Media Matters
A Saudi has bought a third of London’s paper – and no one’s noticed
Why would anyone pay £25 million for a third share in a paper which haemorrhaged £10 million last year, and may increase its losses over the coming years? It is an interesting question.
An unknown Saudi businessman called Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel recently shelled out this sum. It makes him the second biggest shareholder in the London Evening Standard, which is still controlled by the Russian-born Evgeny Lebedev. It is of course edited by the former Tory Chancellor, George Osborne. In 2017 Abuljadayel acquired a third of the Independent, whose largest shareholder is the same Evgeny Lebedev.
One can see why the 38-year-old Russian might want to offload part of the loss-making Standard. The paper, which distributes some 850,000 copies a day across the capital, has a creaking economic model. As a giveaway, it has no circulation revenue, and is reliant on a diminishing pot of advertising income as advertising money migrates online. Lebedev must have blessed the day he bumped into the Saudi tycoon, and welcomed the investment in his struggling newspaper.
But what’s in it for Abuljadayel? It’s fair to say he wasn’t eager to broadcast his new shareholding, which was made though a Cayman Islands company. It took the Financial Times to identify him. The Saudi presumably does not harbour hopes of making money out of the Standard, unless he has worked out how to turn base metal into gold. Perhaps he envisages spin-offs: the Independent has launched an Arabic-language edition run by a Saudi media company with links to the Saudi royal family. Or maybe he simply hopes to exert influence. Starved though it is of resources, the Standard is quite a powerful newspaper, not least as a cheerleader against Brexit, with Osborne penning stirring editorials.
Whatever Abuljadayel’s motivations may be, his shareholding has barely caused a ripple in political or media circles. If Rupert Murdoch or any other Right-wing proprietor acquired a slice of the Standard, Labour MPS would explode in indignation, and the
Guardian’s Polly Toynbee would blow a gasket. But an unknown Saudi Arabian who may have links with the country’s royal family? That is evidently perfectly all right.
Needless to say, I don’t suggest Abuljadayel will be standing at George Osborne’s shoulder instructing him what to write. I am sure he will behave entirely properly. But if there is no such thing as a free lunch, the notion of a large stake in a newspaper without any strings attached is fanciful. What would happen if Lebedev were tempted to sell more shares and Abuljadayel were minded to buy them? What if the Saudi became the
Standard’s controlling shareholder? I realise that in modern Britain we cheerfully flog off precious assets to any foreigner who comes along with loads of money. But amidst this free-for-all, London’s only title should surely be regarded in a different light. This must be the only country in the world in which a mysterious businessman from a not particularly nice place can buy a large stake in the capital’s newspaper without there being a peep of complaint.
Sometimes when I am bored, I look up people I have known in Wikipedia. I don’t do so in any great expectation of encountering the truth.
The other day I alighted on the entry for Stewart Steven, a senior executive on the Daily Mail before becoming editor of the Mail on Sunday and then of the Evening Standard. In was in this latter capacity that I knew him, when I wrote a column for the newspaper in the 1990s.
I liked Stewart, who died in 2004. He was a good editor and a generous man. So you can imagine my feelings when I read in Wikipedia that his ‘career was marked by three major errors’. The first two of these alleged mistakes we’ll have to skate over. Suffice to say, they weren’t that bad. The third, though undoubtedly farcical, wasn’t his fault at all.
What happened is that Sarah Sands, the brilliant features editor of the Standard, seized an article off a fax machine and shoved it in the paper under the byline of Bryan Gould, a Labour MP of recent vintage, who had been commissioned to write about Tony Blair. Since the piece was highly critical of the new Labour leader, it attracted a lot of attention. Unfortunately, the anti-blair tirade had coincidentally been sent in ‘on spec’ by the undergraduate son of Tory Cabinet minister Michael Howard.
Labour (wrongly) claimed dirty tricks. Sarah, naturally mortified, was mildly censured by Stewart, who doted on her. She is now the distinguished editor of Radio Four’s Today programme.
Straightforward errors of fact are less common in Wikipedia than they used to be. But mistaken judgments remain ubiquitous. I suppose I could alter Stewart’s entry. But then the idiot who got it wrong in the first place would probably write it again.