Abstract
If a broadcaster's day job requires him to display impeccable political balance, should he also restrain himself from revealing in print what he really thinks? News with attitude is the fashion these days; but even so, how wise is it of Robert Peston, as ITV's political editor, to show quite how personally upset he felt about the votes to leave the EU and to elect Donald Trump? As to the former, he reveals that the 17 million Britons who opted for Leave did not include a single one of “my closest circle of perhaps a hundred family members and friends” and that when he thinks about Theresa May's folly in triggering Article 50 without securing negotiating advantages first, “I weep”. As to the triumph of Trump, “all I could think was that I wanted to hug my two boys”.
So this tour d'horizon of major economic and political issues facing Britain and the world today starts in the realms of emotion before switching to the more familiar Peston mode of analysis based on statistical data. And having taken us through why he thinks voters have gone so haywire (in the EU referendum, he thinks the “£350 million for the NHS” bus slogan made a crucial difference), and what's fundamentally wrong with our economy, he works up a final head of steam about the policy failures and perceived bad attitudes of the governing elite revealed by the Grenfell Tower fire.
All of which leads to the Peston manifesto - which includes a Thomas Piketty-style wealth tax, a new body to regulate all forms of employment, and a general reversal of Tory attempts to reduce red tape. A Peston government (surely not unthinkable, if we can contemplate the possibility of Boris Johnson as prime minister) would be more pro-business than Corbyn-McDonnell but well to the left of Blair and more interventionist than Gordon Brown. As a journalist, Peston has always been known for the strength of his Labour sources, but rarely accused of anti-Tory bias; now we know what an inner struggle that must have required.
My biggest beef with WTF, however, is not about its political stance but about the way it is written. As with his previous book How Do We Fix This Mess? (co-written with Laurence Knight), the reader senses a bit of a rush-job. In the occasional use of expletives and slang, one senses also an urge to be accessible to, and read by, Peston's own teenage sons and their ilk; this we can of course forgive, or even applaud. Likewise, the device of addressing the book to his late father (a Labour peer and LSE economist) and the many asides about his Jewish forebears, his “beloved Arsenal” and why he identifies more with Andy Murray - who is “British and seemingly a bit tortured” - rather than Tim Henman, who is “English and clean-cut”: all these add warmth and personality to what might otherwise be an ill-tempered op-ed.
But oh dear: the misplaced commas, the sentence structures, the sloppiness of “a bit fewer” and “yours and Mum's ideological commitment to comprehensive education”. Peston is a world-class journalist, a master of financial and economic complexities. But has he, I wonder, reached such an eminence that editors and sub-editors are no longer allowed to touch his copy? Had its infelicities been ironed out, WTF would have been a considerably better book.
It would also have been better if, rather than cantering across such a wide field, it had concentrated in depth on fewer themes, or even just one: the sinister and rising power of social media, or the barriers to reducing inequality, or the mystery of the UK's chronic limpness in productivity. But I recognise that's an unfair criticism: this is the book Peston wanted to write and it achieves lucid polemical answers to the first two questions he sets himself on his cover, which are “What have we done?” and “Why did it happen?”. Essentially, “we” (though at this point he really means “they”) voted for the wrong things out of frustration at a system which favours the privileged while failing to help the less fortunate.
But as to the third question, “How do we take back control?” - and here I assume he really does mean “we, the metropolitan left-liberal elite” - he can do no more than lob out a Will Hutton-ish ragbag of policy ideas and a cri de coeur for “an end to the fetish of austerity and a reassertion of the proper and benign role of government”. Whether or not we agree with his diagnosis, we feel his pain - and for better or worse we now know, much more clearly than before, that his pain is the filter through which he reports the news on television.
Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator.