I was the junior researcher, and he was the living legend. When I started working at the BBC on the Money Programme, I was assigned to work with Peter Jay, who was presenting various documentaries, and I had never previously met anyone quite so aloof. I had no idea if he even knew my name, and it was many months before I had evidence that he did. But in the end, my entire career at the BBC, ultimately as economics correspondent appointed by him, was interwoven with his, and I developed a certain fondness.
Jay was ferociously bright, which often manifested itself in slightly strange ways
Peter always had an otherworldly sense of being rather helpless. I remember sitting in the BBC office in London taking a call from him while he was out filming in South Africa, and he wanted to know where he was. How was I meant to know? We did a studio show with an audience in the North of England and he seemed visibly uncomfortable.
He gave the impression that everything was beneath him, but if you had been US ambassador at the age of 40, that was not surprising. I knew never to mention Carl Bernstein (whom his first wife had an affair with) or his nanny, but I remember once asking if he had ever been interested in being an MP, and was struck by his answer that essentially being an MP was below him. When I went with him to events, he would ask me if he was meant to be intelligent or nice – the two modes he said he learnt to operate in when he was an ambassador. I only once saw him defer to anyone, when I invited one of the top bankers in Germany to come to the UK to join an economics debate, and he was visibly in awe: ‘He really is a grandee.’
BBC journalists loved telling and retelling stories about Peter, and some of them were probably true. When the Barings scandal erupted in Singapore, he was a short hop away in Hong Kong, and the news editor was delighted to have their celebrity journalist almost on the spot. But Peter refused to go to Singapore to cover the biggest financial story of the decade. ‘I don’t do business stories,’ he said, which was true. Allegedly he said he would only go if the director-general himself, his friend John Birt, personally asked him.
Peter’s reporting of economics on TV became a source of frustration and bickering among news producers. He became obsessed with the ‘output gap’, which no one understood despite the complex graphics he commissioned for the then Nine O’Clock news. Producers begged him to do stories in ways that viewers could understand, but he apparently thought the problem was with the viewers and not himself. He refused to do things differently: it was his Reithian job to educate them. He once pre-filmed a package about an economic indicator, that ended up going in the different direction than expected, making his whole broadcast inappropriate. But despite pleading from producers, he refused to change it to take into account the actual news, as he said the essential economic arguments still held true.
However, this was good for my career. Producers used to phone me trying to get me to cover the economic news rather than him. When the News 24 television channel was launched, they told him it was really important that he appeared on that all the time as the BBC’s flagship project, but the editors told me it was really just an excuse to keep him off the main BBC One news bulletins. His appearances became fewer and fewer. He was quite happy not to broadcast that much, but he said he had to keep working: he had a whole new younger family with his second wife.
Peter was ferociously bright, which often manifested itself in slightly strange ways. Once when I went to his family home in Ealing for a meeting, he asked me ‘How do you take your tea – as coffee?’ and burst out laughing. It was a sort of Platonic philosophical joke I think, but just asking someone if they wanted tea or coffee would have been too straightforward.
He came from the political left, but his views on economics evolved. I remember once he burst out, referring to the collapse of communism, that the whole lesson from the last 20 years was that economic incentives matter much more then most people realised. Indeed, I thought.
He was famously a massive intellectual snob (an incomprehensible column he wrote in the Times was only meant to be understood by three people, ‘the editor of the Times, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England,’ he told a sub-editor). He supposedly never appointed anyone at the BBC to report on economics who did not have a first in PPE from Oxford. Since I had a first in mathematics from Cambridge, that was seen as a problem. When he interviewed me for the role of economics correspondent, the entire discussion was about abstract academic economic issues, such as the definition of an optimal currency area, which had no bearing on reporting economics on TV and radio (he formally appointed me ‘acting economics correspondent’, whatever that meant).
Peter was extraordinarily self-confident and privileged – the son of a cabinet minister married to the daughter of a prime minister – but also extraordinarily gifted, and essentially very kind hearted. He was unique, and fascinating. The world was a better place for him.
Peter Jay, the journalist and diplomat, has died at the age of 87
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