Robert Peston: ‘Liz Truss looked broken when I told her she'd trashed the Tories'

Telegraph

12-04-2025

Born in 1960, Robert Peston read philosopy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and began his career as a stockbroker in the City, before shifting direction to journalism. After spells at The Independent, the Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph, he became the BBC's business editor in 2005, and broke multiple scoops during the 2007 and 2008 financial crisis. After two years as economics editor, he left the BBC in 2015 to become ITV's political editor, launching his show Peston on Sunday – later renamed simply Peston – in 2016. He has one son, Max, with his late wife, Siân, who died in 2012, and is in a long-term relationship with Guardian journalist Charlotte Edwardes.
Best childhood memory?
We always did Passover with my grandparents, Joe and Rose, my great-aunt and uncle and sometimes their grandchildren. It was always a big, bustling, chaotic meal, partly because my dad, who died in 2016, was an arch rationalist and thought all religion was hocus-pocus. He never rejected his Jewish heritage, though, so there was always this slight sense of tension at Jewish, semi-religious events. It was one of those occasions where the whole family felt unified and came together, and every single year horrifically undrinkable red wine got spilt over my grandmother's pristine white tablecloth. And the great thing about our kind of chaotic Judaism is that although traditional Passover meals can go on for hours before you eat anything, we always rushed through the religious stuff straight into my grandmother's rather extraordinary chopped liver and roast chicken.
Best day of your life?
I know it's a cliché, but it would have to be the day my son, Max, was born. There are certain events in your life that are imprinted on your memory in an astonishingly indelible way. He was born at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and my late wife hadn't found either of her pregnancies easy [she also had a son from a previous relationship], and the day that he was born, I just felt an overwhelming sense of happiness.
Best political interview?
Looking back, it feels more like an event than an interview, but during the day that Liz Truss sacked her chancellor, she did a press conference, and I was the last person to ask a question. I said, 'You've trashed the Conservative Party 's arguably only asset, which is its reputation for financial and economic competence. Do you want to apologise?' It was a really painful moment because she just froze and I actually thought she was going to burst into tears – it was one of those moments that I just thought, 'Oh my God, I've gone too far,' as in the end, even though it's my job to hold people to account, one is not immune to people's humanity. Whatever one thinks about her performance as prime minister, she just looked utterly broken. She did her normal thing of not apologising and sidestepped the question, then she just walked off the stage. It was the shortest press conference ever. It felt like a very big and dramatic moment.
Best personality trait?
That I don't give up. The thing that's always driven me is getting scoops, and I've written about that addiction to getting scoops in both my thrillers, The Whistle Blower and The Crash. You've got to have a curious mind about what's going on in the world that might interest people, but also you have to keep going. If you get knocked back, you've got to pick yourself up and carry on and be persistent. And that's what I do; I just keep going.
Best thing about OCD and ADHD?
I had quite serious obsessive-compulsive disorder as a teenager and although I've never been formally diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, I've self-diagnosed myself with it, but the one great advantage it does give me is the ability to hyper-focus. If I've got a project that I really care about, for example writing a book or finishing an investigation, I can focus on it and screen out pretty much every bit of noise, which is very helpful professionally but incredibly frustrating for family and friends who care about me, because they can struggle to get in.
Best decision?
Moving away from print journalism into broadcasting is certainly the most important career decision I've made. When the job as business editor at the BBC came up immediately before the financial crisis, because I'd been City editor at The Sunday Telegraph and I had a good understanding of banks and financial markets from my earlier career, I was in good position to get lots of scoops about it and I immediately became a much more visible and, I suppose, much more famous journalist and broadcaster than I might have been if I'd taken that job in quieter times. So it was a very lucky break, and I could never have known that it would transform my life quite as much as it did.
Best advice you've ever received?
My dad was obsessed with the concept of there being no point crying over spilt milk. You just move on. In economics that's an important concept, where if something's failing and you decide to change direction there's no point worrying about that sunk cost. That spilt milk. You have to consider what the additional costs might be. More importantly, it's an incredibly important concept for life. We all make mistakes, and we have a temptation – and I know I do this – that when we've made mistakes, we learn from it, you try not to do it again, but at that point you regard it as spilt milk, but you write it off and then you get on with your life.
Worst childhood memory?
The only thing that does quietly haunt me – and my sister, Juliet, says she doesn't remember this – but I was the older brother, and I was very mean to her a lot. I remember teasing her in a really horrible way and it fills me with absolute horror. It still fills me with a sense of shame. I've repeatedly apologised to her, and she says she can't remember, which is great, so I suppose I'm torturing myself for no reason, which is the story of my life. I spend my life torturing myself.
Worst moment of your life?
Being with my late wife, Siân, as she died. She was only 51 at the time. She didn't want to die. At that time, I was sleeping on the floor of the hospice that she was in, just holding her hand while she died. Frankly it was pretty awful.
Worst television experience?
There are endless examples, but two stand up as particularly terrible. First, when my show was on a Sunday morning, we had Miriam Margolyes on and she got quite heated and turned to me and said there was something she wanted to say about a particular person, and my producer in my ear shouted, 'Whatever you do, don't let her say what she's thinking,' and I misheard and said, 'Say whatever you want,' then at 10 in the morning on a Sunday she used the C-word very loudly and we had to spend the rest of the programme apologising. And I know it's a bit of a cliché, but I did the Jeremy Hunt mispronunciation too – I think every broadcaster has at some point – and on election night recently, I misidentified the former Conservative minister Gillian Keegan as the actress Gillian Anderson at 3am; fortunately she took it very well.
Worst thing anyone has said about you?
I'm pretty thick-skinned, actually. I care about what the people I care about say and think about me, but you can't do what I do if you take the barrage of noise that comes your way on social media and be affected by it. I'm pretty prominent on social media and to stay relatively sane you can't get upset by the vicious things people say. I just screen it out, as you become a lightning rod for people's anger – and their anger is normally about other things in their lives but they've decided they're going to crystallise it by saying something disgusting and hurtful about you. It's impossible to do what I do if you don't have a pretty rhino-like hide.
Worst personality trait?
Hyper focus is a double-edged sword. My ability to screen out things and people enables me to be incredibly productive, but I can be not attuned enough and sensitive enough to the needs of the people I care about. Historically I have definitely lived my life in different compartments, so the thing I've been trying to do is break down those psychological walls so that even if I am engaged in some kind of work project, I'm still hearing and listening to those whom I care about when they need me. Am I succeeding? Look, it's a work in progress. That's for others to judge, but I recognise it's something I need to do.
Worst decision you've ever made?
I've made tons of dumb relationship decisions in my life, but professionally I left journalism to try a dotcom thing in about 1999 or 2000 and it was a mistake. I'm a journalist to my core and I was really miserable for a year or two. I don't often get depressed, but I actually was then.