THE newspaper which pays Boris Johnson £275,000 a year to be its star political columnist has been forced to issue a correction after he made a manifestly false claim about Brexit.
The Tory leadership hopeful said opinion polls showed a no-deal exit was the most popular option among voters “by some margin”, when they said no such thing.
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The Daily Telegraph has now admitted the claim, which appeared in one of Mr Johnson’s columns in January and was repeated on its front page, was inaccurate.
It followed the press watchdog Ipso upholding a complaint that the statement was not true.
Ipso also revealed that the Telegraph had argued the former Foreign Secretary was “entitled to make sweeping generalisations” based on his opinions”.
In a defence that was widely mocked on social media, the paper said the leading Brexiter’s article was “clearly comically polemical, and could not be reasonably read as a serious, empirical, in-depth analysis of hard factual matters”.
It also argued that “amalgamating various combinations” of responses from four polls could result in no-deal being seen as more popular than Theresa May’s deal or no Brexit.
However it admitted “some degree of subjectivity” was inevitable in interpreting poll results.
Ipso rejected the Telegraph’s arguments and upheld the complaint, ruling there had been “a significant inaccuracy, because it misrepresented polling information”.
In a correction agreed with Ipso, the Telegraph said of the poll claim: “In fact, no poll clearly showed that a no deal Brexit was more popular than the other options”.
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The complaint was lodged by Mitchell Stirling, a statistician from Reading, who said he felt “a potential prime minister shouldn’t be able to make things up in a weekly column”.
He said: “To exaggerate like that is clearly out of the Trump/Bannon playbook. But because it was in print and the phrase used by Johnson was so strong, contrary to the lack of evidence that I, as an avid poll watcher, knew didn’t exist, I knew I had a decent case.”
It is the second blow in days to Mr Johnson’s credibility.
Earlier this week, Westminster’s ethics watchdog said the Ruislip MP lacked “leadership” after he repeatedly failed to keep his register of financial interests up to date.
The Standards Committee also criticised his “over-casual attitude”.
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