Robert Peston

Robert Peston is Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston. His articles originally appeared on his ITV News blog.

Thursday

23 Jun 2022

Where’s Boris’s plan to stop the economic chaos?

Interest payments on the national debt rose 70 per cent last month to £7.6 billion (compared with a year earlier) – largely because of the impact of inflation on income paid to holders of index-linked gilts, which are inflation-protected government bonds. More worryingly, this was 49 per cent more than the official forecast made in March by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). It suggests the OBR’s forecast that the government will have to pay £87.2 billion in interest payments (a colossal sum) may be too low, especially since the ONS is not factoring in the most recent inflation figures in its calculations of the monthly bill. Little wonder Rishi Sunak says 'rising inflation and increasing debt interest costs pose a challenge for the public finances, as they do for family budgets'.

Wednesday

22 Jun 2022

Boris Johnson’s inflation contradiction

As Boris Johnson tries to limit pay rises to bring down inflation, ministers have no explanation for why planned rises in the state pension and benefits would be less inflationary than increasing teachers’ and nurses’ pay. The government is attempting to limit public sector pay to 3 per cent, while allowing pensions and benefits to rise to around 10 per cent. This is not to argue against protecting the poorest through the standard indexation of pensions and benefits. But it is to say that Mr Johnson’s pay policy is confusing. And he cannot pretend there is no pay policy. Even refusing to engage directly in pay talks with rail workers – despite owning the network and funding services – is a policy. Johnson’s mantra is that incomes have to be suppressed to bring down inflation.

Monday

13 Jun 2022

The Northern Ireland Protocol is a problem Boris created

If Boris Johnson was elected on a single slogan, it was ‘Get Brexit done’. He then claimed it was done at the end of 2019 in the terms for leaving the EU he agreed. Not so. Today legislation will be introduced by the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to unilaterally overhaul a central pillar of the UK’s negotiated exit from the EU, the Northern Ireland Protocol – which is seen by the EU, whatever the government may claim, as a breach of the UK’s international treaty obligations. Economic relations with the EU, still the biggest market for our exporters by a country mile, were already bad. They are about to become appallingly bad. As the UK’s former ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers said in a magisterial lecture on Thursday: ‘The EU… is bound to commence legal proceedings… [It] will view the threat to rewrite the Protocol unilaterally as self-evidently in bad faith, as an extraordinary hostile step to take at this geopolitical juncture and as warranting retaliatory safeguard measures.

Tuesday

7 Jun 2022

Boris’s moment of maximum danger is yet to come

Much as Boris Johnson wants to 'bash on', deliver popular populist policies, and characterise Monday's confidence vote as the catharsis that purges him and his party of the partygate poison, his struggle to re-establish his credibility and authority will be the challenge of his life. First of all, most of the 148 Tory MPs who rejected him cannot be bought off, because they typically want him out not for the policies he espouses but rather for what they see as his character flaws – and they are doubtful he can change his spots. I asked one rebel what was the new plan, after the rebels failed to muster the 180 votes needed to unseat him. The answer: 'A process for securing 30 extra votes.' A few rebels have said today that they will try to bury their qualms and do the unity thing.

Monday

6 Jun 2022

The dilemma facing Tory MPs

There are two questions for Tory MPs today. One, do they believe that the PM will cost them or save them their seats at the next general election. Two, how pernicious to confidence in the important institutions of government is the widespread perception that the politician at its apex is dishonest. The first question is about the future of the Tory party. The other is about the future of the UK. They are of course linked. Tory critics of Mr Johnson say that he is now, in the words of one, ‘our Jeremy Corbyn’, by which they mean large numbers of potential Conservative voters will never again vote for their party while he is leader. But Mr Johnson’s supporters say he is the most formidable campaigner their party has known in the modern era, and if anyone can turn round the ailing fortunes of the Tories it is him.

