Yahoo News The Telegraph's 25 biggest stories in our first 25 years online
Launched in 1994, the Electronic Telegraph was the earliest attempt in this country to publish a newspaper on the world wide web. With a snazzy masthead which likely took around 20 seconds to load on computers of the time, the site ushered in a new era for the publication.
The Telegraph has been a part of Britons' lives since 1855, making the site a comparatively recent addition to our history. Nevertheless, through several rethinks of design and direction, our website has consistently been the place where the Telegraph has broken stories.
With the end of the decade approaching, and the inevitable reams of retrospective round-ups that will bring, there seems little point in re-telling the familiar moments from history since our site went online.
Instead, we present this collection of the 25 biggest Telegraph stories in the 25 years since the site launched. These are the very best examples of our exclusive reporting, our journalism and our online heritage.
Here's to the next 25.
1. Tories block open inquiry on MPs' cash
15 November 1994
The story which led the Telegraph's website on the day it went online, a touch over halfway through John Major's term as prime minister. The Labour party, with newly-elected leader Tony Blair in charge, called for an open hearing into the cash for questions scandal. It was blocked by the government, despite warnings from senior Conservatives that parliament's standing was falling in the eyes of the public. Ministers and their money was an area we would go on to explore in some depth 15 years later.
2. Barings bank crash
26 February 1995
The Sunday Telegraph broke the story of Barings' collapse, an implosion of one of the country's oldest banks. Details about rogue trader Nick Leeson emerged in the following days.
Barings refused to confirm or deny the emerging story so a photographer was sent to the bank's office. They noticed the lights were on, unusual for a bank HQ on a Saturday. This allowed a journalist in the newsroom to call Barings and say “We know you’re in there”.
3. Whitewater scandal
1995
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s series of investigative pieces about Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Whitewater scandal made editors aware of the potential global audience for the Telegraph. Interest in the series of reports was so large that Clinton was eventually forced to issue a 331-page report responding to some of the accusations.
Former online editor Derek Bishton said: "In the days before Electronic Telegraph it would have been highly unlikely that anyone in the US would have been aware of Evans-Pritchard's work - and certainly not to the extent that the White House would be forced to issue such a lengthy rebuttal."
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard recalls the spread of his work, not all of it through officially-sanctioned channels:
At first I did not understand why my Sunday Telegraph stories on Bill and Hillary Clinton were suddenly attracting notice in far corners of America.
Local radio shows in Montana, Texas, and California were calling me hours after my articles were cleared by our long-suffering lawyers and went to the printers. In fact, a network of Americans seemed to have the pieces on Saturday night as earley as West Coast time, before British readers. They were hungry for the “full dope”, convinced that the US media was covering up the death of Vince Foster, the Arkansas cocaine mafia, and later the Oklahoma bombing.
I was vaguely conscious of the internet - and had an AOL account for emails - but had no idea of its potency. I discovered that a member of the Samizdat underground was buying a dawn copy of the Sunday Telegraph at Heathrow and immediately transcribing chunks of text on Prodigy. It would then go viral, although we did not use that term then.
Social media was arriving. The monopoly of the ‘seven deadly sinners’ was being broken. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, and the three establishment TV networks, no longer had a stranglehold on opinion. They could no longer ‘manufacture consent’ in the Chomsky sense. Or at least that was the view of the dissidents.
Few realised that this would lead to the monster of modern social media - an addiction disease, and at worst a threat to freedom and democracy - or that it would cause the fragmentation of society into irreconcilable and irascible tribes. We jumped from the frying pan of smothering consensus into the fire of visceral division. But it was intoxicating fun in the early 1990s
4. New Mini revealed
8 March 1997
Andrew English and Mark Hales broke the news that Rover was tearing up its previously-trailed concept for a new Mini, and instead using a car "virtually the same" as a 1970s design by Sir Alec Issigonis, creator of the original Mini.
"Contrary to what has been thought, the new Mini design is finished, and now lies hidden in the cupboard marked 'Top Secret' at Rover's HQ," English and Hales wrote. "Unwittingly, Rover's designers had come up with a car so similar to one of Issigonis' ideas that Bernd Pischetsrieder was rocked on his heels when he saw it. "
5. Interview with General Pinochet
18 July 1999
Dominic Lawson secured a world exclusive interview with the Chilean dictator, nine months after his arrest in London for human rights violations. Under house arrest at the Wentworth Golf Estate in Surrey, Pinochet railed against his imprisonment, denied crimes against humanity and posed for a picture with six of his grandchildren.
