Stonehouse ‘Tory MP’ slip

THE Left-wing Observer newspaper has come under fire for mistakenly describing a disgraced Labour politician as a Tory MP.

John Stonehouse, the 1970s minister who tried to fake his own death and is the subject of a new ITV drama, formed the basis of a column this weekend linking his scandals to problems in today’s Conservative Party.

Catherine Bennett’s article was on The Guardian’s website under a headline stating that he had ‘paved the way for today’s sleazy Tory MPs’. It said his ‘rackety life and faked death’ now seem ‘almost quaint compared with the brazenness of members of his party today’ and was also in print. But the MP was in Harold Wilson’s Labour government.

Amid a flurry of corrections on social media, the column was amended online to say Stonehouse paved the way for all today’s ‘sleazy members’.