Wednesday

25 May 2022

I’m not exaggerating partygate

A veteran Tory MP, who I've known for almost 30 years, just laid into me – and my colleagues in much of the media – for allegedly exaggerating the seriousness of how Covid laws were systematically broken in 10 Downing Street. He hadn't read Sue Gray's report into the rule-breaking parties and did not attend the PM's statement on her findings. He has already decided that all is for the best in Boris Johnson's best of all possible worlds. His decision to ignore Gray's report is not what most voters would expect from their elected representatives. What many would see as his negligence is all the greater because in my lifetime there has never been a report into misconduct at the heart of government as damaging as Gray's.

Tuesday

24 May 2022

A Treasury cost-of-living help package could be imminent

A £10 billion package of help with fuel bills and the cost of living targeted at those on lowest incomes could be announced as soon as Thursday, I am told. No final decisions have been made, but the prime minister wants to reset his administration before the Queen’s Jubilee parliamentary recess and after the publication tomorrow of Sue Gray’s report into Downing Street parties - which is expected to be damaging to the PM’s reputation. The expected acceleration of new Treasury support for the poorest follows today’s announcement by the energy regulator Ofgem that energy bills are likely to rise a further £800 in the autumn to around £2,800 per household on average. This rise would mean that in England alone, just under 10 million households would suffer from 'fuel stress' - meaning they would be shelling out 10 per cent or more of all their net income on energy - according to new research by the Resolution Foundation.

The unspoken argument behind a windfall tax

Tuesday

17 May 2022

How does Boris Johnson save the economy?

'For the first time since records began, there are fewer unemployed people than job vacancies,' the ONS says. The number of unemployed people in January to March was 1,256,846 whereas vacancies in February to April 2022 rose to a new record of 1,295,000. At a time when we may already be in recession, and we certainly face it later this year, this is extraordinary. Part of the explanation is that hundreds of thousands of people have voluntarily left the Labour market, as the Bank of England’s governor Andrew Bailey told MPs yesterday. One explanation is that large numbers of people have long Covid and cannot work. Others are clinically vulnerable and are choosing not to work because they don’t wish to take the health risk when Covid remains prevalent.

Monday

9 May 2022

Why Starmer had to put his job on the line

Keir Starmer had no option but to say – as he has done – that he will resign if fined for breaching Covid rules, as I already pointed out on Friday when Durham police announced it was investigating whether his beer and curry last April was work sustenance or an illegal party. There were two reasons why he had to put his job on the line. First, he would never get over the charge of grotesque hypocrisy had he failed to do this, given that he and his party have repeatedly and urgently called on Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak to quit, after they received fixed penalty notices for attending the PM’s birthday party. Second, and this is short-term politics, tomorrow Starmer would not have been heard in the important Queen’s Speech debate on Johnson’s new legislative programme, because Tory MPs would have repeatedly interrupted his address to taunt him about the police probe.

Friday

6 May 2022

Partygate could still sink Boris Johnson

There are two big questions in UK politics, neither of which has been decisively resolved by local election results in England so far – and probably won't be by the time all UK results are announced over the coming few days. They are: Will and should Conservative MPs remove Boris Johnson as their leader and the country's prime minister? And has Keir Starmer set Labour on a path that could see the party win the next general election? In London, the swing from Tory to Labour of three symbolically important councils – Barnet, Wandsworth and above-all Westminster – is humiliating for a Prime Minister who still boasts of his erstwhile popularity as two-time London mayor. It also confirms the durability of the big Brexit-connected historic switch in British politics: that much of the very rich south is now hostile territory for the Tories, whereas swathes of the working class midlands and north remain relatively fertile ground for Johnson's Conservatives.

Tuesday

3 May 2022

Why is Boris Johnson suppressing the incomes of the poor?

As the Prime Minister pointed out this morning, looming recession and soaring inflation are not uniquely British problems – though right now the UK economy is slowing faster than many of our rich country competitors. In the US for example, the IMF’s former chief economist Ken Rogoff has warned just today that the Federal Reserve’s official interest rate may have to go as high as five per cent to suppress rampant inflation. Which is one of the reasons I was nonplussed when the PM told Susanna Reid on ITV's Good Morning Britain that he’s reluctant to increase universal credit and benefits and protect poorer people from the ravages of inflation because doing so would stoke inflation and force the Bank of England to put up interest rates.

