Remember that absurd Telegraph story about the investment banker his and wife who have a joint salary of £345,000 but are no longer able to take five holidays a year because of VAT on school fees?
As everyone suspected it was phoney, and PressGazette blames a finance industry PR for pitching it.
My own view is that even if every word were true, it would still have made most people cheer the idea of VAT on school fees. So I blame the news editor for putting in the paper at all.
But then the Telegraph has always been susceptible to this sort of thing. Here's Ian Wooldridge writing in the Daily Mail in 2002:
For several years the late E.W. 'Jim' Swanton, cricket writer emeritus, published a Monday morning column in The Daily Telegraph extolling the outstanding feats of obscure players, mostly pupils of lesser-known, fee-paying preparatory or public schools.
Thus Robin Fortescue-Smythe (Jim did love double-barrelled names) took all 10 for next to nothing for St Swithin's bowling offspin against St Agnew's the previous week.
It transpired that many of these entries were fraudulent, the work of that incorrigible hoaxer, Peter Richardson, the former Kent and England opening batsman. Peter used to appropriate headed notepaper from minor seats of learning and bombard Swanton with hilarious and utterly spurious information.
Peter Richardson made five centuries for England.
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