The empty tears of Lord Lebedev
The Evening Standard owner used a child's death to illustrate a stunt.
Previously: Dr Strangehack
On 2 November 2015, Evgeny Lebedev wrote in the Evening Standard and Independent that:
For all the greatness of this island nation, for all its hard and soft power, there is a laxity in our approach to the Syrian crisis. Meanwhile, a plague is spreading, bringing terror to our shores.
As we become smaller, others grow; and we should join all our allies in fighting the real threat to humanity now, which is Islamist terror. Picking up the phone to Moscow would be a good start.
Between September and November 2015, Russia airstrikes on Homs, Idleb and Aleppo, targeting residential areas and medical facilities, killed 200 civilians. They were the latest chapter in Putin’s history of war crimes that stretched back to the Second Chechen War in 1999.
The previous year, in May 2014, Lebedev told BBC Radio 5Live that:
I think [Putin is] somebody who has done a lot of good for Russia. To begin with, after the period of president Yeltsin, Russia was in complete chaos. I think the later decisions may have not all been correct and I’m not so sure the country is continuing on as democratic development as I was talking [about] earlier on…
I think if he was put up for election, in a fair and square election, I think he would have still been president, the majority of Russians still vote for him because they see him as a strong leader, there is something to be said about that kind of common belief that Russians like a strong leader.
That’s hardly a surprising view for him to hold given that his father Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB agent like Putin, ‘made’ his fortune in the Yeltsin years and consolidated it under Putin.
Nor is it surprising that Alexander publicly supported the annexation of Crimea — where he owns a hotel complex — in 2014 and held a media symposium there in 2017 “to correct an impression of Crimea put out by a biased western media”.
Alexander Lebedev previously showed his commitment to dealing with ‘biased’ media by abruptly shutting down the Moskovski Korrespondent newspaper and website in 2008 after it wrote a story about the relationship between Putin and the gymnast Alina Kabayeva.
Evgeny has inherited that love of transparency. In 2019, The Evening Standard and Independent were accused in court of being part-owned by the Saudi state. Lebedev sold 30% stakes in both publications to offshore companies fronted by a Saudi businessman — Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel — but his representatives admitted in court that he doesn’t know who ultimately employs the businessman.
Curiously though, the FT revealed Abuljadayel’s association with NCB Capital, the investment banking arm of Saudi Arabia's National Commercial Bank. It is majority-owned by the Saudi government, which all leads back to the country’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman whose ‘robust’ approach to media criticism led him to order the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018.
Bin Salman is the architect of Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign in Yemen where war crimes investigations were only discontinued as a result of an October 2021 vote pushed by Saudi ally Bahrain and supported by Russia and China. Lebedev held a dinner party for the Saudi leader in March 2018, hosting the soirée at his house in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace.
Lebedev was made Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation by his frequent house and party guest Boris Johnson in July 2020. He has yet to contribute to a single debate in the House of Lords since he made his maiden speech in February 2021. Like the dick-faced child sculpture1 in his office, Lebedev’s peerage is a vulgar bauble.
All of these details have to be taken into account when looking at the front page of yesterday’s Evening Standard. Beneath an image of a paramedic working to save a six-year-old Ukrainian girl in the final moment of her life, Lebedev penned a ‘plea’ to President Putin. It was a cheap way to give his carefully calibrated words resonance that they do not have; piggybacking on profound pain for PR.
Lebedev’s intervention is scarcely more consequential than Compare The Market’s decision to pull commercials featuring fictional meerkat oligarch Aleksandr Orlov from ad breaks in news shows. The company wants to make it clear that the ludicrous furry caricatures have “no association… with the current situation”. Lebedev and his fuzzy felt beard are striving for a similar effect.
The Standard front page has been framed as a denunciation of Putin but while the headline reads President Putin, please stop this war, Lebedev avoided calling it by its name in the copy. Instead, he wrote:
As Europe stands on the brink of another world war, and the world on the brink of a possible nuclear disaster, I plead with you to use today’s negotiations to bring this terrible conflict in Ukraine to an end.
Who put it “on the brink”? And who is threatening “nuclear disaster”? In this context, “conflict” is a weasel word. Lebedev continues:
I say this as someone with deep personal ties to both my country of birth, and to the country where I was raised and now call my home.
It’s the language of hedged bets and divided intentions, the same line as his father took when he told The Times in 2015 that “[he’d] rather do a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad” than criticise Putin”. In today’s Times — proprietor R. Murdoch, occasional Lebedev party guest — a story buried in the gutter on p.10 elevates the intervention beneath the headline Lebedev and super-rich Tory donor condemn hostilities.
Lebedev’s evocation of the child’s death is bloodless, stripped of any sense of responsibility:
On this page are the final minutes of a six-year-old child fatally injured by shells that struck her Mariupol apartment block on Sunday. She is still wearing her pink jacket as medics fight to save her. But it is too late. Other children, and other families, are suffering similar fates across Ukraine.
Whose shells? In Lebedev’s spineless phrasing they appear to be naturally occurring shells, shells gone rogue, escaped from the confines of their habitat. And it goes on:
As a Russian citizen I plead with you to stop Russians killing their Ukrainian brothers and sisters.
As a British citizen I ask you to save Europe from war. As a Russian patriot I plead that you prevent any more young Russian soldiers from dying needlessly. As a citizen of the world I ask you to save the world from annihilation.
Obviously, the Lebedev of yesterday would be disgusted by the Lebedev of last week who tweeted coldly with the bothsidesing logic of the practised fence-sitter keeping an eye on his balls:
Orthodox Slavs killing their brethren on a scale not witnessed for centuries. An unimaginable tragedy for people of Ukraine and Russia.
Lebedev’s ‘plea’ was the bare minimum, a statement of pure self-interest, dressed up as the emotional decision of a man who truly cares. He waited to speak until the heat was on him. That’s not bravery, it’s sparkling cowardice.
But Lebedev is a media fixture now, a ‘friend’ to the stars and a pal to the Prime Minister. After his appearance at the Leveson inquiry, he tweeted:
Forgot to tell #Leveson that it’s unreasonable to expect individuals to spend £millions on newspapers and not have access to politicians.
In a 2012 Guardian profile, Simon Hattenstone wrote that it made Lebedev seem “funny and refreshingly honest”, before going on to describe him as “increasingly eccentric and impressive”. Lebedev fooled people then and he’s doing it again.