‘I was collateral damage’ – an interview with Evgeny Lebedev

The last grand party that Evgeny Lebedev held nearly ended in disaster. It was in December 2021: one of the Christmas bashes he was famous for hosting for celebrities, socialites and politicians, including his old friend and ally Boris Johnson. Johnson was still UK prime minister and was considering imposing another Covid lockdown, but Lebedev was determined to carry on.

That was what he was best known for, after all: throwing together a crazy mix of his many friends and contacts in London, from Rupert Murdoch to Tracey Emin, to have a good time. Emin remembers one of his parties long ago at which she watched Mikhail Gorbachev dancing with Salman Rushdie to the Black Eyed Peas. “Eclectic is an understatement and I don’t know why it doesn’t implode, but everyone stays calm, everyone’s polite and everyone’s full of wonderment.”

But something was off this time. “Everyone was pressuring me, saying, ‘Just cancel it. You’re mad doing this.’ And I thought, ‘No, no, no. I’m going to do it,’” he recalls. It was a mistake of the kind that those who believe the normal rules do not apply to them are prone to make. Only about 50 of the invitees made it and many caught Covid, although not Lebedev, nor his oldest guest. “I was very lucky that Joan Collins came early and didn’t. So that was the last one I held, although it doesn’t mean I won’t do it again.”

Three years later, Lord Lebedev, 44, sits in the garden of Stud House, his 18th-century home in Hampton Court Park, a former hunting ground of King Henry VIII. His black beard is immaculately trimmed and his jeans perfectly pressed. The sun shines, wind ruffles the trees, and birds sing. He looks poised and fit, having brewed me a cup of tea and himself a 100 per cent chocolate and oat milk beverage with powdered reishi, chaga, collagen and cordyceps mushrooms, which even he describes as “weird”. 

Stud House is rather weird too. His father Alexander, a former KGB officer in London who built a fortune in post-Soviet Russia, acquired it in 2007. The son has since made it his own, originally with the help of the artist and interior designers Patrick Kinmonth and Edward Hurst. The result is an eclectic mix of country-house comfort and macabre contemporary art: an Anselm Kiefer wedding dress and crucifix, a Rachel Kneebone sculpture of piled bodies, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s long-necked bronze Hamburgler. 

Perhaps Lebedev should have sensed in 2021 that the party was over, and with it the charmed, flamboyant life he had known as proprietor of the Evening Standard newspaper and Gatsby of the new British establishment of the early 21st century. When Russia invaded Ukraine two months later, the balancing act of Baron Lebedev of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation came crashing down.

The benefit of the doubt was no longer extended to the dual-national British and Russian citizen, who took friends on expeditions around Europe and Africa, sometimes by private jet, and delighted in dressing up. The scrutiny intensified when it emerged that Johnson had insisted on making him a peer despite the initial (later withdrawn) doubts of the UK security services. A Channel 4 documentary questioned the loyalties of a man whose first childhood home was on Romanov Lane, Moscow.

Nor has the Standard, acquired by Alexander Lebedev in 2009 (together with The Independent a year later), been running smoothly. Being a media baron, before becoming an actual one, gave Evgeny a beneficial alliance with Johnson as London’s mayor and helped him to turn its Theatre Awards into a glitzy annual event. But it all came at a heavy price after initial success: in May, the Standard said it would stop printing daily and lay off staff, having lost £84.5mn in six years.

So it has been a testing period for Lebedev and, discussing it, his equanimity slips. “When the war broke out, I started being under attack. There are lots of people dying on both sides, so I don’t want to be all ‘woe is me’ but I will say one thing.” He describes coming to the UK as a child and later being told by Russians that it was an island nation that did not welcome foreigners. “I’ve never, ever felt this in my life. It was sad to me that, at the age of 42, I suddenly did.”

What he calls “a bunch of lies and bullshit” about his possible KGB links still rankles. “I was in touch with a florist the other day,” he says. “A florist?” I repeat, unsure that I have heard correctly. “Yes, a florist. A fucking florist, John, to get some flowers. They said, ‘We can’t take you on as a client.’ For what reason? ‘We can’t tell you.’ That, to me, is racism. On what basis? What gives you the moral high ground? Because I’m Russian, or maybe because you’ve read something?”

The social Siberia into which he was cast took its toll. “By last summer, when that documentary aired, I felt very on edge… I felt I wanted to just get some healing. We’re all human, and I can’t pretend I’m just a machine, even to myself.” Despite his flair for publicity and party-giving, friends describe him as a loner at heart. “I don’t like to be, but the reality is that I am. But now I’ve acknowledged it, like acknowledging that you’re an alcoholic, I’m going to work on it.”

The actor Helen Mirren met Lebedev at the Standard awards and compares him to a character in a 19th-century novel. “We had dinner and I found him easy to be with in a fun, charming, intelligent way. He appealed to my half-Russianness [her father was Russian]. He comes from the complex, terrifying, pragmatic world of oligarchs, but there is an innocence about him.” They had planned to take a train trip across Russia together – “I would have loved that, but we could not do it now.”