Monday

25 Apr 2022

What’s going on with the Met and partygate?

I don't understand the logic behind how the Met Police is conducting its probe into unlawful parties at Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. My confusion reached brain-aching proportions after my ITV colleague Anushka Asthana disclosed on Friday that officials had received fixed penalty notices – fines – for attending perhaps the most famous of all the Downing Street events, the Bring Your Own Booze garden party on 20 May 2020, revealed by an email leaked to ITV News. The point is that I know of at least two relatively junior officials who have been informed by the police that they've been fined. So there is no longer any doubt this was a law-breaking party. And it was a party that the PM has admitted he attended and has talked about at some length, in the House of Commons no less.

Thursday

14 Apr 2022

What’s wrong with the Rwanda plan?

There are many unanswered questions about the government’s new policy of compelled expulsion to Rwanda of uninvited asylum claimants. Here are just a few. 1) What is the estimated cost per expelled refugee? None of the briefings give a clue. In its absence, how can the policy be assessed for its value for money, compared with the status quo? 2) What is the UK’s responsibility – moral, legal – if bad things (illness, accident, attack) happen to the expelled refugees after arrival in Rwanda? This would be a concern even if Rwanda did not have a recent history of trampling on civil liberties and basic human rights (see this report from the US state department). 3) Since the UK and Rwanda say only adults will be shipped to Rwanda, and the Home Office says families will not be broken up, how can the Home Secretary be confident she has not created a perverse incentive to malign smugglers, to carry whole families across the dangerous Channel crossing in precarious small boats, putting the lives of more children at risk? 4) Here is the Foreign Office’s assessment of the welfare and safety of the LGBT+ community in Rwanda: Homosexuality is not illegal in Rwanda but remains frowned on by many.

Tuesday

12 Apr 2022

This is a constitutional crisis

The police have today concluded that Boris Johnson, the Chancellor and the PM’s wife all attended illegal parties that breached Covid laws written by the PM. This is most serious for the prime minister of the three of them because it was he who told MPs on 8 December that he had been ‘repeatedly assured’ there were no parties and that no Covid rules were broken. He now has the challenge of his life to prove that he did not willfully and knowingly mislead MPs – because if he did deliberately mislead MPs then he has no choice but to resign under the code of conduct for ministers, which he signed off and approved in keeping with normal practise on becoming PM. This is perhaps the most important test of the robustness and efficacy of the checks and balances in the British constitution of my lifetime.

Tuesday

29 Mar 2022

How Boris misled MPs over partygate

The significance of today's announcement by the Met Police that 20 individuals who unlawfully attended parties in Downing Street and the Cabinet Office will be fined is that it confirms the Prime Minister misled the House of Commons on 8 December. On that date he told Sir Keir Starmer, Labour's leader: 'I have been repeatedly assured that the rules were not broken. I repeat that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no Covid rules were broken.' We now know there were lots of parties, and the Covid-19 rules that banned them at the time – drafted by the government on the orders of Boris Johnson – were breached. What we don't know, of course, is whether the Prime Minister knowingly misled the House of Commons.

Putin’s war is pushing Finland towards Nato

Wednesday

23 Mar 2022

Has Rishi Sunak just destroyed his relationship with Boris?

I said yesterday that I expected the Chancellor to increase universal credit by more than planned. I was misled. I was wrong. Today, Rishi Sunak's official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, is explicit about how painful Sunak's refusal to increase benefits will be for those who rely on them. It says: 'Lags in CPI (or inflation) uprating of benefits mean they fall almost five per cent in real terms in 2022-23, reducing their real value by £12bn, and take up to 18 months to catch up fully with higher inflation'. It means those who are unemployed, on very low incomes, or who rely on the state pension, are going to be in dire trouble in coming months. Contrast that £12bn real cut with the £500m being allocated to local councils so that they can help those struggling most with the cost of living in a 'targeted' way.

