The Sun has been forced to print a front-page correction over a claim that the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was willing to join the privy council because his party stood to benefit financially.

The press watchdog said the paper had made “significantly misleading” claims in its front-page story, published on 15 September and had only made an offer to correct them at the eleventh hour.

The Sun reported that Corbyn “will kiss the Queen’s hand on bended knee in a humiliating personal climbdown”. It said he had become a privy counsellor so he can “grab £6.2m” of state cash.

But, after a complaint from a former Labour party staff member, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) said that there was not a formal connection beteen Corbyn’s position on the council and the allocation of funding for opposition parties – called Short money.

It said, therefore, that the story was inaccurate, in contravention of clause one of its editorial code.

Because the misleading information was “repeated throughout the article” and appeared on the front page, Ipso ordered that notice of the adjudication also appear on the front of the paper.

It also said that the Sun’s offer to issue a correction had come more than a month after it was notified of the complaint and after the organisation had informed it and the complainant, Rosemary Brocklehurst, that its committee would consider it.

Front page of the Sun, dated 15 September, for which the newspaper issued an apology to Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Guardian

The Sun became the second paper within the space of only a few days to be ordered to print a correction on its front page. The Express had to do so last week after it inaccurately claimed that English was starting to die out in schools.



In its ruling, Ipso ordered the Sun to print a reference to the adjudication on its front page that would direct readers to the full ruling, which it said should appear on page four or further forward.

“Both the headline to the adjudication inside the paper and the front-page reference should make clear that Ipso has upheld the complaint, and refer to its subject matter,” it said.

Accordingly, the Sun printed 11 words in the bottom left corner of the front page of Tuesday’s edition in a space roughly 15mm by 35mm. The rest of the adjudication appeared on page two.

Under the headline “Ipso complaint on Labour short money is upheld”, which was printed in capitals in smaller font than its other front-page headlines, it directed readers to page two. It did not refer to the Sun on the front page.

Inside, it told readers: “Ipso’s complaints committee found that it was significantly misleading to claim that Labour’s access to the £6.2m depended on whether Mr Corbyn was a member of the privy council.

“The two were not formally connected and the article did not make clear how a majority of the funding was in fact allocated. The committee upheld the complaint.”

However, complaints that the Sun’s depiction of Corbyn as a jester and its reference to him as a “leftie who hates the royals” were not misleading, Ipso said, because the image had been made to “lampoon” the Labour leader and because Corbyn himself had given public statements opposing the monarchy.

Ipso said that, while the Sun accepted that it “could have been clearer in certain respects, the newspaper defended its coverage overall as legitimate speculation based on accurate information”.

The Sun argued that it could demonstrate a direct link between Corbyn’s acceptance of a place on the privy council and short money because “around £700,000 of the total would be allocated to the running costs of its leader’s office and would be available only if he secured his position as leader of the opposition by joining the privy council; had Mr Corbyn failed to do so, the entire £6.2m available to Labour could have been at risk”.

But Ipso ruled that the article had “referred repeatedly to the sum of £6.2m in the context of Mr Corbyn’s role as opposition leader, but had not clarified that the great majority of the funding relates to the party as a whole, as an opposition party, rather than the leader of the opposition specifically”.

It added that the paper had “also failed to clarify that Short money is allocated based on the number of seats won by a party in opposition, rather than any specific role leading the opposition, and would therefore be unaffected by any concerns over Mr Corbyn’s status as opposition leader. This represented a further failure to take care not to publish misleading information”.

News of the decision was first published by the Independent on Monday. Reacting to it, a spokesman for the Sun told the Guardian: “The only publications that will write about this decision have chosen not to abide by the press regulator, which is an irony worth noting.”

The Guardian did not sign up to the regulator, writing in a leading article in September last year that it would “wait to see whether [its chairman] succeeds in reforming some of the governance issues that still cause anxiety”.

A spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn declined to comment.