One thing has already changed Lebedev: fatherhood. He is single, but we talk just before the fourth birthday of his daughter Maria, known as Masha. She lives alternately with her mother in London and with him. He is a proud and observant father. “She’s a very bright light in my life… It’s been incredible to watch her growing up, particularly in juxtaposition with what I’m finding out about myself. You see everything you know is learnt because you see her learning, and everything is new.”

Spoken like an autodidact, it reminds me of something one of Lebedev’s friends said of his teenage years. He attended Mill Hill School in north London, occasionally living in an apartment by himself at weekends (under the care of a guardian) because his parents had gone back to Russia to make his family’s wealth amid the post-Soviet rough and tumble. “I sometimes wonder if the experience of desertion marked him permanently. In a peculiar way, he is a self-made man.”

His parents were in their early 20s when he was born and he describes Alexander’s attitude to him as “quite demanding in a dismissive way”. Financially privileged but emotionally isolated, he says he “grew up young… That’s why I think I can do everything.” One friend cites his “iron determination to get his own way, which can make him quite unreasonable”. Another recalls that he appeared to think that West End plays should start when it suited him.

Lebedev’s maternal grandparents were scientists: his grandmother, who is still alive, worked at the Moscow Botanical Garden and his late grandfather was a zoologist and head of biology at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He took his grandson on long expeditions to Siberia and countries including Ethiopia, where they once found AK-47 rifles pointed at them by tribal members. Lebedev still has a taste for African expeditions, along with “dark, morbid art” and visits with friends to catacombs and graveyards, such as Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa.

I mention that the tent-like mausoleum of Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer, is in a cemetery behind my old primary school in Mortlake, south-west London, and Lebedev asks if I know a book of Burton’s collected letters. “I was reading it when I last went to the Omo River in south-western Ethiopia, which is where I went as a child. You travel down by motorboat and you don’t see a soul. There are crocodiles popping up and down. It was quite a pleasurable experience.” Of course.

So it is typical that when Lebedev “crashed and burnt” with anxiety, he responded by delving into his own mind. Hence Brave New World, the podcast he launched this year, in which he discusses breakthroughs in fields including human longevity and trauma with figures such as the Canadian addiction expert Gabor Maté and the Dutch deep-breathing maven Wim Hof. Never one to avoid an outré experience, he describes visiting a Costa Rican retreat and hallucinating on the plant-based psychedelic ayahuasca.

“A lot of people think it’s wacky science, woo-woo, New Age, but it is science-based,” he says of extending life. As to psychedelics, “I’ve had an interest in the more esoteric and shamanic aspects of it for a long time and I just felt that I needed something – I wanted to explore myself.” While tripping, he had a vision of an operation he had at the age of three (“the 1980s Soviet surgeon’s mask, and the old-fashioned reflective glass on his forehead”) and being put in isolation to recover.

Much about Lebedev seems to have its roots in his strange childhood. When I ask where his love of formal dress comes from, he pauses to consider. “It’s a good question. I wear things that I think are beautifully designed, beautifully tailored… The shallow answer is, I like the way they look on me. I remember when I was a child, watching movies of the Musketeers and the French Revolution and just liking [the costumes].”

He shares a fondness for display with a less meticulous dresser: Johnson. One chain of media inquiry was sparked by a photo of Johnson when he was foreign secretary in 2018, returning dishevelled from a party at the Lebedevs’ Palazzo Terranova in Perugia. It was just after the poisoning in Salisbury of Sergei Skripal, the former GRU agent, and his daughter Yulia. By the time that Alexander Lebedev was placed on a sanctions list by Canada in 2022, the Johnson-Lebedev axis had become publicly toxic.

“I can see that I was collateral damage [in Johnson’s downfall as prime minister],” he says. Has it ended their relationship? “No, Boris is a friend. I’m loyal to people, I don’t turn on them. It is ironic, though, that despite everything that’s been said, he presided over the worst worsening of relations between Britain and Russia probably in modern history. So if I am his KGB controller, I haven’t done a good job at all.” (Johnson declined to comment for this article.)

We discuss the Standard, and he comes near to admitting that he was pushed into ending the daily print edition due to losses by Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel, a Saudi investor who holds a 30 per cent stake. It was, “primarily, the shareholders’ decision… I really should have done it four years ago, but I didn’t… I tried, I tried, I tried, and it just didn’t stack up.” He has high hopes for a new weekly print product.

To close, we tour the gardens of Stud House, with its flowing lawns and herbaceous borders designed by the late Lady Mollie Salisbury. Lebedev points out the Tudor bricks of the house’s former stables. “I was picking it with my father at the time,” he’d said earlier of the purchase. “I think he was probably more in love with it than I was but I can see now, having grown older, that it’s a special house.” 

He walks me to the long gravel drive and waves me off through the security gates into Hampton Court Park. Deer scatter in the car’s path as I rejoin the frantic world beyond his enclave. Later, I recall his summary of his life after things fell apart: “I’ve been exploring and learning, maybe too much by myself.” Evgeny Lebedev is definitely a sadder man. Wiser? Well, he’s trying.