'It’s an astonishingly fragile time’: Robert Peston on inequality, identity politics and how to heal Britain

Two seconds earlier, it had been sheet rain and squally winds at the street festival in north London, but as Robert Peston took the stage with his band, Centrist Dad, the weather suddenly swerved back to sunshine, which gave the whole thing a surreal edge. What did these men (including Peston on vocals, John Wilson from Front Row on bass and Ed Balls from New Labour on drums) do, to get blessed by Zeus? What dense thicket of influences informs Peston’s performance, which is a little bit Bowie, a little bit Carly Rae Jepsen, a little bit Ross-from-Friends-in-a-school-musical? The broadcaster, author, journalist and fabulously idiosyncratic emphasiser of words is, of course, well connected (Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper are also here), but he doesn’t strut like a well-connected person. He struts like a guy who really likes being in a band.

I met Peston two days before, in a cafe in Kentish Town. He is 64 but reads as peculiarly ageless, natty in a sharp blue suit, carrying a Brompton bike, a bit like a guy from the BBC sitcom W1A . He has lived his entire life in what you might call the progressive aristocracy. “I never thought of it quite like that,” he says, “but that must be true.” His father, Maurice Peston , was an economist and adviser to various Labour governments from the 60s to the 90s, becoming a life peer in 1987. Robert Peston talks about a “cringe-making section” in his teenage diary – “13- or 14-year-old me saying, ‘Had a good chat with Roy [Hattersley], I don’t think he likes me.’”

This, he says, was “bohemian north London in the 70s. It felt normal. But ‘bohemian north London’ meant something different in the 70s, just as ‘secular Jewish’ meant something different in the 90s to what it does now. The people stay the same, and the meanings change.” He went to a state school in Crouch End, his parents wholly committed to comprehensive education. “I’ve inherited that from them, but I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had a very positive experience,” he says. His parents used to take him to Michael Meacher ’s parties, where he would chat with Tony Benn . He was friends with Arnold Wesker’s son, who had a goat. Peston is not blase exactly about these lefty titans, he just sounds more excited about the goat. “There was too much drink, there were too many drugs. There were hippies,” he says. “What, in your house, or in the era?”, I ask, not unreasonably, but he is already haring off on the subject of state education and Speakers for Schools, the charity he set up in 2010. I’m certain he wasn’t being evasive: obviously, he didn’t mean in his house.

There is a reason he doesn’t see himself as, and nor does he come off as, a political insider: he has said a lot of things in his long and illustrious career, and the world has so far failed to listen. “This is the fifth non-fiction book I’ve written,” he says, of How to Run Britain, which he co-wrote with Kishan Koria, his editor on the ITV programme Peston. He rattles through the others, one on the tensions between Blair and Brown, the rest all on the country’s “big structural problems, and the things we need to do to fix them. With every successive book, things have felt worse.”

The original title for this book was Bust, he says, but he and Koria went back to the drawing board after the election, “I wanted people not to feel that I lack hope. Because I don’t lack hope. I think we can fix these problems.” He’s emphatically non-party political, for deeper reasons than that his job as a broadcaster relies on that stance. But of course you can’t run or fix, or consider Britain except through a political lens, and his focus is on inequality, whose dangers “I’ve been warning about since literally 2007”. Since the situation has only worsened, and financial and wealth inequalities have been exacerbated by “a very powerful and divisive identity politics,” along with “social media, which combines chronic misinformation and the hysteria that comes with the worst in identity politics, it does feel like an astonishingly fragile time”. I go in for a bit more detail on “identity politics”, since it could mean anything currently from a white supremacist to someone who prefers they/them pronouns. “I’m really talking about the rise of a certain kind of toxic nationalism, but associated with that is persistent toxic sexism, persistent toxic homophobia. I’m talking about the erosion of tolerance and mutual understanding. If anybody wants to be called they/them then that, of course, should be regarded as absolutely fine. What I object to is people then hating those people.”

His prescriptions are extremely varied, often counterintuitive. While he agrees with the broad consensus that Liz Truss wreaked havoc in her short time as prime minister, he saves much more of his censure for the Bank of England. “I’m not remotely trying to say that her economic policy was rational or sensible. What I am saying, however, is that the fall in government bond prices and the rise in interest rates was made significantly worse by the Bank of England’s failure to spot a significant vulnerability in the financial system.” He also thinks it overdid the Covid 19 stimulus package; that if it had put up interest rates sooner, it wouldn’t have had to put them up by so much. He really gives it a kicking, in fact. “It is bad for democracy when institutions like that are not held to account.” He’s in favour of price-capping essentials. “I’m certainly not arguing that competitive markets have proved themselves inappropriate for wealth generation in the UK. But I am saying there are times when – Adam Smith would say this – markets don’t function completely efficiently and you have to intervene, particularly to help vulnerable people.” It’s what we did in the 70s (Peston’s father was involved in the Price Commission); it’s what we’ve done with energy; it’s what they did in France; it’s what Kamala Harris is suggesting. It all sounds reasonable. I suppose I’m just surprised to hear it from a centrist dad when I’ve only previously read it from the radical leftwing geographer Danny Dorling.

