As the Telegraph celebrates another victory in its long campaign against the BBC, one of its own has been dishing out fake news far worse than Panorama’s Trump edit. Last Thursday, columnist Allison Pearson claimed on GB News: “Dorset Police are looking at 119 sexual prosecutions going through at the moment… 44% of those prosecutions are asylum seekers living in asylum hotels. In Dorset!”
Those figures are indeed shockingly high (and thus Pearson’s claim was shared by the usual right wing ghouls) but they are untrue. A Freedom of Information (FOI) response from Dorset Police last month showed just 8.2% of those convicted of sex offences in 2024 were foreign nationals, and only a fraction of those could possibly have been asylum seekers as the data included offenders from France, Germany, Poland and New Zealand, none of whom are entitled to claim asylum in the UK.
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One theory is that Pearson’s figures stem from a different FOI request, made by the Daily Mail. But even these do not back her claims as, for a start, they are for a three-year period (not a year) and include all crimes (not just sex offences). Dorset Police wrote on X: “This is incorrect information. The figures… do not correlate to offences committed in Dorset.”
Pearson is said to be trying to broaden her media profile as rumours swirl that she is on her way out at the Telegraph. She is thought to have fallen out with editors after including her own publication among those she criticised for critical but accurate coverage of violence at Tommy Robinson’s London march in September.
