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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A political donor who has made donations to Rachel Reeves, Labour’s new chancellor, has been made a director in the Treasury, prompting questions about the party’s stated commitment to high standards of public life.

Former financial services executive Ian Corfield has donated more than £20,000 to senior Labour figures in the past decade, including a £5,000 contribution to Reeves last summer, according to Electoral Commission data.

He became a director in the Treasury last month — the same month Labour won a seismic landslide in the general election — following a spell as a full-time senior business adviser to the party between January and July, according to his LinkedIn page.

Prior to that Corfield held senior positions at financial services firms.

Donors and figures with party political connections are not barred from becoming senior officials in Whitehall.

However, Sir Alistair Graham, former chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, warned: “You need to be particularly careful if somebody has been a donor that they’ve gone through a competitive process [to become a senior official].”

Jack Worlidge, senior researcher at the Institute for Government think-tank, said that while fair and open competition was fundamental to the principle of civil servants being hired on merit, there was a procedure to deal with exceptions.

He agreed with Graham that “when the successful candidate has a clear and recent political affiliation, it’s important that an open and fair competition has taken place — and is seen to have taken place”.

The Treasury declined to release details on Corfield’s recruitment process. “We do not comment on individual staffing appointments. Any appointments are made in line with the civil service rules on recruitment,” a government spokesperson said.

Graham added: “It throws into question the commitment of the new government to high standards of public life . . . At an early stage, you don’t want questions to be raised in the public’s mind about whether donors are being given priority for key positions.”

A vow to strengthen the ethics regime at the heart of government was a central pillar of Sir Keir Starmer’s pitch to the public ahead of the election, following a string of sleaze scandals in recent years under successive Tory administrations.

Starmer signalled his commitment to the cause after entering office, by publicly confirming that he had met Sir Laurie Magnus, his independent standards adviser, on his first day as prime minister.

Corfield’s appointment, first reported by Politico, has also stoked criticism from some Tory figures.

Andrew Griffith, the Conservative shadow technology secretary, said his hiring was “alarming” and accused the new Labour administration of dispensing with a “normal, open, transparent and fair civil service appointment process in favour of a Labour supporter”.

The former City minister also claimed the appointment risked harming the independence of the civil service.

Tory peer Lord Francis Maude, who previously served as Cabinet Office minister overseeing the civil service, took a different view.

“We should be much more relaxed about people with a political background being appointed as mainstream civil servants. The key is that they behave impartially,” he said.

However, he argued that “if the Conservatives had done what Labour have just done, the outrage from the Whitehall establishment would’ve been off the scale”.

The Financial Times has approached Corfield for comment.

The Labour party declined to comment.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Warner Bros Discovery has written down the value of its traditional television networks by $9.1bn, a dramatic recognition of how fast streaming is eroding the cable business model behind channels such as CNN, HGTV and the Food Network.

The non-cash charge led the US entertainment group to on Wednesday report a quarterly net loss of $10bn, which compared to Wall Street’s expectations of a $542mn loss and exceeded its total revenue of $9.7bn.

The stark revaluation reflects a determination that WBD’s television channels are no longer what they were worth just two years ago, when the company was formed from the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia.

“It’s fair to say that even two years ago, market valuations and prevailing conditions for legacy media companies were quite different than they are today, and this impairment acknowledges this,” chief executive David Zaslav told investors. “The market conditions within the traditional business are tough.”

“It’s an accounting reflection of the state of the industry,” said chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels.

“Am I disappointed about the impairment? Yes,” Wiedenfels said. “There’s been talk about recovery [in the traditional television market] a year, or year and a half ago. It hasn’t really happened.”

Shares in WBD were down 10.5 per cent in pre-market trading on Thursday morning. The company’s stock had already fallen by almost 70 per cent since it was formed in 2022 in a $40bn merger that was meant to help two legacy media groups survive the brutal streaming battle.

Quarterly revenue fell short of forecasts, weighed by WBD’s television networks, which were hit hard by shrinking audiences as people cancel their pay-TV subscriptions.

Revenue at WBD’s television business unit dropped 8 per cent from a year ago to $5.3bn. Rival Disney reported earlier on Wednesday that its television network revenue fell 7 per cent to $2.7bn in the quarter.

Zaslav and his team have been discussing strategic options as they try to reverse WBD’s sinking share price. They considered breaking up the company but have concluded that this is not currently the best option, the Financial Times reported earlier this week.

Zaslav on Wednesday told analysts: “We have to . . . consider all options. But the number one priority is to run this company as effectively as possible.”

The group’s streaming and HBO cable businesses added 3.6mn direct-to-consumer subscribers in the quarter, reaching 103.3mn subscribers globally. 

“We recognised early on this was a generational disruption . . . requiring us to take bold, necessary steps,” said Zaslav.

PARIS — A feud between the world’s leading sports anti-doping organizations just escalated again.

This time, U.S. officials face accusations they improperly allowed American athletes to compete in “elite level” events after tests showed they used performance-enhancing drugs. Deals were struck with at least three athletes if they agreed to serve as informants and cooperate in on-going doping investigations. Reuters first reported the practice.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) says the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) ran a rogue operation that turned athletes into “undercover agents.”

“WADA did not sign off on this practice of permitting drug cheats to compete for years on the promise that they would try to obtain incriminating evidence against others,” the organization said in a statement.

According to WADA officials, when they learned of the practice by USADA in 2021, they ordered the Americans to “desist.”

This salvo from international anti-doping officials based in Montreal, Canada, comes after WADA itself faced growing criticism for its handling of positive drug tests involving 23 Chinese swimmers.

WADA kept the positive drug tests taken in 2021 and 2022 secret, allowing the Chinese athletes to keep competing, at the Tokyo Summer Olympics and again at the Paris Games this year.

In a statement, USADA CEO Travis Tygart said WADA is raising concerns over the secret use of American athletes in its investigations as a “desperate and dangerous” effort to smear critics.

According to Tygart, WADA was “aware of the athletes’ cooperation” in probes of sports doping and knew some athletes had been allowed to return to competition.

USADA said in its statement athletes who worked undercover while still competing “provided intelligence” to U.S. federal law enforcement and anti-doping investigators that eventually led to criminal charges.

“When USADA and other anti-doping organizations obtain information about misconduct and potential violations,” Tygart said, “it’s critical that we pursue the truth with all the resources at our disposal.”

According to both organizations, the practice of allowing proven sports cheaters to continue competing, in exchange for cooperation, is no longer in use.

This fight comes as USADA’s Tygart has emerged as a chief public antagonist of WADA, calling for major reforms to the world’s premier anti-doping organization. The U.S. Congress opened a probe and the FBI also launched a criminal investigation.

WADA and the International Olympic Committee have punched back, arguing that U.S. officials have overstepped their authority. The IOC threatened last month that Salt Lake City’s hosting of the 2034 Winter Games could be revoked if U.S. probes and criticism continue.

As this diplomatic fight between the world’s most powerful sports organizations grows more bitter, many American athletes say they no longer trust the system designed to preserve fair, drug-free competition.