Boris Johnson has been rebuked by the press watchdog for claiming in a newspaper column that a no-deal Brexit was what voters wanted “by some margin”.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph in January, the former foreign secretary and likely Tory leadership candidate said polls showed leaving the EU with out an agreement had become the most popular outcome.
In a ruling published today, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) said Johnson had “misrepresented polling information” and was guilty of “significant inaccuracy”.
He had written: “Of all the options suggested by pollsters – staying in the EU, coming out on Theresa May’ terms, or coming out on World Trade terms – it is the last, the so-called no-deal option, that is gaining in popularity. In spite of – or perhaps because of – everything they have been told, it is this future that is by some margin preferred by the British public.”
Johnson is paid £275,000 a year to write a weekly column for the newspaper and the piece titled “The British people won’t be scared into backing a woeful Brexit deal nobody voted for” appeared on the front page.
Defending Johnson’s claim, The Daily Telegraph argued as it was a comment piece Johnson was “entitled to make sweeping generalisations based on his opinions”.
“It was clearly comically polemical, and could not be reasonably read as a serious, empirical, in-depth analysis of hard factual matters,” it added.
A correction now added to the column on the newspaper’s website reads: “This article previously said that of all the options suggested by pollsters - staying in the EU, coming out on Theresa May’s terms, or coming on World Trade terms - a ‘no-deal’ Brexit was by some margin the outcome most preferred by the British public.
“In fact, no poll clearly showed that a no deal Brexit was more popular than the other options. This correction is being published following a complaint upheld by the Independent Press Standards Organisation. ”