"As the General began to talk, a problem immediately became apparent," wrote Lawson. "His voice is extraordinary - almost no voice at all, more a hoarse whisper. It is the voice of a man who needs only to whisper to be heard loud and clear by the right people. It is the voice of a man who does not want to be overheard by the wrong people. It is the voice of a man who could make an interpreter weep."
6. Scientists unlock clue to secret of human life
28 November 1999
No big deal, only the secret to human life.
Quite the discovery from the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, which won the race to decode chromosone 22. This was the first time the chemical structure of a complex human chromosone had been revealed. Quite the scoop too, from Mark Court, who brought Telegraph readers the news before anyone else.
7. Sprinter was asked to feign injury after drug test
6 February 2000
Former world 200 meters champion Merlene Ottey made an explosive claim to the Telegraph early in the new millennium. The sprinter said she had been asked by the International Amateur Athletics Federation to invent an injury and withdraw from the world championships. This followed a positive test for the banned substance nandrolone, for which she was later cleared.
"Ottey claims that before the announcement of the findings of the drugs test, her agent, Daniel Zimmermann, received telephone calls from two senior officials from the IAAF asking her to hush up the news and to say she was withdrawing from the World Championships because of injury," wrote Own Slot.
"She was, in fact, at peak fitness and refused. 'I said I can't do that. I think only a guilty person would do. I hadn't done anything wrong. I was in very good shape and ready to run'."
The IAFF denied any such discussions took place.
8. Reformers leak secrets of Tiananmen bloodbath
7 January 2001
"Dramatic secret transcripts showing how Chinese hardliners outmanoeuvred their moderate comrades and ordered troops to crush the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest have been smuggled to the West by leading reformers," reported Philip Sherwell in 2001. The papers in question were a rare insight into the machinations of China's ruing elite. Thirty years on from the massacre, the Communist Party maintains its efforts to erase the event from history.
9. Revealed: The great Cronje cover-up
16 March 2003
Hanse Cronje was the South African cricket captain who had the chance to set an example of racial integration for his country to follow. Instead, Scyld Berry's work a year after Cronje's death in a plane crash, exposed his corruption and greed.
Berry remembers how the story came about, 16 years later:
The Scorpions were a unit set up by the post-apartheid government in South Africa to investigate corruption. It was one of their officers in Cape Town who revealed to me the extent of the financial dealings of the former South African cricket captain, Hansie Cronje.
The scale of Cronje's empire - over 70 overseas bank accounts - was breathtaking when I was told, and it still is. As most of them were joint accounts, the imagination can only boggle at the number of players who helped him in match-fixing, and at the number of international matches that were influenced - whether by fixing the result or an individual's performance within a game.
But officialdom did not want to know, whether the South African government or the International Cricket Council. It was so much easier - so much more reassuring for broadcasters and other stakeholders - to assume that Cronje's misbehaviour was limited to what he officially confessed to during the King inquiry, especially after his death in a plane accident in suspicious circumstances.
Everyone prefers to take it for granted that professional cricket is fundamentally clean, in accordance with its image. I doubted it then, and I doubt it now.
10. Secret Army unit colluded in assassination of Irish republicans, inquiry finds
3 April 2003
The Telegraph was first to publish the findings of the Stevens Report, which determined that a covert army unit had worked with loyalist paramilitaries to target suspected IRA terrorists for assassination. "The report will say that a shadowy Army outfit called the Force Research Unit effectively ran a rogue operation in Northern Ireland in the late 1980s and early 1990s that resulted in a number of murders," wrote Philip Johnston. "These included the shooting of Pat Finucane, a solicitor who represented suspected terrorists but who Stevens believes was not a member of the IRA, despite the suspicions of police."
11. Late-term abortion clinic exposed
21 November 2004
Charlotte Edwardes and Daniel Foggo uncovered a GP who admitted arranging a termination for a healthy patient who was 31.5 weeks pregnant. In covertly recorded video footage, the doctor was shown lying to a hospital over the telephone, saying that she was with a patient "in severe pain", in order to obtain an NHS scan which could then be sent to a clinic in Spain.
