Can Geordie save the Standard and get rich?

Alexander Lebedev, the Russian oligarch and former KGB agent, has succeeded in buying the London Evening Standard, the paper he famously used to read when he worked as a spy at the Soviet embassy in London in the 1980s. He paid a nominal sum, thought to be £1, for the loss-making title.

As reported here, the sale is the result of more than six months of fraught negotiations. It is thought that Lord Rothermere, chairman of the Daily Mail & General Trust (DMGT), which owns the Standard, was reluctant to sell, but he has the consolation that DMGT will retain a 24.9 per cent stake in the company Lebedev formed to buy the paper, Evening Press Ltd.

Inevitably, the sale has turned attention to who will succeed Veronica Wadley as editor. The most talked about contender is Geordie Greig, 47, the urbane editor of the society magazine Tatler. He is a long-standing friend of the Lebedev family, and, as the Financial Times reported yesterday, Greig is one of two shareholders in Evening Press Ltd, of which Lebedev's son, Evgeny, is chairman.

Another name floated in media circles is that of Anne McElvoy, who writes on politics as the Standard’s executive editor. She knows Russia - she reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall and was the Times’s Moscow bureau chief in the early 1990s - and speaks the language.

But Greig is the front-runner. If the Standard moves back into profit, as the Lebedevs must hope, Grieg could not only glory in the role of editor but also make a tidy profit in the process. On the other hand, if you believe the doom merchants, that will never happen.

According to insiders, Rothermere's accountants persuaded him he had to sell the title. The chance to get shot of a paper that has lost its way amid all the freesheets and is suffering from the migration of advertising from print to web, was too good to pass by. ·