“I don’t myself think Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic. I think he is genuinely naive. I’ve told him how uncomfortable I was with how slow they were to start dealing with this problem.
“I am concerned about how slow Labour have been to address this.
“People whom I regard as friends and family feel so alienated from Labour at the moment. I think they’re moving in the right direction but I will not believe, because it is such an indictment of our democracy, that the Labour Party is institutionally racist - this is such a horrific thought.”
Discussing his family background, Mr Peston, who is currently ITV’s Political Editor and presenter of the Peston on Wednesday show, said “I’m not a religious Jew, but all my family are Jews. I identify as a secular Jew.”
Mr Peston also used his talk to criticise the BBC, where he used to work, over their failure to understand how to be impartial in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
He said: “I love the BBC but I did feel that during the Brexit campaign they slightly got confused about what impartial journalism meant. It is the role of the journalist to say ‘we’ve got these two contradictory arguments, I’m now going to revise which of these is likely to be closer to the truth’.
“The problem with the BBC was during the campaign it put people on with diametrically-opposed views. It didn’t give any help in assessing which one was the loony and which one was the genius.
“I do think that they went through a period of just not being confident enough. Impartial journalism is not giving equal airtime to two people, one of whom says ‘the world is flat’ and the other says ‘the earth is round’. That is not balanced, impartial journalism.”