Tuesday

22 Mar 2022

What to expect at the spring statement

The big story of Wednesday's spring statement by the Chancellor will be the impact of inflation – which has soared from almost zero just over a year ago to perhaps 10 per cent in coming months – on living standards and the public finances. I expect Rishi Sunak to provide limited protection from the ravages of inflation to those on low and middling incomes, probably by increasing universal credit and the threshold for paying national insurance. But quite how far the Chancellor inflation-proofs the take home pay of low earners will be the most important question he will answer tomorrow. Either way, such support is likely to cost more than £10 billion – four or five times more than he is likely to spend on another expected measure to ease the cost of living surge, namely knocking 5p off the duty on a litre of petrol.

Wednesday

9 Mar 2022

Is Boris in denial about the looming economic crisis?

The priority for the UK and other rich democracies is to protect the people of Ukraine from the depredations of Putin's forces. A close second should be protecting the poorest people in our countries and vital public services from the cancerous impact of soaring inflation, made much worse by the West's economic warfare against Putin's Russia. The most basic costs of living are soaring. And that means a devastating recession that has already begun for all those but the richest. This blow to living standards will be the worst in living memory, more pernicious than the impact of either the banking crisis or Covid. Talking to ministers and MPs, it is clear to me that they as yet fail to appreciate the scale of the economic shock that is upon us.

Sunday

6 Mar 2022

Why did Boris prioritise Lebedev’s peerage during the pandemic?

Like me, you probably remember the third week of March 2020 as though it were yesterday. Covid-19 was on these shores in scale. Hospitals were filling up with acutely sick people. On 16 March 2020, we'd been told by the Prime Minister to isolate at home for 14 days if we had Covid symptoms, to work from home where possible and to avoid unnecessary contact with anyone. On 23 March, Boris Johnson would announce full lockdown. It felt like the worst crisis since the second world war. It was the worst crisis since the second world war. So perhaps the most interesting revelation in today's Sunday Times story about the peerage given to Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian proprietor of the Evening Standard, is how much time the Prime Minister spent in the middle of this disaster trying to reverse a recommendation by the security services that it would be inappropriate to make Lebedev a lord.

Thursday

3 Mar 2022

The invasion of Ukraine and the death of globalisation

Putin’s savage invasion of Ukraine, and the West’s collective response, is the moment that the slow death of financial and trade globalisation has been accelerated and made irreversible. Globalisation has been rolled back since the banking crisis of 2008, first by the banking regulation that followed, then by Trumpian and Brexit nationalism and mercantilism, then by Covid and now by the shock of war. The current dislocation of supply chains, especially for energy but much more broadly, means inflation will be much higher for longer – because businesses will speed up the shift in procurement of raw materials, energy, components and so on to supplies much closer to home. It is not unrealistic to fear that inflation will nudge 10 per cent for a couple of years, maybe longer.

Saturday

26 Feb 2022

Expelling Russia from Swift would be a massive economic shock

If Russia is expelled from the Swift banking messaging system, that would be serious economic warfare against Putin. Because Thursday’s decision by the US Treasury to make it almost impossible for Russia’s two biggest banks, VTB and Sperbank, to do any business with US institutions or use US infrastructure to process dollar payments will potentially disrupt tens of billions of dollars of Russian financial transactions every day, much of it related to its huge oil and gas industry. This combined prohibition on international transfers by Russian banks and the US embargo on dollar clearing for them would in theory generate a massive negative economic shock for Russia, that would rapidly impose serious hardship on Russian people.

Friday

25 Feb 2022

Will Ukraine become Putin’s Afghanistan?

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace may be right that Russian troops have not succeeded in all their immediate objectives, that they are demoralised and have been incompetent, and have suffered heavy losses. But the idea Putin is failing miserably – as Wallace claims – won't be compelling to those who spent the night in Kiev's metro stations to shelter from Russian missiles. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government colleagues, who warn that the first priority of Russia's special forces is their removal from the face of the planet, are also unlikely to be persuaded. For all Western leaders' words about imposing the 'mother of all sanctions' and not allowing the bully Putin to prosper, Ukrainians can only see Putin's overwhelming military capability.

