You can bank on him: Robert Peston

During the Falklands War of 1982, an anxious nation turned each day to a rather nerdy civil servant called Ian McDonald for news of latest developments in the South Atlantic. In September 2008, during an alarming but very different kind of crisis, Britain has looked towards a journalist to tell us what is going on.

This has been Robert Peston's time. In recent weeks, as capitalism itself has seemed in peril, the BBC business editor has hardly been off duty, whether reporting for Radio 4's Today programme, for rolling news and the bulletins, or posting on Peston's Picks, his influential blog.

On 17 September, at exactly 9am, a new entry on that blog opened with the simple but remarkable sentence: "Lloyds is in advanced merger talks with HBOS to create a giant UK super retail bank, I have learned."

Within seconds of posting the story from the PC in his office at home in Muswell Hill, north London, Peston, 48, had walked to the spare room and, via a specially-installed ISDN line, was broadcasting his scoop live on the BBC News channel. In the words of this newspaper, Peston's influence meant that he was "one of the few men with the power to dam the floodwaters heading HBOS's way". This was the same reporter who had already won the Royal Television Society's "Scoop of the Year" award for his coverage of the collapse of the Northern Rock building society.

"Extraordinary, I mean quite extraordinary, I've never in my career known a period of such intense change," is how he describes his working life over the past weeks, a period of such "absolutely frenetic activity" that he has been obliged to work "16 or 17 hour days, more or less non-stop".

He starts reeling off the stories, the fates of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, of Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, of AIG and of course HBOS. "I mean the financial world has been turned upside down," he says, almost pinching himself. "These are amazing changes."

The mini-studio in his house is a reflection of the BBC's need to have him on call at all times. "It's in one of the spare bedrooms, so if anybody is staying they get turfed out. Very early in the morning!" he says, emitting a machine-gun cackle of laughter.

The hotline to Robert Peston is his BlackBerry, which answers to the same phone number he has had for 17 years, during his time at the Sunday Telegraph (assistant editor, city editor) and the Financial Times (financial editor, political editor, banking editor, investigations chief). "It's mobile, emails and texts – and the great thing about a BlackBerry is you can get them all on one thing. If the Blackberry doesn't work, it's a disaster, the only time you see smoke coming out of my ears is when the emails don't come through on my BlackBerry and then I get very grumpy."

In times like this, how does he manage his daily life? "The hardest thing, the one thing you don't want to happen in all of this, is for your, or actually my, for my family to feel neglected and let down," he says. "My 11-year-old has just started a new secondary school. So I'm doing the Today programme, rushing downstairs making sure he's got his lunch money, making sure he's got his bottle of water, his PE kit and rushing back up again."

As for the scoop-getting, that's just "what I've done for 20-odd years", he says. "I love getting scoops, I like stories and I think in order to get the story you have to talk to as many people as possible, keep your eye on the screen, and immerse yourself in what's going on. The way you get scoops is if you can see the patterns and get some idea of what's going to happen, what might be a scoop, you make the calls and you get the scoop."

This methodology of second-guessing sounds not unlike that used by some of the traders Peston reports on. "If you're any good in the market as a trader then you've got to have a sense of where prices are going. I suppose to that extent there is some kind of analogy."

He describes "a market in information ... whizzing around the world", from which he must sieve the facts that matter and "ignore the noise". He says: "Before I did the scoop on HBOS I was immersing myself in that story because of the extraordinary things that were happening with share price. It was tumbling in an unprecedented way for a company of its size and not something you could ignore if you were business editor of the BBC."

The exact circumstances surrounding the scoop have been the subject of speculation. As well as having impeccable contacts in the banking sector (for example, he recently conducted a first televised interview with HBOS chief executive, Andy Hornby, and his friend Roland Rudd works as PR supremo for Lloyds TSB) he is also close to government (the son of Labour peer and economist Maurice Peston, he is author of Brown's Britain, a biography of Gordon Brown). But of course the BBC business editor keeps his sources a guarded secret.

