The Conservative party has removed videos from YouTube including the Webcameron series that were billed as providing "behind-the-scenes access" to David Cameron, it has emerged.

News of the video deletions follows the disclosure on Tuesday that a decade of speeches from the party's website and from the main internet library – including one in which David Cameron claimed that being able to search the web would democratise politics by making "more information available to more people".

The archive removed text includes a decade of speeches between 2000 and 2010. The party claims the deletions are part of a redesign of its website. Labour also stands accused of trying to remove speeches from the internet with its own website redesign.

Now it has emerged that every video on the Conservatives' YouTube page that dates from before 2010 has been removed or marked as private. Videos such as Ask David Cameron: Shared ownership, EU referendum, PMQs are now marked as unavailable on YouTube. Others, such as Boris Johnson at the pre-election rally in Swindon, and David Cameron down on the farm, are now unlisted, ensuring that only users with a direct link can see them.

Additionally, a file on the party's website instructed sites such as the Internet Archive and Google, which store copies of webpages for posterity, to remove the deleted pages from their databases. (Those instructions have now been removed from the file, called robots.txt).

Labour has also edited its news archive. The party's new website only goes back to September 2010, leaving Ed Miliband's keynote at the party conference that year the oldest speech available. But unlike the Conservatives, Labour didn't require internet archivists to remove stored versions, leaving pages dating back to July 2002 in the database.

The Webcameron videos were launched by the Tories in 2006 with great fanfare and were billed as a way for the public to see a more natural image of the then leader of the opposition.

"I want to tell you what the Conservative party is doing, what we're up to, give you behind-the-scenes access so you can actually see what policies we're developing, the things that we are doing, and have that direct link ... watch out BBC, ITV, Channel 4, we're the new competition. We're a bit shaky and wobbly, but this is one of the ways we want to communicate with people properly about what the Conservative party stands for," the future prime minister said.

Cameron aide Sam Roake described the videos at the time as "a significant change in the way politics has been done".

"It very much represents the values of David Cameron's Conservative party, of openness and community," he said.

The message of transparency was echoed in one of the speeches now removed from the party's website. George Osborne said in 2007: "We need to harness the internet to help us become more accountable, more transparent and more accessible – and so bridge the gap between government and governed."

On Wednesday, Chris Grayling said that there is "a limit to how much you can put and keep on your website year after year", and a Conservative spokesman claimed that the changes to the website were to "allow people to quickly and easily access the most important information we provide – how we are clearing up Labour’s economic mess, taking the difficult decisions and standing up for hardworking people.”

When asked about the YouTube deletions and why it was necessary to remove webpages from the Internet Archive, a spokesperson for the Conservatives declined to comment.

"I think it's a bad attempt to airbrush some of their most embarrassing online and offline moments from their past, but obviously the public won't be fooled by it," said a Labour source.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, pointed out that the material is still available on the UK Web Archive, a project run by the British Library to archive British websites.

Nonetheless, he said: "The suspicion has to be that at the point they are engaged in a huge debate about mass surveillance … they are removing the videos where they criticise Labour for doing the same thing. That's why it's absolutely important that that material remains available."

Despite having been variously removed and hidden from YouTube, the Webcameron episodes are still available on Conservatives.com, on a page only accessible through search.