Standard stuff

Old, white, Tory-loving man becomes editor of Russian-owned newspaper

Dylan Jones photographed in London last month. Photo by Dave Benett/Getty Images.

“I am thrilled to be joining the Evening Standard at such an exciting time in its development. It is an iconic title with a brilliant team, and I'm looking forward to helping steer the brand into its next phase”.

That was ex-GQ editor Dylan Jones, speaking a few days ago as he packed his lunchbox and got ready to set off for his first week as Editor in Chief at the Evening Standard.

Now let us translate that quote from ‘PR bullshit speak’ into plain old English for you:

“I am being paid an awful lot of money by Evgeny Lebedev to join the Evening Standard at a very ‘dustbin fire’ time in its development. It is a struggling title with a severely reduced team, and I’m likely to be replaced by someone else in a couple of years when the money runs out.”

But we are getting ahead of ourselves a bit here. Let’s pause a minute to see how we got to this point…

A quick recap

If you’re not up-to-date on the continuing travails of ‘London’s Newspaper’ then you can go back and read our potted history of the paper’s descent into terribleness here:

How the Standard went from bad to dead

If you can’t be bothered then the TL;DR version is that hiring ex-Tory ministers (or their close relatives) with little or no journalistic experience to edit your newspaper is not a great strategy and will probably lead to huge financial losses, no matter how many times you talk about becoming “a mobile-first media company”.

We updated the story around a year ago, when the paper filed its 2021 finances, revealing a pre-tax loss of £14m.

A Standard story of convicts and oligarchs

And, when we last left things at the end of 2022, the Standard was going through acting editors like Holly Willoughby goes through co-presenters, and there were some frankly terrifying rumours that Boris Johnson might be heading to the editor’s seat:

Is Boris Johnson heading to the Evening Standard?

Which brings to a couple of weeks ago, when the Telegraph was reporting that the paper’s owner, Baron Lebedev of Kingston upon Thames and Siberia (yes, that’s his actual title) was getting ready to “call in” GQ’s 63-year-old former editor as an ‘editorial consultant’ to try and “salvage the newspaper’s floundering efforts to adapt to a digital future”.

Jones must have done something right in the past few weeks to convince Lebedev that he could plug the hole in the Standard’s finances, because a few days later the bearded Baron was announcing on Twitter that he was “delighted to welcome” Jones as the new editor of the paper, saying:

“I have always had huge respect and admiration for his work and am excited to see his vision for London’s paper come to life as we begin a new and exciting chapter in its 200-year-old history.”

So who is Dylan Jones and what can we expect him to bring to his new role?

Old boys in blue

Dylan Jones’ and David Cameron’s foreheads in 2008. Photo by Dave M. Benett/Getty Images.

Jones is pretty much known for two things: wearing a lot of polo neck jumpers and editing “men’s style bible” GQ for 22 years, during which time he managed to keep the lights on through the end of the ‘lad’s mag’ era and the demise of other titles like Nuts, Maxim and Loaded.

It’s probably that second qualification which most attracted Lebedev to him (although ‘The Press Baron of Siberia’ has been known to cosplay as a Bond villain in the past). As for Jones, he’s been looking for a new gig ever since he ‘stepped down’ from his editor’s seat in May 2001, following a “streamlining of operations” at Condé Nast.

The other thing that will make Jones very at home in the Standard office is his unabashed love of the Tory party and his skill at sucking up to those most prominent in its ranks.

Jones ‘came out’ as a Conservative in 2008, when he explained to the Mail that he didn’t want to vote Labour because they had done things like “banning fox-hunting [and] slashing the armed forces” and he had no intention of voting Lib Dem because that would mean being “penalised by a ten per cent tax hike”.