A report in the Mail on Sunday highlighted that in the minutes before Peston got the rescue story out, millions of pounds was spent on HBOS shares in two massive deals. "My purpose in life is to get stories that I think are of interest and relevance to the millions of our viewers, listeners and readers," he says, warily. "What I do know is that there's nothing that either I or the BBC has done in the context of breaking the story that gives us any reason to be anxious about our behaviour, we've just played it completely straight."

He's clearly smarting a little from the backlash he suffered over his Northern Rock scoop last year. "There were a lot of angry people out there who somehow thought that I brought down Northern Rock single handed. It is absolute rubbish. I've renewed my broadcasts and our broadcasts in enormous detail. I was very, very, very careful in what I said that night and absolutely clear in all my broadcasts that the fact that the Bank of England was stepping in to provide emergency help meant there was no reason for depositors to worry," he says. "People in the circumstances got very frightened and were looking for people to blame. I was very visible which is one of the reasons people directed their anger at me."

Peston received criticism from within the media industry when he first replaced Jeff Randall in the BBC's senior business post in 2006. A lifetime print journalist, he had no broadcasting skills, they said. He talks of the "appalling and scary" experience of his first appearance on the flagship Ten O'Clock News (which he repeatedly refers to as News at Ten, for which Huw Edwards will surely forgive him in view of the 17-hour days). "You think 'Oh my God, there are five or six million people looking at me now and I'm sure I'm not going to be able to speak'."

The criticisms over his diction seem petty now, considering what he has done to improve the BBC's previously poor reputation for covering business. He has had to work hard at changing the culture and Leading Questions, a recent series of 30-minute interviews with business leaders for the BBC News channel (including the Hornby scoop and a rare audience with Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC), would have been unheard of when he joined the corporation. "When I came here I said I would love to do this kind of thing and people looked at me as though I was out of my mind." Nobody is saying that business is boring now.

Peston's skill is that he plays a long game. During his time at the FT he hired the young Will Lewis (now editor of the Daily Telegraph) and told him to carefully target potential sources. "You have to be pretty scientific in thinking who actually knows stuff, right? Then you've got to get know them and win their trust," he says. "Will was brilliant at it."

Experience is a factor in Peston's success. "That's the other thing that is jolly helpful. I mean I'm 48 ... I think. Am I 48? What year is this ... 2008 yeah? Yes, I'm 48. So the other great advantage about being as old as I am is that you've seen a few cycles and you can put things into context in the way that younger journalists can't. There are great advantages in having been round the block a few times."

His range of roles means that his contacts extend "from Westminster to Whitehall to the City to the boardroom", many of them courted years earlier. "It's extraordinarily unlikely in the heat of battle that somebody who doesn't know you will talk to you, so you have to plan and think about where stories are going to be for months and years ahead. You have to get to know people when there's no pressure on them. The best time to win the confidence and trust of people is when things are quiet for them and there's no story." He says his book Who Runs Britain? (published back in February) is an indication of his ability to read the financial runes, dealing as it does with the "mad and excessive" culture of private equity capitalists and those running hedge funds.

Peston says he understands that he has the power to drive people to despair, with all that could mean for the state of the economy. "People come up to me – people I know and people I don't know – and they say how anxious they are about what's going on in the world. This is causing profound anxiety to people and they feel powerless," he says, stressing how hard he works to avoid being "alarmist".

But he has few words of comfort for us now. "It would be a foolish person who said they know we are over the worst and it's all going to settle down. I personally think you can expect things to be pretty miserable for a year and then rather flat for another year, maybe a bit longer than that."

Given Peston's track record, he's probably right. Though he is guarded about how long he sat on the HBOS story, fearful of exposing his source, he says he took time to check its veracity. "You live or die as a journalist by your reputation for getting it right. I know this sounds pompous but I've never rushed a story out because it was too good to hold. I've always sat on a story until I was absolutely certain it was correct," he says. "Because in the end as journalists all we have is our personal brands and once they're damaged that's the end. You might as well go off and do something else."