THE TELEGRAPH has been slapped on the wrist by press regulator Ipso for publishing a “significantly misleading” smear accusing Jeremy Corbyn of being an “anti-semite.”

The front page of the paper owned by billionaire Tory donors the Barclay brothers was found to have breached the accuracy clause in Ipso’s editors’ code of practice.

The paper was ordered late last month to feature a “prominent” correction and apology on the second page, with a reference to the correction on the front page, as well as on its website.

Labour MP Ivan Lewis had lodged the complaint against the Telegraph because political correspondent Ben Riley-Smith falsely reported in August that he called Mr Corbyn “anti-semitic.”

Mr Riley-Smith wrote that a number of “Labour grandees” had criticised Mr Corbyn, when he was a candidate in the leadership contest, and that Mr Lewis — shadow Northern Ireland secretary — had accused him of using “anti-semitic rhetoric.”

The Telegraph initially refused to admit it represented Mr Lewis’s comments inaccurately. It also claimed that it was “widely accepted in modern Western societies” that to tolerate anti-semitism was somehow in itself a form of anti-semitism.

Mr Lewis and Ipso argued that the MP had in fact spoken out against Labour Party leader Mr Corbyn’s supposed “failure to challenge the anti-semitic rhetoric of others.”

The regulator, which has been criticised in the past for going easy on the unruly gutter press, said that the paper “distorted [Mr Lewis’s] comment on this issue” and that the headline — “Labour grandees round on ‘anti-semite’ Corbyn” — perpetuated the lie.

Ipso wrote: “An express claim that Mr Corbyn was an anti-semite would have constituted an exceptionally strong attack by the complainant on Mr Corbyn, with potential implications for both men; this was a highly significant claim … The coverage was therefore significantly misleading.”