The Captain Renault cosplay festival
Hacks are shocked! shocked! to find gambling taking place in the corrupt saloon of British politics.
Previously: The empty tears of Lord Lebedev
If it doesn’t come from the oligarch region of Russia, wielding political influence via underhand means is sparkling corruption. Yesterday, Times columnist and fake leather jacket connoisseur David Aaronovitch tweeted:
Listening to the excellent Tortoise podcast on the bizarre rise of Lord Lebedev and it honestly makes me want to hurl. The casual venality of parts of the establishment which culminated in Johnson making him part of our Parliament is appalling.
The word “bizarre” is key there. It carries an implication that Lebedev was able to become Baron Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia aged just 41, after being installed as proprietor of the Evening Standard at 29 by his former KGB agent father Alexander, because the system failed rather than because it was working precisely as designed.
The rise of Lord Lebedev is no more ‘bizarre’ than the rise of Rupert Murdoch. In both cases, money was the lubricant and newspapers are a means of wielding power and influence. Murdoch doesn’t have a peerage nor does he want one — though he does have a papal knighthood — because he knows the open door to Number 10 is more valuable than any bauble.
Lebedev is simply more gauche than Murdoch; he couldn’t resist combining his influence on the Prime Minister with a fancy outfit. He’s cosplaying as a member of the House of Lords — he’s yet to vote in or contribute to a debate beyond his maiden speech — just as he pretended to be a bullfighter for a ghost-written Independent article.
Tortoise’s podcast episode on Lebedev is a good summation of how he went from party boy host of charity bashes to newspaper proprietor and ludicrously bearded baron. The trouble is just how slow this news from the self-described slow news outfit turns out to be.
The ‘revelations’ shared by Tortoise and a Sunday Times report this weekend that Boris Johnson ignored security concerns to push through Lebedev’s nomination for the Lords were revealed by John Sweeney in August 2020. Anyone paying attention has been dubious about Lebedev since he began forcing his picture into the pages of the Standard, befriending celebrities, and indulging in stunts like ‘sleeping rough’ on the streets of London with Johnson.
When Rupert Murdoch was attending the same parties as Lebedev — alongside Nigel Farage — and even showing up at the younger proprietor’s Christmas dos, his papers went easy on the Russian. But now that the big boss knows which way the wind is blowing and is less bothered about bolstering Boris Johnson, it’s fine to really go for Lebedev (“Boris Johnson’s Russia crony” as the Sunday Times headline put it).
The same thing is happening at the Mail titles, where any reference to their owner — Lord Rothermere — dining with the Lebedevs and enabling their entry into the British press with the Evening Standard sale is conspicuously absent from the coverage.
After his appearance at the Leveson Inquiry 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.
The quip was deemed “funny and refreshingly” by Simon Hattenstone in a Guardian profile that year. Seen in the light of Lebedev’s elevation to the Lords, it looks more like a brazen example of not just saying the quiet bit out loud but doing so through a megaphone encrusted with jewels by Damien Hirst.
Three years later, in 2015, a Spectator profile opened with a barrage of quotes from celebrities and politicians praising Lebedev:
Evgeny Lebedev’s famous friends are eager to tell you what a darling he is. Piers Morgan says that he is ‘one of the most charming, well-connected, exotically attired and fascinating figures in English society right now’.
Stephen Fry says that ‘for a man of his power, status and wealth, he is endlessly teaseable and humorous’. Boris Johnson says that he is ‘a major force for good’ and ‘a very generous soul’. And Boris’s sister Rachel calls him ‘a wise old beard (or two) on young shoulders. He’s much smarter and funnier than people think.’
Later in the same piece, Amol Rajan, then editor of The Independent and now BBC Media Editor and a Today presenter, rebuffed a suggestion that his boss was not bright:
He has a terrifyingly good memory and, as someone who works for him, he can be terrifyingly sharp.
He likes to absorb a lot of information before he makes a decision and he always notices if something he has asked for isn’t done.
There was also a rather telling anonymous quote from a Tory MP about Lebedev and The Independent’s decision to back another Tory/Lib Dem coalition in the 2015 election:
‘For getting the Indie on side, he deserves a bloody peerage.’
While one of Rajan’s first ‘scoops’ as the BBC was the appointment of George Osborne as Evening Standard editor — nothing says hard-nosed investigation like receiving a call from your old boss — he’s kept quiet on the current Lebedev story. Last week he interviewed Ian McKellen, who co-owns The Grapes pub in East London with Lebedev. Curiously, the connection didn’t come up.
Whether its Rajan distancing himself from his previous career as a patsy for Lebedev, figures like Aaronovitch pretending not to make the connection between the Murdoch playbook and what followed, or Robert Peston penning wide-eyed blog posts asking, “Why when Covid was raging did the PM care about giving Lebedev a peerage?”, the British media is riven with Captain Renaultism — performative and opportunistic shock at corruption that has been blatantly obvious for years.
Almost all of the damning facts in that Tortoise podcast episode are present in the glowing profiles of Lebedev that came before. Just as Renault turned a blind eye to the gambling at Rick’s because he was benefiting from it, only to decry it when he had no other choice, the British press is pretending that the questions around Lebedev weren’t obvious before.
Behind carelessly applied Claude Rains moustaches, they pull straight faces and mutter that something must be done. The rot started long before Lebedev but too many people’s livelihoods rely on pretending he’s a ‘bizarre’ outlier and not an inevitable consequence.
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