The Daily Telegraph is testing my loyalty - how long before I desert it?

The Daily Telegraph on Friday carried the result of the Oldham by-election but if you read the headline you would get a distorted view of the who the real losers were.

Under the headline Lib Dems suffer in Oldham by-election the paper wrote a story that would lead the reader to assume that the party did very badly. This is true but another party did far worse: the Conservatives.

The intro read: The Liberal Democrats were defeated by more than 3,500 votes early today in the first by-election since the Coalition was formed. While the statement is correct it doesn't tell the whole story and indeed gives a false impression of what happened.

In May 2010 Labour won 14,186 votes; Lib Dems 14,083 and Conservatives 11,773.

In Jan 2011 Labour won 14,718; Lib Dems 11,160 and Conservatives 4,481.

So Labour gained 532; the Lib Dems lost 2,923 and the Conservatives lost 7,292.

So who was the real loser: the Tories.

But perish the thought that The Daily Telegraph would point that out. Now I like the paper. It carries more news than any other, has a lively letters page (whose writers normally infuriate me) and I love its crossword. I like the broadsheet page size too. But I am getting more and more fed up with its anti-Coalition stand.

There is rarely a day when there isn't some pop at the Coalition and in particular the Lib Dems. Had the Conservatives won the election, they would be governing the country single-handed. But no one party did win a mandate from the electorate to run things their way. There had to be a compromise. But I don't think The Daily Telegraph's Tory-supporting readers are happy to accept the will of the people.

This Coalition was voted for by no-one and yet it was also voted for by everyone. That's democracy and it's time "Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells" accepted that. (It is also time the Labour Party accepted it too and stopped trying to destabilise the government by making overtures to less than enthusiastic Lib Dems.)

I don't know if The Daily Telegraph thinks it can batter the Lib Dems into submission and cause an election in which it the Tories will win an overall majority. It certainly looks that way. Why else scrutinise Lib Dems minsters but not Conservative ones. A piece of biased investigative journalism for which it now faces a Press Complaints Commission inquiry.

I applaud the paper for its publication of the MPs' expenses scandal. I was also impressed by yesterday's story on how Qatar won the right to stage the 2022 World Cup. These are stories that show journalism at its best - doing the jobs it's meant to do. The Daily Telegraph has a fine record in its 155 year history.

Today it purports to be a centre-right Conservative newspaper. Nothing wrong in that if its views are confined to the op-ed pages but distorting news is wrong whether left or right. It is not the job of news stories to lead the reader by the nose. News reporting is meant to tell readers what is happening in the world in the more accurate manner possible.

I belong to no political party and vote on the issues not on the party in every election. I love newspapers. I particularly love The Daily Telegraph but it is testing that love by its biased news coverage in news stories such as that shown last Friday. I may have to have an affair with another paper. But the question is which one?