‘I am not some agent of Russia,” wrote a pained Evgeny Lebedev in one of the newspapers he owns with his father, Alexander, the former Russian spy. “I am not a security risk to this country, which I love.”
And for once, the sheer preposterousness of Lord Evgeny, the most elaborately costumed proprietor in press history, is on his side. Perhaps it’s reading too much John le Carré, but are serious security risks also likely to be party-mad showoffs, enthralled by celebrities, with titles that sound – “Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation” – as if they were dreamed up by a rather worrying 10-year-old? Though in that respect it might shed some light on an affinity sometimes considered suspect between Lord Siberia and the no less preposterous world king, Boris Johnson, whose determination to ennoble Lebedev has now embarrassed both. Is it impossible that Tuscan parties featuring celebrities and (Rory Stewart was told) “girls”, might, for such men, represent the pinnacle of human achievement?
The similarities don’t stop there. Johnson thinks it stylish to flourish the classics; Lebedev was accessorised with De Profundis and Areopagitica for an appearance at the Leveson inquiry, an early signal of his claim, now endorsed by a Russian winner of the Nobel peace prize, to be called a press “freedom fighter”. Back in 2012 Lebedev tweeted: “Forgot to tell Leveson that it’s unreasonable to expect individuals to spend £millions on newspapers and not have access to politicians.”
Both men like posing with their dogs, have fathers who hit people, and with their shared weakness for costly furnishings we can picture them pricing whatnots with the same fervour they bring to discussing Putin’s annexation of Crimea (in 2016 Johnson blamed the EU). Lebedev is said by one editor to have “exquisite taste”; a supporter said the exact same thing about Carrie Johnson, when her taste for neo-colonial polychrome was attacked.
Still, for a Russian peer attempting to convince us of the innocent trajectory of his ambitions, “Siberia” is strange. Why allude to the gulags? At once silly (if he wasn’t always on about Russia) and sinister (if he wasn’t always on about Elton John), the title pretty much encapsulates the difficulties with Evgeny Lebedev. Can a person who invariably looks in his countlessclose-ups as if he’s auditioning for the Bullingdon Club really represent a security threat? Unless this fairly crude caricature of Etonian affectations, added to the Lebedevs’ past efforts to detoxify Putin, should only intensify doubts about Johnson’s judgment?
Supposing, picking the first option, that Lebedev is guilty of nothing more than absurdity, social mountaineering and, like some valued Tory donors, living on a fortune gained by an occasional endorser of a murderous tyrant, there are many distinguished party guests who could testify to, if nothing else, his generosity. Although to date, we have heard more from Keir Starmer and Rory Stewart, both refusers of Lebedev invites, it’s too soon to conclude that smarter guests have, in the manner of the friends who once enjoyed Philip Green’s toga parties, scented disgrace and fled.
It can’t be long, anyway, until we hear from much better informed intimates, from former editors qualified to endorse Johnson’s view of Lord Siberia as a blameless victim of “Russophobia”. Or alternatively, from former editors who, unless they endorse various Lebedevian equivocations on, say, the Litvinenko and novichok poisonings, support the contention that he isn’t. There would be no shame, you could argue, in the admission that without any actual instructions, they would naturally work, as Harold Evans once said of Murdoch’s system, “towards the Fuhrer”. “He doesn’t have to give direct orders. His executives act like courtiers, working towards what they perceive to be his wishes or might be construed as his wishes.”
Some executives might be more embarrassed to recall what was always plain: that even editors with journalistic talent effectively doubled – given the pressure to cram Lebedev’s newspaper campaigns with scaleable heaps of politicians, royals and celebrities – as his diary secretaries.
In Sasha Swire’s excellent memoirs, George Osborne is reportedly “concerned” that “Evgeny Lebedev is going to use him to arrange his social life”. Pending personal contributions from Osborne and fellow editors including Geordie Greig, Amol Rajan, Sarah Sands, Emily Sheffield and Chris Blackhurst, her account remains, in fact, the closest you can get to squaring Rachel Johnson’s tribute to Lebedev, “much smarter and funnier than people think”, with a tweet he once addressed to some Guardian journalists: “Up yours.”
For Swire, when they were David Cameron’s guests at Chequers, Lebedev was “a charisma-free zone”. It was “extraordinary”, she noted in 2015, that the son of a KGB operative had penetrated “the very core of the British establishment by buying a newspaper”. Lebedev senior, she noted, even before junior embarked on some informal diplomacy, “is still pally with Putin”.
How was it done? Did journalists serve, in this instance, with the same uncritical alacrity that is now condemned in the politicians, lawyers, estate agents, PRs and other enablers who made London so agreeable for oligarchs? Or was Lebedev smart enough, with Dad, to perform this feat solo? Rajan, once Lebedev’s media adviser, then his Independent editor, has stressed his old boss’s “terrifyingly good memory”, how he was “terrifyingly sharp”.
By great good fortune, Rajan is now the BBC’s media editor, star interviewer and Today presenter, thus uniquely placed and equipped to offer insight on this important story. Presumably he’s simply been too busy to comment, to date, on whether Johnson’s passion for Evgeny’s elevation was understandable, or, when you factor in the ex-KGB father and his Crimean investments, fully as reckless as Cameron’s earlier infatuation with the Murdochs. There are those, you hear, who feel the BBC is overly dazzled by the ubiquitous Rajan: what a way this would be for him to prove them wrong.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
