He Was A Spy and Don't Ever Forget It!

There are certain criminal acts that the public will, in nine out often cases, forgive you for and take you into their hearts regardless, think Leslie Grantham or Cheryl Cole. There are others however where whatever road to redemption you may have travelled the public will always hate you, or at least part of the public will always hate you. Think Gary Glitter, Jonathan Aitken, sorry Jonathan King, O.J Simpson or Michael 'Billie Jean is not my lover, she's just the girl who let me sleep with her eight year old brother in a purely platonic relationship (allegedly)' Jackson.

Being a spy puts you down there among the real lowlife, you're only really allowed into the company of Estate Agents and newspaper journalists for social discourse, that's how low they are. Nothing glamorous about spying, about spying for or against your country. It's not some glorious game where at the end of your career you have a big party and a card signed by all in accounts, it's waterboarding, submarine torture, electrodes on your naughty bits. Well that's what I've heard and read.

Former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev obviously liked the company of journalists so much he decided to buy a newspaper, the London Evening Standard. I have to be honest and say that on my visits to London, which become less frequent as I grow older, sorry Dr. Johnson, the Standard never ceases to disappoint. Like many newspapers it can't decide whether it wants to be serious or tabloid, stories about George Osborne and 'horrible' Heather Mills sit uneasily next to each other. As well as being seemingly undecided what sort of paper it is in terms of its presentation you also have to wonder whether it sees itself as a local or regional newspaper, it's always seemed to me to be a perfect companion for the train journey home as it seems to appeal to everybody rather than those within the M25.

Anyway having bought one paper would you believe Mr Lededev decided he'd continue his pursuit of owning the bottom shelf in his newsagents by buying The Independent. He bought the paper for £1, which is all I pay for it three times a week, but he didn't just get a postcard with a code on it entitling him to download half a dozen tracks from the latest Groove Armada album, he got the whole paper. And it gets better, whilst I sometimes find that the distributors have forgotten to put my copy of the Travel section in with the Saturday edition, Lededev got £9 million quid to cover the outgoing owners printing liabilities. £9 million quid without having to buy a scratchcard!

For that £9 million, which covers a years worth of costs, the new owner gets a paper that has fewer daily readers that Barcelona get for most of its home matches. The Independent finds itself in a strange position readership wise and I'm not just referring to the size of its circulation. Whilst the Daily Mail represents all that is wrong on the right wing of the British press, the Express represents the lunatic fringe and the Daily Telegraph seems to be just a tad dull but with its establishment heart in the right place, the Independent frequently gets lobbed in with the Guardian and the Times as the three papers to the left of centre.

The Independent has never struck me as a mouthpiece of the Labour party in the way that the Guardian does, I actually find that paper embarrassing to read sometimes, it seems stuck in the mid-1970's and comes across as if it has been written by the military wing of the creative writing faculty at Norwich University. The Guardian readership really do knit their own yoghurt, wear sandals and think that social workers will inherit the earth. At the Independent you have, among its regular columnists: Bruce Anderson, a man who is too far right for most Conservatives I know, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who thinks Britain should be a rainbow alliance of races and religions and grateful for the experiment and Johann Hari who comes across in both his articles and television appearances and somebody who drank too much Ribena as a child, good though his writing is. On a serious note Hari wrote a quite brilliant article on the barmy nature (my words and his) of Religion - you can read it here.

Anyway enough of this rambling, the point of this article is that Mr Lebedev is already considering the possibility of making the Independent a free newspaper. Now I know that for most of us beyond the distribution network of the Metro, the thought of a free paper is met with a shudder. Free papers generally consist of about thirty pages of property ads, ten pages of personals and a weekly motoring pull out, if you get two pages of news you are lucky, if you get two pages of news that doesn't involve the local school, a traffic accident or a story involving an animal you've cracked it. The idea of having a quality newspaper free of charge, in large towns and cities only, at a time when the Murdoch evil empire is looking to charge for online access to its titles is intriguing. Watch this space.

Of course if the new free Indy has a personal ad section which consists of unintelligible messages requiring meetings beneath the clock at Waterloo we will all know why won't we?