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.
Tony Hall is stepping down as BBC director general of the BBC this summer, but I’m not sure his departure is a pure exercise of free will. A couple of days ago, a very well-placed source told me Hall’s preference was to stay until the corporation’s centenary in 2022, but that BBC’s chairman David Clementi
I am not going to lie: I am bored sick with Brexit. Like so many of you, I have become that frustrated child in the back of the car moaning, ‘are we there yet?’ Boris Johnson won’t tell us. Or at least not in precise terms. So on this marathon journey, just days before we
Boris Johnson says he is desperate to get Brexit off the agenda for his own government, so that it can start applying blue cement to the bricks he turned blue in Labour’s red wall – or throw money and popular policies at the midlands and northern seats he recently pinched from Labour. In fact he
President Trump’s decision to assassinate Qassem Soleimani accelerates perhaps the most important post-Brexit decision faced by Boris Johnson: whether to stand with the US or the EU at moments of potentially acute global crisis. What happens next will largely be conditioned by how Iran responds and retaliates. But all Western governments are examining their options.
If you believe betting odds, Rebecca Long-Bailey is a shoo-in to be Labour leader, after the shadow chancellor John McDonnell on Sunday anointed her as the candidate most likely to build on the Corbyn/McDonnell project. But punters may be getting ahead of themselves. For one thing, I am told that a YouGov poll of Labour
Those who thought Boris Johnson would exploit his huge majority to be flexible on the end-2020 deadline for negotiating a trade agreement with the EU will be proved wrong at the end of the week. Because I understand that the revised Withdrawal Agreement Bill will put into law that the transition arrangements with the EU,
This was an election as important and as divisive for the UK as Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. Vast numbers of British people will never be reconciled to Boris Johnson as prime minister or to Brexit. In fact, a whole nation, Scotland, is already asking permission to leave. My assumption, however, is that Johnson will
The two stand-out moments of the campaign? 1) Jeremy Corbyn refusing to say sorry to the Jewish community, in Andrew Neil’s BBC interview, for the hurt and anxiety he caused by failing for years to eliminate anti-Semitism from the Labour party. 2) Boris Johnson’s refusal to look at a picture of a four-year-old with suspected
In the end it probably comes down to four things, most of them momentous, about the power of the people, and the very structure of the country. First, this is your only chance to decide whether the UK leaves the EU at the end of January or whether you want a referendum next year that
An interview earlier today with my colleague Joe Pike captures the contradiction at the heart of Boris Johnson’s campaign. He wants to be seen as campaigning to lead a ‘new’ government, but the Tories have been in power since 2010. So he finds it impossible to take responsibility for four-year-old Jack Williment-Barr, left to lie on
Interviewing Boris Johnson last night on my show, I ended up feeling a bit sorry for Jo Swinson, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Because for him the election is a proxy for another referendum. His whole mantra is ‘get Brexit done, and move on’. Swinson’s position of ‘revoke and move on’ is a wholly rational response
How do you weigh a once-in-a-generation transfer of power from private sector to public sector and from capital to labour, against an irreversible rupture with the European Union? That is the choice being offered to voters, by Labour and the Tories respectively. Talk about chalk and cheese, or bicycles versus fish. How on earth do you decide, if you
There is both a moral and a practical dimension to Labour’s desperate slowness to root out anti-Semitism. The moral one, highlighted by the Chief Rabbi last night, is whether Jeremy Corbyn is fit to be prime minister having seemingly been too tolerant for too long of avowed anti-Semites. The practical one is that Labour is
Boris Johnson just took a very big political risk, by not making any serious attempt to compete with Labour on bunging cash at public services and the fabric of the UK. Where Corbyn is pledging £83 billion a year of increased spending on students, the elderly, health, schools, public-sector pay and so on by 2023,
I am not sure if it is class war exactly but something very like it is back. Perhaps it is a hybrid of a class, eco and generational war. In that Labour is planning to sting those earning £80,000 a year or more with an additional tax burden just short of £20bn from higher taxes
It had not occurred to me that the Lib Dems would ‘allow’ Boris Johnson to remain PM if he were to fail to win a majority but the Tories nonetheless were to emerge from the election with more MPs than any other party. I assumed Jo Swinson’s and her Lib Dem MPs’ savage criticism of
An attack line that both Corbyn and Johnson shied away from last night in ITV’s debate best characterises the rotten core of this election. I had half expected Corbyn to make a big thing of the risk that even if Johnson gets his self-styled microwaveable Brexit deal zapped and approved by MPs, such that the UK leaves the EU on 31
A question I don’t expect my colleague Julie Etchingham to put to the two party leaders in ITV’s debate is the one that has been nagging away at me for days: why is the policy-making that will underpin the election manifestos we’ll get from the parties over the next few days so lacking in intellectual
I emerged with three thoughts from my interview with the Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson, which is three more thoughts than I often have after interviewing a senior politician. First, her attack on Labour was massively personalised as an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, who she says is not fit to be PM, rather than on the party itself.
The poor performance of the NHS relative to government targets is turning into a major headache for the PM. The point is that Johnson and the Vote Leave team won the EU referendum largely on the basis of their controversial promise to invest £350m a week into the health service. They were acutely aware that money for
