He’s the voice of the crash, but the words are all his own

Financial crisis has transformed Robert Peston from egghead to celebrity, says Dominic Midgley, but the BBC business editor indignantly denies he’s a government mouthpiece

The cover of the hardback version of Who Runs Britain?, Robert Peston’s masterly dissection of how the global economy got into the mess it’s in today, features an abstract version of the Union Jack. On the front of the paperback version published last week, however, we are treated to a portrait of the man himself. And we all know why the publishers made that change. In the past six months or so Robert Peston has gone from being the highly respected but faintly obscure business editor of the BBC to something of a celebrity.

He laid the foundations for his rise to fame as long ago as September 2007 when he broke the news that Northern Rock was seeking emergency financial help from the Bank of England.