Robert Peston

Award-winning journalist; Business Editor, BBC

Robert Peston is an award-winning Journalist and Business Editor at the BBC, best known for his reporting about the global financial crisis. After studying at Balliol College, Oxford and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, he began his career as a journalist in 1983, working for the Investors Chronicle. He obtained his first national position with The Independent, and spent a decade with the Financial Times in a number of roles, including Political Editor, Banking Editor and head of an investigations unit. Peston has written across the media spectrum, including columns for the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, The Spectator and the New Statesman. He has held editorial positions with online financial analysis service Quest, The Spectator and The Sunday Telegraph. In late 2005, it was announced that Peston would succeed Jeff Randall as BBC Business Editor, responsible for business and city coverage on the corporation's flagship TV and radio news programmes, the BBC News Channel, its website and on Radio 4's Today.

Peston is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Harold Wincott Senior Financial Journalist of the Year Award (2005), the London Press Club's Scoop of the Year Award (2005), Granada Television's What the Papers Say award for Investigative Journalist of the Year (1994) and the Wincott Young Financial Journalist of the Year (1986). Peston is the author of Brown’s Britain (2005), a biography of Gordon Brown which details his rivalry with then Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has since published Who Run’s Britain? How the Super-Rich are Changing Our Lives (2008).