Allegations that editorial independence at the Daily Telegraph has been compromised because of the interests of the paper’s owners were “deeply regrettable” if true, a former editor at the group, Dominic Lawson, has said.
Lawson, who edited the Sunday Telegraph, is contractually barred from talking about his time on the paper, but said it was sad to see such a distinguished title become enmeshed in such controversy.
Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s former chief political commentator, has launched a blistering attack on the paper’s management and owners over its lack of coverage of the HSBC tax story, which he described as a “fraud on its readers”.
Oborne claimed the paper deliberately suppressed stories about the bank – including last week’s revelations that its Swiss subsidiary helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars in assets – in order to keep its valuable advertising account.
Lawson said: “It’s very sad what happened to the Daily Telegraph and I share – not as personally as Peter – I share his sadness about it, because clearly the Telegraph has, like the Guardian, has an importance within the social fabric of this country. It is deeply regrettable.”
Lawson also said he had noticed one day recently there were “about 10 stories” in the home-news pages of the paper with no byline. This is frequently an indication that the story has come from a news agency rather than an in-house reporter, and could reflect cutbacks at the paper over the last two or three years.
A Telegraph spokesperson said: “Like any other business, we never comment on individual commercial relationships, but our policy is absolutely clear. We aim to provide all our commercial partners with a range of advertising solutions, but the distinction between advertising and our award-winning editorial operation has always been fundamental to our business. We utterly refute any allegation to the contrary.
“It is a matter of huge regret that Peter Oborne, for nearly five years a contributor to the Telegraph, should have launched such an astonishing and unfounded attack, full of inaccuracy and innuendo, on his own paper.”
The paper has parted ways with a succession of senior figures in the past year, including its editor Tony Gallagher, its deputy editor Benedict Brogan, the group business editor Tim Jotischky and one of the industry’s best colour writers, Neil Tweedie. Other more junior staff chose to quit the paper, some after just a few months.
Related: Telegraph owners' £250m HSBC loan raises fresh questions over coverage
“It has been hollowed out,” said one former senior journalist. “Some people have been pushed out, some have left. The Barclays don’t really see the need for experienced journalists. They don’t care about their readers: they see them as customers, people to make money out of.”
Another executive said Oborne’s depiction of life at the paper was “on the money” while another described it as “spot on”. “The interference wasn’t as blatant as a story-by-story review but, repeatedly, edicts would be handed down to desk heads and the executives about how people who worked for banks needed to be ‘soft soaped’.”
One former Telegraph executive said: “My impression was that the Barclays ran the business desk as their own personal fiefdom. The rest of news was rarely interfered with, but the business desk would be getting all the pressure.”
The executive said that the main issue was that the paper was controlled by the chief executive rather than the editor, whose power was limited: “Murdoch MacLennan basically ran it,” he said.
Two former journalists on the paper have said that the interference in independent reporting went beyond banking. Both sources say there was a bust-up after the paper reported that the former chief executive of Sainsbury’s, Justin King, was calling for an tax on online retailers such as Amazon. “They were furious that this interview appeared in the paper, even though all we did was report what someone else, Justin King, had said. An edict went around that we shouldn’t even dignify such ideas by reporting on them,” one said.
“There was great recrimination. The suspicion was it was because of the Barclays’ own interest in [online shopping groups] Shop Direct and Littlewoods,” said the second source.
Another journalist on the paper said that for several years there had been both spoken and unspoken advertiser-driven editorial interference at the Telegraph. It centred mostly on the business desk, he said, as this was the part of the paper writing about big advertisers such as HSBC, John Lewis, Asda and BT.
Another said other banking stories were regularly changed, “not just HSBC”. “If you wrote something negative it would be turned into something positive: it would be changed by the person on the desk that day,” the reporter added.
Oborne revealed the deletion of HSBC stories written by former banking correspondent Harry Wilson, who had long complained about articles he wrote about the bank being changed. The matter came to a head in January 2014, when Wilson raised the deletion of an article in an all-staff meeting with MacLennan. Shortly afterwards, Wilson left to join the Times.
The bank was one of the Telegraph’s biggest advertisers with a reputed annual spend of £3.5m, according to one informed source.