Two great con­spir­at­orial minds ana­lyse the Lebedev pur­chase of the Even­ing Stand­ard, or Stand­ard. First Peter Pre­ston:

It mat­ters hugely to Lebedev whether he has to com­pete against the Lite and Murdoch’s thel­on­don­pa­per. (The signs are that he will.) It mat­ters hugely to Asso­ci­ated to know whether a Lebedev Stand­ard would turn itself into a morn­ing paper, com­pet­ing dir­ectly with the Mail and Metro. It mat­ters per­son­ally to Rothermere to under­stand whether selling the Stand­ard would also hand Wap­ping vic­tory in the freesheet wars. It mat­ters migh­tily to James Mur­doch to under­stand whether the Lebedev deal would des­troy any imme­di­ate pro­spect of News Inter­na­tional win­ning a chunk of the Stand­ard in an even­tual peace deal. Everything connects.

And then the excel­lent Richard Addis:

With losses at £18m a year the Stand­ard might be prised away. With his son in law Mat­thew Freud help­ing to dir­ect the Lebedev cam­paign, one assumes Mur­doch would have known about the plan to buy the Stand­ard. But it would be abso­lutely vital for him to stay abso­lutely out of the pic­ture oth­er­wise it would never get sold.

Once time has gone by and the con­trac­tual restraints that Lebedev will prob­ably have to sign have expired, one might ima­gine the Lebedev/Freud Stand­ard would move closer to the Mur­doch camp, at any rate enough to stop assist­ing Lon­don Lite.

Lon­don Lite then becomes another drain on the Asso­ci­ated resources. It has to be closed down. If Mur­doch can force Metro into mak­ing losses — another victory.

Mean­while the FT finds DMGT’s CFO, Peter Wil­li­ams, out of love with newspapers.

“We are so much more than a news­pa­per com­pany,” Mr Wil­li­ams concludes.

“To be hon­est, we don’t see this [pro­posed Even­ing Stand­ard deal] as a hugely sig­ni­fic­ant event.”

And Roy G has yet more inter­est­ing detail on Even­ing Press Ltd.