The Financial Times has accused a Labour peer of “spouting nonsense” over claims the newspaper is backing Theresa May’s Brexit deal in an attempt to please its Japanese owners and get a knighthood for its editor.
The former Labour minister Andrew Adonis has repeatedly criticised the news outlet on Twitter over its stance on Brexit, suggesting the newspaper’s overseas owner, Nikkei, is exerting its influence over the publication.
The leading anti-Brexit activist claimed on Tuesday the FT was “appeasing Brexit” in part because of its “Japanese ownership”, citing unnamed sources within the newspaper.
“Corporate Japan is backing the deal for fear of worse, and to give it time to get investments out of the UK in good order if it goes badly,” he claimed, having previously suggested Nikkei was using the newspaper to please its corporate allies who “want ‘any deal’ to avoid immediate profit risks”. The Japanese business bought the paper from Pearson in 2015.
An FT spokesperson said there was no truth to the claims. “As any serious reader of the FT will know, Andrew Adonis is spouting nonsense,” they said.
The Labour peer is a former FT journalist and contributor to the paper, who this month wrote the newspaper’s obituary of the former cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood.
He has become a vocal opponent of Brexit and prominent supporter of the People’s Vote campaign for a second EU referendum, touring the UK to drum up support while making regular claims about the FT and BBC’s coverage of the Brexit process.
Last week he claimed and then retracted a suggestion that the FT editor, Lionel Barber, was backing the deal in order to obtain a knighthood from the Conservative government.
I have been in communication with @lionelbarber and withdraw my earlier suggestion that he is manipulating the FT’s editorial line in order to gain a knighthood
— Andrew Adonis (@Andrew_Adonis) November 19, 2018
This month he claimed the BBC “banned a documentary team from working with me on the campaign for a people’s vote” because the corporation wanted to avoid offending the government.
The BBC said the documentary was never commissioned and the only filming was for an initial internal “taster tape” to give editors an idea of the material they could expect from interviews with Lord Adonis.
