Evgeny Lebedev May Be No Secret Agent: But Would Boris Johnson Notice If He Was?

THE GUARDIAN: Wild parties in Tuscany and a peerage for the Russian newspaper owner are hardly signs of a precautionary approach

Evgeny Lebedev and Boris Johnson pictured in 2015 as they slept outside in central London as part of a campaign against homelessness. Photograph: Nigel Howard
On the night Boris Johnson finally threw his lot in with the Brexiters, naturally only his nearest and dearest were privy to his thoughts.

His then wife, Marina Wheeler, was there, plus the leading leaver Michael Gove and his then wife, Sarah Vine. The odd one out over a supper of slow-roasted lamb at Johnson and Wheeler’s Islington home, meanwhile, was Evgeny Lebedev. The millionaire son of a former Russian KGB officer apparently hung out with the wives making “polite conversation in stage whispers” while Johnson and Gove talked by speakerphone to a fellow cabinet minister who was trying vainly to persuade them to back remain. Vine did not explain, in her subsequent newspaper column describing the evening, why Lebedev was playing gooseberry on such a momentous and sensitive night for the nation’s future. If the presence of the Evening Standard and Independent proprietor surprised her, however, she didn’t say so.

For a famously shy man, Lebedev certainly gets around. Here he is with Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, photographed for the annual Evening Standard theatre awards (at which, the Guardian’s veteran awards-coverer Hadley Freeman points out, winners would invariably thank “darling Evgeny” and mention his “beautiful house in Tuscany”). Here he is handing the Standard editorship to George Osborne, an ousted chancellor in need of a job but not noticeably a journalist. Here he is photographed with Prince William, with Peter Mandelson, with Tony Blair, with Elton John. And here he is hosting what Johnson’s biographer, Tom Bower, called bacchanalian weekends in his castle in Italy every summer, where Johnson could apparently behave “like a naughty schoolboy”. There are no photographs of those, of course; just reports of an unkempt Johnson the morning after one of them looking (according to a fellow passenger at the airport) like he’d slept in his clothes. Johnson was foreign secretary at the time. » | Gaby Hinsliff | Monday, March 14, 2022

Multiple links apropos of Evgeny Lebedev.

Can this prime minister really be trusted? – Mark