The last Post plays for Will Lewis

So, farewell then, Will Lewis, the former Murdoch man who has just left his position as chief executive of the Washington Post just days after dispensing with a third of its editorial workforce.

Lewis, brought to run the much-garlanded title by Jeff Bezos when the Amazon owner decided he fancied a newspaper to play with, did not deliver the news of the mass lay-offs to the staff himself. He chose to attend the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California instead. But staff at the WaPo, already thoroughly miserable, had got used to his lack of presence, as Lewis was increasingly absent from the office.

It brings to an end a spell that is unlikely to see Lewis portrayed in a heroic Hollywood movie like All The President’s Men or The Post. He largely did Bezos’s bidding as the billionaire ran the once-great newspaper into the ground, agreeing not to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, as would once have been expected, as his boss sought to stay on the right side of Donald Trump (a move which earned Bezos a front-row seat at Trump’s second inauguration).

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He also acceded to Bezos’s request for the Post’s comment pages to focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets”, a move which saw its comment editor quit, and more recently offered no opposition to the paper banning any reporting on itself in its news section. This would be perfectly normal at a UK newspaper, but American journalists like nothing more than writing about themselves, plus the Post’s owner is allowed to interfere with comment but technically not news.

Now Lewis’s tenure has culminated in the announcement of the slashing of a third of its workforce and a dramatic scaling back in its coverage of sport and international news (at a time, fortunately, when there is not much going on globally).

Now Sir Will – he was knighted in Boris Johnson‘s controversial resignation honours list after giving “informal advice” to the hapless former PM – is seeking pastures new, possibly back on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe Johnson, now a vastly overpaid columnist at the Daily Mail, could put in a word for Lewis to run his former paper the Telegraph again, if and when the Mail completes its purchase?