up to John Humphrys announcing the sad news of Bowie’s death, “and I just went ‘WHAAAA-AAA-T? And then I had to shout up because Max, my boy, loves David Bowie – ‘Max! Max! He’s died!’”

He’s really into fashion, it turns out, and his biggest extravagance is buying shoes. His grandparents were East End tailors and his Jewish background is hugely important to him: “Not in a religious sense,” he says, “I’m not religious at all, but it’s a cultural thing. My father’s dad, Abraham, was a pleater – he had a business pleating skirts in the East End. [Robert’s father, Maurice, was an economist and Labour peer; his mother, Helen, worked for the NHS.] My mum’s dad was a tailor, then a mini-cab driver, and his wife had a shop on The Cut in Waterloo.

“My family were all, basically, East End Jews. If you’d grown up, as I did in the 60s, with all these relations, most of whom were religious – apart from my parents – culturally, it was a Jewish household, and that is a powerful upbringing. So if you were to ask me what I am, I would say, ‘I’m Arsenal and Jewish.’”

A few days after we met, Peston’s father died. When we speak about his dad’s passing, Peston says, “He’s left a big hole in my life and my family. My dad passionately believed in social justice and in making the world we live in a better place. He and I talked all the time – about the things that mattered – Arsenal Football Club and movies more than politics and economics. We were very close. He was fantastic at living well and eating well. We’d usually go to one of the great restaurants of London, a family tradition which started when I was six.”

Peston freely admits to having a big ego, being hugely competitive, ambitious and vain. He’s actually good fun, once he allows himself to engage in a bit of to and fro. He has a tendency to make bad jokes (sometimes in Latin) but he would be a laugh on the dance floor (favourite dance tune, Chic’s Le Freak) and shopping for clothes. My final question is to ask what is the silliest thing about him? “Oh my God, there’s so much,” he grimaces. “Erm, occasionally I take myself too seriously?”

Radio Times