The Daily Telegraph pulled an article critical of Conservative leadership contender Theresa May from its website after pressure from her campaign team, it has been claimed.
The article by Jonathan Foreman, which can still be read in full at Web Archive, has mysteriously disappeared from the newspaper’s website and any attempt to access it at its original location returns a 404 error.
Now the Guido Fawkes blog says that Mrs May’s campaign thought it was so damaging they “insisted it be removed or the newspaper would suffer consequences after her coronation…”
The article, entitled “Theresa May is a great self-promoter, but a terrible Home Secretary”, provides an excoriating list of the Home Secretary’s failings while in office, saying that although she is good at exuding an air of competence, her record “has been little better than disastrous”.
As Breitbart London reported on Thursday, Mrs May presided over the biggest migration surge in British history all the while promising to reduce figures to the “tens of thousands”.
In his article, Mr Foreman says she is responsible for a “succession of derelictions that has left Britain’s borders and coastline at least as insecure as they were in 2010, and which mean that British governments still rely on guesswork to estimate how many people enter and leave the country.”
Among her failings, Mr Foreman includes:
Take the demoralised, underfunded UK Border Force. As the public discovered after a people-smugglers’ vessel ran aground in May, it has has only three cutters protecting 7,700 miles of coastline. Italy by contrast has 600 boats patrolling its 4722 miles.
Considering the impression Mrs May gives of being serious about security, it’s all the more astonishing that she has also allowed the UK’s small airfields to go unpatrolled – despite the vastly increased terrorist threat of the last few years, the onset of the migration crisis, and the emergence of smuggling networks that traffic people, drugs and arms.
Then there is the failure to establish exit checks at all the country’s airports and ports. These were supposed to be in place by March 2015.
The incident comes shortly after the Telegraph was forced to apologise after one of its journalists incited murder against UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
Catherine Gee wrote on Twitter: “You know that time travel conundrum: would you kill baby Hitler? Same but Nigel Farage.”
The paper issued an apology, saying: “The tweets were wholly inappropriate and offensive. Once we became aware of them, we instructed the member of staff to remove them immediately from her personal feed.”