Thursday

24 Feb 2022

How should Boris respond to ‘crazy’ Putin?

Putin’s invasion has begun, and its scale is worse than even the gloomy fears of British intelligence sources and the public warnings of America’s president Joe Biden. Former Nato Secretary General Anders Rasmussen told me on my show last night he feared Putin had 'gone crazy', that his recent conduct didn’t seem rational, and that no one around him could check his aggression. Which seems borne out, but also makes it harder for the West to assess whether any of its plausible responses will have an effect – especially given Putin’s implicit threat that he will use nukes against any nation that directly interferes with his plans. According to an official readout, Boris Johnson told Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy overnight that: 'The West would not stand by as president Putin waged his campaign against the Ukrainian people.

Tuesday

15 Feb 2022

What is Boris’s partygate defence?

The presumption of many MPs — and maybe many of you — is that the Met is bound to issue a fixed penalty notice to the Prime Minister for attending parties in Downing Street, because the half dozen 'events' he attended look, swim and quack like a party, and therefore must have been a breach of Covid rules. So what is Boris Johnson's defence? He thinks he has one, so he is paying out of his own pocket for a lawyer — who is also being used by his wife Carrie Johnson. And the Met Police have sent the relevant questionnaires for the PM and Carrie direct to this lawyer. As you know Boris Johnson's consistent claim is that he thought and was advised that the events he attended were 'work', not illegal parties. But what would 'prove' that these were work, not parties? I am told that the relevant test — or at least so his lawyers believe — is whether he went back to 'proper' work immediately after drinking a glass of wine in the Downing Street garden or being ambushed by birthday cake in the Cabinet Office, or saying goodbye to a colleague in a haze of prosecco or singing along to Abba in the study of his Downing Street flat.

Monday

14 Feb 2022

The Ukraine crisis has united the West

There has been a subtle change of tone from Joe Biden and Boris Johnson about the likelihood of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has gone from 'highly likely' to 'there may be a diplomatic solution' — or from 'almost all hope lost' to 'chink of hope'. So from where does that hope emanate? Largely, I am told, from noises out of Ukraine that its government is moving towards a public statement that although it retains the right to join the Nato western defence alliance, it will commit to not consider applying for at least ten years. The US president and UK prime minister are keen to encourage, through diplomatic channels, such a statement from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. They hope that this would remove any powerful motive for Putin to move his 140,000 troops encircling Ukraine across the border, and begin a conflict that would probably endure for years, would be hugely costly in lives and Russian living standards, and for which Russian people have not been prepared.

Sunday

6 Feb 2022

Has Rishi Sunak blocked Boris’s NHS recovery plan?

The Treasury on Saturday prevented an announcement pencilled in for tomorrow of the so-called 'elective recovery plan', the multi-billion pound initiative to reduce the NHS's record backlog of treatments. Treasury sources insist the plan wasn’t ready and this was a joint decision with the NHS. 'The NHS wanted to pause too,' said one. But this is disputed by those working for the Department of Health and the NHS. They believe the delay to its launch stems from mounting tensions between the Chancellor and Prime Minister, and a reluctance on the part of the Treasury to help a PM it views as a lame duck and living on borrowed time. According to senior Whitehall officials, the plan to make a dent in a waiting list of six million people had been worked out and was ready to go, and was pencilled in to be rolled out tomorrow, as part of the PM's relaunch.

Thursday

3 Feb 2022

Rishi Sunak’s cost of living gamble

The Chancellor is lending £200 this year to anyone who pays an energy bill in their own name. That’s 28 million people at an upfront cost to the government of £5.5 billion. The £5.5 billion will go directly to the companies this year, and will be knocked off bills from October. It will count as public spending. However, we will all have to repay that £200, in five equal annual instalments of £40 from 2023. Or to put it another way, our energy bills will be £40 a year higher than would otherwise have been the case until 2028. In a way, Rishi Sunak has given most of us an interest-free loan of £200. And we’ll only be able to dodge repayments if we stop buying energy in the UK. So the Chancellor seems to be taking a punt that this year’s energy price surge will be temporary.