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June 30, 2015

Four months on from Telegraph resignation, Peter Oborne moves back to Daily Mail

By William Turvill

Peter Oborne has announced he is to return to the Daily Mail four months after he resigned from The Daily Telegraph. (Picture: Channel 4 News)

The Telegraph's former chief political commentator quit in February over what he saw as a lack of integrity at the newspaper.

Oborne claimed that pressure from advertisers HSBC had prompted the Telegraph to give scant coverage to a tax avoidance row involving the bank.

Other former Telegraph journalists agreed with Oborne that there were issues at the paper with advertisers exerting pressure over editorial coverage.

The Telegraph has since issued new guidelines over the way editorial and commercial staff work together.

He will return to the Mail, which he left for the Telegraph in 2010, as a political columnist in the autumn. He has also started writing a column in the Middle East Eye.

Asked whether he had received any other offers for work, Oborne said: "I've had a few conversations."

He described the Mail as a "terrific newspaper" that he was "thrilled" to be rejoining the title.

"I've profoundly missed being able to write about British politics at such an amazing time."

In an interview with Press Gazette, Oborne told how Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, when he was editing the Evening Standard in 1992, asked Oborne to move from the newspaper's City desk onto the politics team.

Then in 2006, Dacre recruited Oborne from the Spectator to be a Daily Mail columnist. He was then taken to the Telegraph by then-editor Tony Gallagher, now deputy editor at the Mail, in 2010.

Earlier this month it emerged that columnist Simon Heffer had moved from the Daily Mail to The Sunday Telegraph.

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