Mark Watts, former editor of defunct investigative news outfit Exaro, has labelled press regulator Impress “a shambles” after it ruled against an article on Ted Heath he had written for Byline.

Impress said the article breached its standards code by using an image of the former Prime Minister in a boat with a teenage boy alongside an article about a police investigation into child sex abuse allegations against him.

The Complaints Committee said that “accompanying it with text which implied that it had direct significance to the substance of that investigation, when that was not the case, amounted to a significant inaccuracy.”