Dear old Pesto, we all make jokes about him but we all secretly admire him. The BBC business editor’s strangulated elocution and stream-of-consciousness style were never going to make him a natural broadcaster — ‘He won’t last six months,’ one of his household-name colleagues whispered to me in the early days. But six years on he’s still there, falling out of bed to cover breaking news from home, packing in 12-hour days in his ill-ventilated BBC cubicle to chase the multiple sources and ‘exclusives’ of which he’s boyishly proud, enduring the jibes of smoother talkers such as Eddie Mair, resisting the siren calls of corporate PRs and ministerial spin, sticking his neck out because he’s so often the front-runner on complex, fast-changing stories. Robert Peston was the voice of the financial crisis, just as Terry Wogan will forever be the voice of the Eurovision Song Contest. Vocal tics and all, he’s now an official national treasure.
‘But can he write?’ as a former editor of this paper used to ask, rather coldly, whenever someone famous was suggested as a potential contributor. This breathless gallop through the development of modern global markets and what went wrong with them does not necessarily answer the question, because it is co-written with one of his BBC juniors, Laurence Knight, who may well have been responsible for the screeds of explanatory material which make How Do We Fix This Mess? much wordier than it needed to be to nail its arguments.
It has the feel of a book written by busy people with no time for the polishing process that produces elegant concision. And we can only be sure Pesto himself is at the keyboard when the narrative is lightened by an idiosyncratic touch, such as the passage in which he asks:
Who would you expect to pay a higher rate of interest when borrowing for three years? Me or the Italian Republic? If you said ‘Peston’, you are right… But here’s the thing: the risk premium for lending to the slightly shambolic house of Peston, as opposed to the sovereign nation of Italy, is rather less than I expected…
The difference, in fact, is just 0.6 per cent — but having taken a closer look at the dire state of Italy’s finances, the great man wonders whether he should be offended that there is any premium at all. It’s an illuminating approach to the issue of sovereign debt, and ‘slightly shambolic’ is a charming self-deprecation.
But on the whole, How Do We Fix This Mess? is a disappointment, because it takes such a long time not answering its own question. We are warned in the introduction not to expect ‘a slick manifesto of sure-fire reforms’, and we don’t get one. Peston’s pre-BBC success as a print journalist, principally at the Financial Times, was as a pursuer and unraveller of difficult stories, rather than as a fount of strong, simple ideas.
We can see where he’s coming from. He believes the great boom was delusional and regrets the shift in the UK economy from manufacturing to financial services, the rise of inequality and the casual reliance of households and governments on debt. He welcomes the ‘shareholder spring’ (in which investors in some public companies have begun to revolt against the pay packets of senior executives), the growing power of social media to hold business leaders to account, and the development of peer-to-peer lending mechanisms that might one day diminish the power of established banks.
But most of this has been said already, and more trenchantly, in a shelf-full of books about the financial crisis. When Peston and Knight do occasionally work up a table-thumping flourish, they tend to soften the impact with a BBC-ish ‘some might argue’ or ‘their critics would say’. In other places, their findings are oddly pie-in-the-sky:
If there were a proper global government, it would be simpler to put in place policies that would encourage us [Britain, America and Europe] to save more and spend less, while Chinese households spent more and saved less.
Well, yes, I suppose it would.
My respect for Peston as an earnest seeker of truth in the financial world is not diminished by this rather flaccid effort, but — contrary to so many comments that must have come his way in recent years — I honestly think he’s better on the telly.
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