Business as usual | 22 November 2012

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.