12. David Blunkett’s ex-lover accuses him of fast-tracking visa for foreign nanny
28 November 2004
Kimblery Quinn was the woman with whom then-home secretary David Blunkett conducted a three-year affair. In an email seen by the Telegraph, Quinn accused Blunkett of speeding through an application for permanent residency for a Filipina nanny working for Quinn. Blunkett denied he had acted improperly, but resigned as home secretary a matter of weeks after the Telegraph's story.
13. ECB sells cricket to Sky
16 December 2004
The summer of 2005 was a great one for English cricket, with Michael Vaughan leading his side to a first Ashes victory since 1987. It has often been lamented since that there was a failure to capitalise on this spike in the sport's popularity, with the removal of free-to-air TV coverage generally seen as the main issue.
While Sky's money has helped fund English cricket to ever-greater heights, far fewer people have seen the key moments live than witnessed the seminal Test series of 2005. News of the sale broke in 2004 on these pages, with the deal confirmed a month later.
14. Sex trafficking brings women to UK from Europe, then shuttles them around our towns
21 May 2006
"Hundreds of sex slaves from Eastern Europe are being shuttled between different towns and cities, often several times a week, by criminal gangs determined to cash in on multiple 'markets'," wrote David Harrison in 2006, as part of a series of undercover reports into sex trafficking.
Weeks later, the Government announced a crackdown on the gangs, leading to the first nationwide police operation against sex traffickers in Britain. Harrison was shortlisted for the 2006 Amnesty International Press Award for his work, with the series also praised by the United Nations' head of drugs and crime.
15. Expenses scandal
8 May 2009
It started with a leaked hard disk and ended with a spate of resignations, via a floating duck house. The Expenses scandal and the Telegraph's exclusive reporting on it has since been described as the biggest news story since the turn of the century. Matthew Bayley, now assistant editor, worked on it:
The MPs’ Expenses investigation was not only a huge moment for the newspaper - it was a seismic event for our website too. Until then, the Telegraph took what was then the traditional approach to publishing news stories on the web - we waited for a story to appear in print and then posted it online.
However, such was the magnitude of The Expenses Files, we realised that that strategy was not sustainable.
The unique nature of the scoop - described as the biggest political scandal since the Profumo affair - meant that for six weeks, the Telegraph was the centre of the national news agenda.
Day after day we published details of MPs’ spending that had the nation transfixed: evening news bulletins used to wait until they had a copy of our next day’s front page to lead the show with.
With an increasing number of people accessing news online via their desktops and - if you can believe it, smartphones and Blackberries - we realised that telegraph.co.uk gave us a way to help sate people’s thirst for the news only we could supply.
So we took what was then the unusual decision to publish at least one of our stories that was scheduled to run the following day in the afternoon rather than waiting until 10pm.
The website traffic went through the roof as readers pored over the latest revelations. And with the front page still to come we ensured that our extraordinary investigation remained at the centre of public conversation for another 24 hours.
Read more about the Expenses scandal and watch our documentary The Disk:
16. Bloodgate
14 August 2009
An unusual tale from the world of rugby at the turn of the decade. The sport allows teams to bring on a replacement player, even if they have used all of their substitutes, in the event of an injury which causes bleeding.
Harlequins used the rule to their advantage by faking an injury to Tom Williams, who bit into a fake blood capsule to make way for a superior kicker. Paul Kelso was the first to break the story and the first to report that Williams was cut in the mouth in an attempt to make the faked injury appear more convincing.
17. 'Chuggers' tricks revealed
23 June 2012
The Sunday Telegraph went undercover to investigate one of the country's biggest street fundraising companies. Its findings were outlined in this video:
18. Ukip foster parents row
23 November 2012
Rotherham council made a controversial decision to remove foster children from the care of a couple who were Ukip members. Sam Marsden's exclusive led the way, with the wife of the couple telling him : “I was dumbfounded.
"My question to [a visiting social worker and fostering agency official] was, 'What has Ukip got to do with having the children removed?’
"Then one of them said, 'Well, Ukip have got racist policies’. The implication was that we were racist. [The social worker] said Ukip does not like European people and wants them all out of the country to be returned to their own countries.
