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.
I am struggling to make sense of the Prime Minister’s answer to my question: whether he is a practising Roman Catholic – which I asked in good faith and with good reason because he was recently married in Westminster Cathedral. His answer was: ‘I don’t discuss these deep issues. Certainly not with you.’ He is
The Prime Minister’s roadmap rules would logically dictate not moving to stage four of lockdown easing on 21 June, but delaying by two or four weeks – because the increase in the R transmission rate to more than one is driven in part by the stage two and stage three easings and not just by
The Health Secretary Matt Hancock has insisted that he promised the Prime Minister and his former chief aide Dominic Cummings only that all elderly and vulnerable patients would be tested for Covid on discharge to a care home when there was adequate testing capacity, and not with immediate effect. This is Hancock’s defence against Cummings’s
The government is not challenging Dominic Cummings’s evidence in any kind of detailed way — despite the many highly damaging charges against the Prime Minister, the Health Secretary, and the entire Whitehall system. On my show last night, the Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick repudiated nothing of substance that Cummings had alleged, including the most damaging assertion of
Dominic Cummings will not pull his punches when criticising the Prime Minister when he appears before MPs on Wednesday morning. In evidence to MPs on the combined health and science committees, he will allege Boris Johnson said ‘Covid is only killing 80-year-olds’ when delaying lockdown in the autumn. Cummings will say that the PM insisted he
I am bemused by Boris Johnson’s optimism about the prospects for full unlocking on 21 June, based on the data he says he is seeing. Because the government’s own daily published data is showing worrying trends for the Indian variant. For example, there were 280 Covid infections reported for Bolton alone yesterday, 10 per cent
Here are two Covid questions, thrown up by the rate at which the Indian variant is infecting parts of the UK. First, does it show that the traffic light system, which was designed to prevent the UK from importing new strains and variants from abroad, is unfit for purpose? The delay of one to two
The prospect of the final easing of lockdown restrictions in England going ahead precisely as planned on 21 June is close to nil, according to ministers and officials. ‘It is clear some social distancing will have to be retained, not everything we’ve set out for 21 June is likely to happen,’ said a government adviser.
The Prime Minister said today there would be a ‘full proper public inquiry’ into the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. This is highly significant, because a ‘full, proper public inquiry’ means one led by a judge and with witnesses represented by lawyers. I am also told – though Downing Street is refusing to comment on
Here are the big things I learned from Thursday’s elections and their aftermath. 1. The Scottish parliament will vote to hold a referendum on independence for Scotland — but the legislation probably won’t be introduced till late 2022. 2. The earliest there would be a referendum would be 2023. 3. Boris Johnson’s revealed preference is to
The Tory victory in Hartlepool, with a swing of 16 per cent and the biggest increase in a governing party’s vote in any by-election since 1945, is a terrible blow to Labour hopes that the choice of Sir Keir Starmer would soon stem their rot. What happened in what was a safe Labour seat —
On 26 May, Dominic Cummings will give evidence to MPs grouped on the health and science super committee, chaired by Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark. This will be box office politically, because – as I have mentioned – Cummings will prosecute Boris Johnson and his scientific advisers for failing to lock down early enough in
28 min listen
In this week’s podcast, ITV’s political editor Robert Peston joins The Spectator‘s deputy political editor Katy Balls to talk over this week’s cover story, on the maelstrom of mayhem surrounding Boris Johnson. (1:29) With the recent exit of Johnson’s oldest advisor, Lord Udny-Lister, from Downing Street, the rumbling row over what Boris did or didn’t
I spent much of the 1980s and 1990s reporting on company chief executives who didn’t understand the distinction between mine and theirs. They enjoyed lavish lifestyles — company flats, art collections, huge expense accounts — without the owners of the company (you and me through our pension funds) having a clue. Then came the corporate
I understand that CCHQ (Conservative Campaign Headquarters) made a payment to the Cabinet Office to cover the initial costs of refurbishing the Prime Minister’s home in Downing Street, and the PM is now repaying CCHQ. There is an audit trail and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case knows about it. This is presumably why he told MPs
There is an incredible amount of hysteria and noise being generated by the conflict between Boris Johnson and his former chief aide, Dominic Cummings. So maybe it is useful for me to share what I know about three big claims: 1) The charge that Prime Minister did say he would rather see ‘bodies pile high in
When No. 10 briefed newspapers on Thursday that Dominic Cummings was the source of leaks of the Prime Minister’s text conversations with Sir James Dyson and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and pointed to Cummings as the ‘chatty rat’ who leaked news of the November lockdown, I said this looked like an exercise in
On the day that senior Treasury officials and the Bank of England revealed quite how much David Cameron lobbied them last spring on behalf of Greensill for access to emergency loan schemes, I want to share important disclosures made in recent weeks that suggest Greensill was heading for collapse over many months. These represent the
The collective gasp of outrage – led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson – at the decision of a few wealthy clubs around Europe to announce the creation of a European Super League is either naive or hypocritical. Because the idea that professional football is some kind of social enterprise owned and run by fans and
The EU is arguably playing a self-harming game in potentially restricting vaccine exports to the UK as a tit for tat for the inability of AstraZeneca to supply the 80 million doses it ordered by the end of March. First of all, this looks like unedifying EU sour grapes that the UK, out of the
