Two years ago, London Evening Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev ended 165 years of history when he closed the paper’s daily evening edition and replaced it with a single weekly one, making London one of the world’s few great capitals without its own daily paper.
The move was aimed at stemming the huge losses the Standard had sustained largely since Alexander Lebedev (father of Boris Johnson’s pal Evgeny, who was handed a peerage by the former PM) bought the title for £1 in 2009 and moved it from being a paid-for title to being handed out free outside Tube stations.
The tactic seemed to be paying off when the paper recorded small profits in the years from 2012, but those soon melted away and Covid proved a fatal blow. Losses since October 2009 now total £157.7m up until the last year.
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While losses underwritten by the Lebedevs more than halved last year to £8.3m following the switch to weekly publication, revenue also dropped, from £23.5m in 2024 to £14.1m in the 15 months to the end of 2025.
And losses were also helped by slashing the number of staff still working at the title, with it employing 119 fewer staff on average in the 15-month 2025 period – just 110 – compared to the previous year. The Standard had 346 staff members when Lebedev bought it in 2009. Total staff costs fell from £19.3m in the 2024 financial year (including £3.7m in redundancy costs) to £7.5m in the 15-month period for 2025.
Since the end of the financial year, the Standard’s editorial digital operation and advertising sales across both print and online have transferred to Independent Digital News and Media. Evening Standard Ltd continues to run the print editorial of the Standard’s weekly magazine edition.
Or at least what is left of it – the Standard’s increasingly flimsy print edition no longer has an editor since Anna van Praagh left to spend more time with her very right wing X account (she went on gardening leave in February and left in May). Deputy Harriet Addison is left running a magazine which appears to be much more interested in, say, New York than Barking.
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Is Lord Lebedev too busy with his role in the Upper House to turn things around? Not really.
Since being elevated to the peerage by Johnson six years ago, he has managed to vote just twice and speak six times, most recently in July when he treated peers to the story of “my grandfather, Professor Vladimir Sokolov, a pioneering zoologist and ecologist”.
Even his podcast, the admittedly catchily titled Brave New World, hasn’t published a new episode since April.
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