The ITV political editor is revealed to be as endearingly eccentric as you might imagine in a profile interview with Press Gazette.
His partner Charlotte Edwardes, who contributed to the piece and writes for the Sunday Times, revealed that “the Pest” took up a lot of space when working from home and was so loud that he had to be banished to a shed in the garden, dubbed New Broadcasting Hut.
Asked whether her famously workaholic partner needs to relax more, she said: “I’m not sure he does. He’s pretty laid back, unless it’s weird stuff he obsesses about like having at least four spare toothpastes, or rows of extra bleach.
“He definitely has stock-piling tendencies. I knew the pandemic was serious when I opened the fridge to find eight packets of butter. I asked him whether we would be smearing it on ourselves to keep warm. Oh, and washing his hands – you’ve never seen someone so excited by the government’s mandate to spend hours at a basin singing.”
Peston says he has suffered from OCD for his whole life and always been “very obsessive about landing a story”.
Asked who he thinks will succeed Laura Kuenssberg as BBC political editor, who is rumoured to be leaving, he said, “Oh, gawd knows. It’s not going to be me because I have zero interest in doing it.
“Because I love what I do at the moment. So why would I want to go somewhere else?”
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