ITV political editor Robert Peston, 62, started his career as a print journalist and broke a string of stories, including the Northern Rock bailout in 2007, when he was the BBC’s business editor. His debut novel, an elegantly paced thriller entitled The Whistleblower, is set in London in 1997 as Labour’s modernizing new leader prepares to sweep the party into power at a general election. Enter political reporter Gil Peck, a flawed hero who stumbles upon the scoop of his life after his high-powered civil servant sister is killed in a traffic accident.
This is your first published novel. Is this the first you’ve written? In my 20s, I wrote three-quarters of a thriller about a female detective with extraordinary powers. I didn’t feel like it was really there, but I had to finish it because it wasn’t a million miles away from the conceit of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
What made you try again? I was stressing out about Covid on ITV and wanted some entertainment. I found the writing process really enjoyable for two reasons: it was quite fun to travel back in time, and I hadn’t realized how liberated I would feel if I didn’t have to worry about the truth.
Is it pure fun, or does the novel have an underlying seriousness? This is a bit of a pretentious version of why I wrote it, but I really think the chaos we’re living through now has its roots in the late 1990s. I think a lot of people have felt lost in recent years, and part of that stems from the erosion of traditional class identification, which has been accelerated and magnified by the fact that Labor has decided that it is no longer a party of the working class in general. This meant that the people lost their political guiding star.
Whether people think I’ll be any good as an MP depends mostly on how dire the current situation can be
Will we be seeing more of Gil Peck? I think this is the first of a three book series. The next one will be set during the banking crisis and then the third – if I get around to it, which I hope I will – will be set more or less where we are now.
How would you characterize the present moment? Time is really complicated and confusing. I mean, just the magnitude of the shocks that we’ve had to go through, whether it’s Brexit, Covid, the war in Ukraine… And then we saw the rise of a generation of populist politicians who focused on slogan rather than honesty, the decency or the details of what you need to do to correct the problems. You also have something like the Tower of Babel of social media, which undermines the ability to form a consensus based on what is actually the truth because too many people have their own “truths”.
Have you ever thought about entering politics? Members of the public are constantly asking. If they think I’d be good, I think it depends mostly on how dire the current situation might be.
Peck has a lot in common with you, including obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). How does yours compare? In my teenage years, my OCD was out of control. I just wouldn’t be able to sleep. I would get up at midnight and check that the front door was locked, that the gas was off – and then check again. It was quite exhausting, but since a lot of it happened at night, no one noticed. It’s still there, it’s just more manageable.
Have you shaved your folding bike? I fell two weeks ago. This is somewhat the story of my life, but my head was completely immersed in Sue Gray’s report. I didn’t bolt the bike down tight enough and as I was going down Camden Road at some speed the front end collapsed. Boys and girls, wear helmets! I got a blue eye, but if I wasn’t wearing a helmet it would have been a problem.
Are you a dandy? I like clothes, but in the 90s I was really into fashion. One of the great tragedies of my life as political editor at the Financial Times is that I wore my absolute favorite Jean Paul Gaultier coat to a party conference and someone grabbed it. The cut was amazing, I’m still mourning his loss.
What books are on your nightstand right now? I read George Orwell’s essays and I really think he understands England, which is really deep. Also Anna Karenina. This is an amazing book, I don’t know why I waited so long.
Which living writers do you most admire? Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Max Porter.
Who is your favorite literary hero or heroine? Lord Peter Wimsey. Maybe I should say Harriet Vane? No, I will not choose the politically correct version. Lord Peter Wimsey. These books are so underrated and so much fun.
What kind of reader were you as a child? I was a great reader. I loved all the E Nesbits and CS Lewises and I’m afraid to say that when I was 10 I literally sat on the sofa with Lord of the Rings and didn’t get off until I finished it.
Do you have any books left over from your childhood? I’m as obsessed with identity as anyone these days, and the books that tend to stick with me are books that helped me root out myself. As a teenager, I discovered Isaac Bashevis Singer, and he helped me figure out who I was ethnically, because my whole family came from the states of Eastern Europe. So I have a strong Jewish identity, but I also have this strange longing for a lost England that comes from a writer named Stephen Potter. His books are basically satires about a certain kind of second-rate public schoolboy – it’s the whole three-men-in-a-boat world that I love again.
How do you organize your books? The weird thing about being OCD is that you can be OCD about some things but not others. When I was young, my brain was a complete mess. There were only thoughts going around all the time, it was complete noise. I could control it when I wrote, but my book collection was always what I thought it was, everything was everywhere – and still is.
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