“I’m sat there and I’m thinking, 'What the hell is going off here?’ because I wouldn’t have joined Ukip if they thought that. I’ve got mixed race in my family. I said, 'I am absolutely offended that you could come in my house and accuse me of being a member of a racist party’.”
19. Sir Alex Ferguson close to ending Manchester United reign
7 May 2013
It was the moment that supporters of Manchester United had feared for many years. Correctly, as it hasturnedout. But Sir Alex Ferguson's retirement came suddenly, and Telegraph Sport was first with the story, the night before Ferguson confirmed his intention to leave.
Mark Ogden remembers the evening his words went online:
My first reaction, when the story was published just after 10pm, was 's---, if he changes his mind again, he'll ban me!' Fergie had previously backtracked on retirement in 2002, so there was a hefty element of risk with this story because it had not been confirmed by Manchester United or the man himself.
That confirmation came just after 9am the following morning, so relief was the primary emotion, before reality dawned on the significance of his remarkable reign at Old Trafford coming to an end.
For me, the best part of the story was the headline in the paper - 'Fergie Time.' That phrase had come to signify United's ability to win games in the final seconds, with the Scot feverishly tapping his watch on the sidelines. But now, it meant that the clock had finally run out on Ferguson, after 27 years at the helm."
20. The proof that Assad used chemical weapons to launch chlorine attacks on children in Syria
29 April 2014
The Telegraph's foreign desk commissioned independent soil testing of three attacks in Syria. An expert in chemical warfare confirmed the worst. "Our results show sizeable and unambiguous traces of chlorine and ammonia present at the site of all three attacks," wrote Ruth Sherlock.
"The use in war of 'asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases' - both of which can be produced by chlorine and ammonia - is banned by the Geneva Protocol, of which Syria is a signatory."
21. Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind in cash for access scandal
22 February 2015
The stellar work of our Investigations team brought another exclusive in early 2015. It uncovered the involvement of two former foreign secretaries offering to use their positions on behalf of a fictitious Chinese company in return for £5,000 in payments per day.
Jack Straw was suspended from Labour following the disclosures, Sir Malcolm Rifkind stepped down from his position as chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee then announced that he would not stand as a candidate in the next General Election.
22. Justin Welby: DNA test reveals my secret father was Sir Winston Churchill's private secretary
8 April 2016
The Archbishop of Canterbury discovered in 2016 that his father was not Gavin Welby, who was briefly married to his mother Jane. Instead, after a DNA test, Archbishop Welby discovered that the late Sir Anthony Montague Brown was his biological parent.
Archbishop Welby said the “revelation” of his true paternity had come as a “complete surprise”, but described it as “a story of redemption and hope”.
“There is no existential crisis, and no resentment against anyone. My identity is founded in who I am in Christ.”
For their work, Charles Moore and Gordon Rayner won Scoop of the Year at the British Journalism Awards.
23. Football for Sale
27 September 2016
There are few bigger jobs in the country than that of manager of the England football team. In 2016 there was a new man in charge, former Blackburn, Bolton and West Ham coach Sam Allardyce.
He lasted just one game in the role, after the Telegraph caught him on camera using his position to negotiate a £400,000 deal and offering businessmen advice on how to circumvent FA rules.
The Allardyce story was part of a 10-month investigation into corruption in football.
24. Bryony Gordon’s podcast interview with Prince Harry
16 April 2017
A significant moment in the perception of mental health in this country, as Bryony Gordon secured an exclusive interview with Prince Harry. The future king's brother discussed speaking to a counsellor after "shutting down all his emotions" following the death of his mother, Diana. Princess of Wales
Listen:
25. The British #MeToo Scandal that cannot be revealed
24 October 2018
The year after the Me Too movement became mainstream, a businessman was granted an injunction against The Telegraph preventing his name being revealed in connection with allegations of sexual harassment and racial abuse of staff. The charge sheet against him in Claire Newell's story included bullying, intimidation and sexual harassment.
The Topshop owner Sir Philip Green was named as the businessman in the House of Lords days later, under parliamentary privilege. In February of this year Sir Philip abandoned legal action against the Telegraph, and it was revealed he paid up to £1million in pay-offs in return for gagging clauses. He was also facing costs of up to £3million.
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