Why would a shrewd Russian oligarch want to buy two notoriously loss making English newspapers? According to billionaire Alexander Lebedev, it was his fond memories of scouring the London dailies for information as a young Soviet spy, as well as being a “good way to waste money”. But really he just wanted to hang out with JK Rowling.
Now that he has already purchased the centre-right Evening Standard, the ‘oligarch with a social conscience’ is set any day now to close the deal on the Independent, a centre left-liberal broadsheet much closer to his champagne-socialist tastes: Lebedev blogs under the name Capitalist-Idealist.
But who is he and what does this all mean?
Unlike other oligarchs, he is not close to the Kremlin (while never doing anything Khodorkovskian to inspire their full rage). He has run on a reformist platform in the controversial Sochi elections only to have his candidacy thrown out by the authories.
Despite his KGB ties Levedev’s unabashed anglophilia has made him more welcome in London than the other oligarchs who have been playing real-life Monopoly in the English capital.
That was a very superficial analysis, and I will now do more homework on this guy.
But I leave you with this pricelessly disconcerting series of photos published in today’s Guardian featuring Lebedev and his bearded, seemingly taxidermic son surrealistically hobnobbing with JK Rowling, Gorbachev, Sophie Dahl and the Prime Minister’s wife.
