Let me transport you to a 2016 house party at the Umbrian estate of Evgeny Lebedev, now Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia. Glamour model Katie Price has just twice enlivened dinner by showing the table her latest breasts. According to one report, she is subsequently escorted to the kitchen by Evgeny’s former SAS bodyguards and not seen again for the weekend.
According to fellow guest Joan Collins, Pricey only repeated the tit trick because Joanie requested she show it to fellow-fellow guest Boris Johnson, who was at the time foreign secretary in Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s government. This was not Johnson’s only trip to the estate. On a stay two years later, he met Lebedev’s father, the former KGB agent Alexander, without officials present. And according to a 2021 report by uninvited guests the Italian security services, who, it was this week revealed, were monitoring the property at the time, and had been for several years – it could not be ruled out that Lebedev Sr still worked for Russian intelligence and still enjoyed the favour of Putin. And according to what a member of Italy’s foreign affairs committee told a new Channel 4 documentary entitled Boris, the Lord and the Russian Spy: “You should really be careful on what kind of relationship you keep with such a person.”
Well now. It is – as they say – a lot.
To Evgeny Lebedev, then, whose subsequent peerage remains a matter of controversy. Events at the Italian estate of the Evening Standard proprietor and Independent shareholder sound intriguing. Someone once told me the famous guests are flown out by private jet and are to varying degrees horrified to learn that they will be flying back by budget airline. Entertainments at the castle seem varied – I heard some eye-poppingly baroque rumours – though Lord Lebedev is keener in public to digress on the restored castle’s location. As he told one magazine: “The Holy Roman emperors’ army knew how to find the right spot.” As does Evgeny, you sense.
As for his own location, he can usually be banked on not to be found in the House of Lords, boasting a mere 1% attendance record. In February, Evgeny had gone an entire year without saying anything in proceedings in the chamber. When he had faced similar criticism the previous year, he hastily scrambled to table precisely two written questions. Lebedev minds dreadfully about things that are said about him, it seems. A previous column I wrote about him resulted in an odd piece of behind-the-scenes behaviour. If you’re reading this one, your lordship, please spare yourself another show of weakness. While such a thing would obviously be amusing to me, someone – someone! – needs to tell you that it is most unbecoming to you.
So who are we dealing with here, apart from London’s biggest starfucker? (Tough field.) Evgeny thinks it’s very grand to have his houses photographed in Architectural Digest and World of Interiors and so on. (Again, someone needs to tell him.) A few years ago, a World of Interiors interviewer who visited his house in the Hampton Court deer park fawned hilariously, praising “some cushions of silk damask I would sell my soul for”. Of particular note, apparently, were “improved copies of 18th-century originals”, the cornice “newly copied from a Chippendale in Dumfries House” and a “Lutyens design but modified for contemporary needs”. Lebedev himself took the opportunity to claim one artwork as representative of Putin’s ideology. According to Evgeny, this was “the Eurasian union – this new kind of philosophy of a Russian state more focused on the east than the west”. Mm-hm.
A week or so after the Brexit vote, Lebedev hosted a garden party at this particular house, where select attendees included Rupert Murdoch, Nigel Farage and Lily Allen, who seemed surprised to find herself at a social gathering where such people would also be guests. To which we can only say: wake up. Alas, it is unclear whether the many celebrities and public figures who buzz obediently round Lebedev will also wake up, or prefer to keep on accepting his hospitality, and donations to their pet charitable causes, and his preferred narrative that he is merely a poor victim of anti-Russian racism – instead of ever wondering, even vaguely, what it is all actually in aid of.
Evgeny himself bristles at the suggestion of anything other than public service, asking rhetorically after he was awarded the peerage: “Is it not remarkable that the son of a KGB agent, and a first-generation immigrant to this country, has become such an assimilated and contributing member of British society? What a success for our system. Don’t you think?”
In fact, Lebedev Jr is very far from a victim. He is an extremely rich man, and his family has held on to its wealth and indeed lives in a world where émigré displeasers of Putin frequently do not. Far from being held back by anything at all, he rises and rises, with media proprietorship merely a part of it. He now sits in the upper legislative chamber of the British parliament, put there against almost all advice by Boris Johnson – a man you sense the celebrities are not minded to buzz around, which should certainly give them pause. But apparently has yet to.
It’s notable how many of his posturings feel like imitations, from the interiors of his houses to his public positions. Look closely at his lavishly curtained four-posters or oddly instigator-lite accounts of the horrors of the war in Ukraine and you might see that they are very expensive reproductions – bought-in copies of the bed one ought to have, or the opinion one ought to hold, but remodelled for his own convenience. I used to think of him as a terminally ridiculous figure – but with each unsettling new revelation, perhaps we must accept that there is nothing terminal about it.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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