Peston’s analysis of where Blair and Brown went wrong could also, easily, come from someone on the left of the Labour party. “They thought, we have this world-class financial services industry in the City of London, which is growing incredibly fast. We will create a framework in which that can continue to prosper, generate the tax revenues, which can top up the welfare payments to those in left-behind parts of the world. Now, if you lived in those left-behind parts of the world, you’d much rather have been helped to create productivity, rather than relying on handouts.” He says of Boris Johnson and the levelling up agenda: “Personally, I think it’s an absolutely ghastly phrase, but of course it resonated with people. It’s just that they didn’t deliver.”

I do think we have to have another referendum, but probably not for another 10 years

Other ideas wouldn’t be out of place in a Reform manifesto – immigration targets, for example, devolved to a local level so, “Andy Burnham should have the ability to look at what the Manchester area needs in terms of skills – give him the resources to do the training and the power to set targets for local businesses, in terms of who comes in.” (Actually, this was also a popular argument, post-Brexit, in leftwing leave circles: it falls apart, I think, on the practicals. If, as a migrant, you have been allowed in by the Manchester mayor, does that mean you are not allowed to move to Liverpool? Seems a bit rum.) Peston is intensely relaxed about which party takes up his ideas: “I effectively called for a windfall tax on the Bank of England, and I was slightly staggered to find a few months after I made it, the only party that picked it up was the Reform party. But I don’t see myself as left or right. I just focus my arguments on what I think works. Look at the evidence. I have lots of proposals, some of which people will think are completely mad. But, as I’ve always said, don’t waste an effing crisis. The only good thing to say about a crisis is, it should usher in genuinely substantial change and it just hasn’t.”

The very words “effing crisis” cast us inexorably back to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, when Peston’s was the only voice you wanted to hear. He was one of the very few people who sounded as if they genuinely understood what the hell was going on – while simultaneously the voice you didn’t want to hear – the news he delivered was never good. He had moved from print journalism two years before to be the BBC’s business editor and had noticed, in his day-to-day life as an interviewer, that “wealthy people were getting wealthier and wealthier. I began to be concerned about the structure of capitalism – it appeared to be more and more winner-takes-all.”

His late wife, Siân Busby, called him at the time “the workaholic oracle”. He has been like that since he left university, the only time in his life when he didn’t work that hard – he studied PPE at Oxford, and got a second-class degree. “I really enjoy my work. I think after Siân died, it took me longer than I would have liked to understand the trauma of it because I probably used work to escape it. I’m not sure that that was entirely healthy.” He may have been working like a dervish, but he wasn’t closed off from his sons after Busby’s death (from lung cancer at 51). “The personal things I’m able to talk to my sons about I would never have been able to talk to my father about. It didn’t make my dad a bad person, but he was very repressed emotionally. If you tried to hug my dad, it was like an electric shock to him.”

Peston considers the addictive properties of journalism – the dopamine hit of being first to a story, of annoying the right people – and concludes that he probably has quite an addictive personality. Has he ever been addicted to anything other than work? “In the 90s, I was quite addicted to exercise for a bit. Just became obsessed with going to the gym.”

Having become the face of the global financial meltdown, he was established thereafter as a kind of layperson-whisperer, the economics broadcaster who could get you to understand, at least in the moment, what gilt-edged securities were. The major risk, as he sees it, of being on TV is that “it’s quite hard not to become a narcissist when you get recognised all the time. You have to have people around you telling you when you’re being a bit of a wanker.” Who does that for him? “Charlotte [Edwardes, the journalist, and his partner], the kids, everybody. Which is good, which is what you need in life.”

He is not one of those broadcasters who has “a panic attack when they’re not on television for a day or two”, he says, but he does have a passion for putting the facts in front of people. This made the referendum years particularly dispiriting. “Night after night on the news, I said that if we left the EU all the economists said we would be poorer. And therefore, if what mattered to you was whether the economy was growing and whether we were going to be richer as a nation, you shouldn’t vote to leave the EU. There might be other reasons to leave the EU, but not for economic reasons. And I was slightly frustrated that the BBC’s equivalent of me never said that. Economics is not a perfect natural science, but there is an enormous amount of fundamental research that can tell you what the outcome is going to be of certain policy decisions. The BBC’s ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that’, was a disservice to the people of Britain.” He thinks in the long run we should rejoin the EU, but that the priority right now is to heal the country’s divisions. “I do think we have to have another referendum, but probably not, frankly, for another 10 years.”

Related: Robert Peston: ‘I’m not a conventional broadcaster – people hate my style’

His current TV persona – a personable and sympathetic interviewer of the leading lights of politics, a wee bit too respectful for my liking – is carefully deliberated. “I do not see my role as a prosecuting barrister trying to prove that every politician is an arsehole. I think that is bad for the culture. If we’re going to elect these people, we’ve got to listen to them. How are we ever going to get the politicians we deserve, if we won’t give them a fair hearing?”

How To Run Britain: Therapy For A Traumatised Nation by Robert Peston and Kishan Koria is published in paperback (Hodder & Stoughton, £10.99) on 19 September. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.