Robert Peston: the outsider who wants to include us all

Anyway, back to the book. Every character is an amalgam of various people, he tells me, apart from one press photographer based on his much-loved cousin Alan Davidson who died at the start of the pandemic. “Some of Gil is me and some of Gil is other people that I’ve observed. The OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, that’s me, the obsession with landing a story, the driven nature of the way that he works. That is, that was definitely me.” The self-medicating with cocaine and alcohol — that’s not him. “That bit of it is based on people that I knew, a lifestyle that I observed,” he says, but at the time that the book is set —1997 — he had a young family and “was all together behaving in a completely different kind of way.”

How about Gil’s Jewishness? One of the best aspects of the book for me was the way he draws a certain sort of Jew — someone who feels an outsider in both Jewish and non-Jewish circles. Gil’s family, when hit by tragedy have a wake, rather than a shiva, they cremate their dead rather than bury them, and yet Gil is hyper-aware that his Jewishness makes him different from others. What’s more the painfully distant relationship between Gil and his leftie academic father feels coloured by a very Jewish sense of past trauma, a fear of loving too much.

“All my family are Jews,” says Peston, “we’re all Orthodox Jews in terms of, that those Jews who practice are all Orthodox Jews. And, both of my parents grew up in pretty religious households in various bits of Stamford Hill and the East End and Stoke Newington, that part of the world — although actually my mom spent quite a lot of my childhood living above a shop in The Cut in Waterloo, where my lovely grandma managed a dress shop that was owned by my great uncle. Anyway, all of my extended family were, typically, practising Jews, not fantastically, strictly observant, but the religion was as important to them as the cultural stuff and the heritage.”

His father, the economist and Labour peer Lord Peston, differed from his relatives in being militantly atheist — “He was never rude to people of faith, or, at least only when he thought they were blithering idiots, but he was rude to anybody that was a blithering idiot, whether they were a person of faith or not.” His mother was, he thinks, more agnostic, which is how he identifies now — “it’s the rational position”— but growing up in a home full of books, “my dad broadly is in a quite proselytising way, basically saying to all of us, religion is mumbo jumbo.”

At the same time, young Robert was being taken to shul in the East End every Saturday by relatives who weren’t grandparents but took that role. The main thing he can remember is the sticky orange squash and the Nice biscuits (“of course I thought they were called nice biscuits”) at the end of a “very boring” morning — and then buying a Batman comic on the way home.

He tried again with shul after his wife’s death, “just to see if it would somehow be comforting and make things easier for me. And it didn’t really, if I’m honest, but, that said, being Jewish in a secular, cultural way is an unbelievably important part of my identity. And I do identify with Jews generally, but not with the practice of the religion.” But in terms of identity, “I never used to be able to define myself as English because I always felt very different to people who were obviously English for generations.”

This feeling of being the kind of Jew who never feels wholly part of the Jewish community was brought home to him on his gap year when he went to live in Israel for a few months, he says. He enjoyed being there, and “has a very strong view on the right of Israel to exist,” while being “incredibly critical” of the lack of progress that the country’s governments have made towards a two state solution. On a recent visit he was struck by the “absolutely wonderful” side of the country, but also found the lack of progress towards Israeli Palestinian understanding “heartbreaking”.

Just as heart-breaking — one of the great things about Peston is his passionate, emotional response to things political — have been the Labour Party’s travails over antisemitism. At one point he felt the need to preface a report on ITN with the words “As a Jew” — something he’d never thought he’d have to do.

“I felt so sad about it. I mean, my dad devoted most of his life working for and helping the Labour Party. And for me to have to basically say as a Jew, I regard the way the Labour Party is behaving is wholly wrong. It’s just so upsetting.”

Now, he says, Keir Starmer “absolutely passionately believes he has to cut out the cancer of antisemitism in the Labour Party,” and is taking the right steps to do so. But it’s a hard process, mainly because so many people don’t understand the nature of antisemitism or why some tropes are so evil. “And that’s really upsetting, that level of ignorance. “

Growing up though, he experienced more antisemitism from “posh English people” than from left-wingers, or from his school friends at Highgate Wood, a comprehensive school in Crouch End. Antisemitism on the left developed, he says, as it became a fashionable thing to support the IRA or the PLO. “that turned over a period of time into a particular kind of antisemitism.” But for most of his life the kind of racism he encountered was epitomised by the PR man he met as a young business journalist who talked about bloody Jews, caught with their trousers down. “And I turned to him and said ‘You know I’m Jewish’ and walked out.”

Although it is set in the world of politics, and our hero Gil is a Lobby journalist, everything is explained — from the workings of Lobby briefings, to what ‘Smith Square’ denotes. This caused some critics to accuse Peston of doing too much ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’, but it does mean that the book is very inclusive, and can be easily understood by anyone from whatever background —a perfect introduction to the world of British politics for Americans, or A level Politics students, for example. Was that Peston’s idea, or his editor’s? His answer says a lot about his philosophy as a journalist and as someone who set up the ‘Speakers for Schools’ scheme, to bring leaders of society into state schools. “I don’t want to exclude people I want to bring people in, I want people to understand as much as possible.”

The good news is that this book is planned as the first of three, with Peston planning to use his foray into fiction to examine and explain how we’ve ended up in the state we are.

The next one will be set after the financial crash, looking at the economic and social consequences of all of that. “And then bring us right up to date with this era of social media hate and the difficulty in establishing, consensus about what the truth is, even about some big facts of our society.”

You know, I can’t wait.

 

The Whistleblower by Robert Peston is published by Bonnier (£14.99)