Links to the KGB? Come on, guys. Lord Lebedev just wants to be a public servant | Marina Hyde

Stop banging on about lapdog politicians and garden parties for the powerful. Why can’t we just see Evgeny as a success, as he does?

Let me transport you to a 2016 house party at the Umbrian estate of Evgeny Lebedev, now Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia. Glamour model Katie Price has just twice enlivened dinner by showing the table her latest breasts. According to one report, she is subsequently escorted to the kitchen by Evgeny’s former SAS bodyguards and not seen again for the weekend.

According to fellow guest Joan Collins, Pricey only repeated the tit trick because Joanie requested she show it to fellow-fellow guest Boris Johnson, who was at the time foreign secretary in Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s government. This was not Johnson’s only trip to the estate. On a stay two years later, he met Lebedev’s father, the former KGB agent Alexander, without officials present. And according to a 2021 report by uninvited guests the Italian security services, who, it was this week revealed, were monitoring the property at the time, and had been for several years – it could not be ruled out that Lebedev Snr still worked for Russian intelligence and still enjoyed the favour of Putin. And according to what a member of Italy’s foreign affairs committee told a new Channel 4 documentary entitled Boris, the Lord and the Russian Spy: “You should really be careful on what kind of relationship you keep with such a person.”

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist