Graham Norton has revealed he stopped writing for The Telegraph because its political stance made him feel increasingly “nauseous”.
The BBC1 chat show presenter stepped down from his advice column of 12 years at the end of 2018, with no explanation.
He has now said that he made the decision to quit after the publication defended public figures including then-US supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
According to The Guardian, Norton made the comments during promotional work for the new series of The Graham Norton Show, which airs on Friday nights.
“When I signed up to be their agony aunt, I was aware that it was a right-wing paper and that didn’t bother me, but about a year before I left, it took a turn and there were some things in the paper about which I thought, ‘I cannot be contained within the same pages as this,'” Norton said.
“There was a piece defending Brett Kavanaugh and things president Trump had said about [Kavanaugh’s] accuser, and I just thought, ‘This is toxic.’ And I loved that job, I absolutely adored doing it, but ultimately I didn’t love it enough to be a part of that stable.”
He added: “I just had to step away, which saddened me, but I was beginning to feel a bit nauseous. It was a weird thing, these very nice people would say, ‘Oh, I love your column in The Telegraph,’ and I’m looking at them thinking, ‘You read The Telegraph?!’ That’s not good, that’s not a happy situation to be in.”
Norton went on to criticise The Telegraph’s standards when it came to fact-checking, referring to the paper as “a mouthpiece for Boris Johnson with no fact-checking at all”.
“He wrote an article where one of the solutions to the Irish problem was to build a bridge between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain, and you only need to talk to one engineer to find out that it’s not possible: the depth of the ocean, the weather conditions; you cannot do that,” Norton said. “So how is he [Johnson] allowed to publish an article in a newspaper suggesting it was possible?”
A spokesperson for The Telegraph said: “Graham’s weekly column was widely enjoyed by our readers, and we wish him all the very best with his future plans.”
Norton’s advice column has since been taken over by Richard Madeley.
The Graham Norton Show continues on Friday 11 October on BBC1.
