careful about adopting a kind of mccarthyism attitude to all russians, and also understand that who else was going to buy it? do we have a fit and proper test? i mean, newspapers are not football clubs, but the lebedevs put in money and, from what i could tell and i have had conversations because i bumped into geordie greg occasionally he did not feel the heavy hand of evgeny lebedev on his shoulder when he was making big editorial decisions. and i have spoken to other editors who said that too. absolutely. that s the point. so again, i think it s you need to look very clearly. nowjust one other point about the intelligence services. the sunday times that has done great reporting made a big deal of the fact thatjohn sors, who was the boss of m16, had raised objections to evgeny lebedev attending the lunch with the editor. do you know something?
the fact i went to lunch at mi6 about once a year? i would never have dreamt of bringing the proprietor because you don t want you re a journalist. and i m sure that sors, who i do know have not asked him, would have thought, well, who the hell am i? i m the one who s making the decisions about who comes to my lunch. and i think that was why he didn t want evgeny lebedev in. not that he thought he was some kind of lord haw haw haw in disguise. right? well, i should say at this point, we did invite evgeny lebedev to join us on the programme today, but we ve not heard back about our invitation. who you made a film for bbc newsnight back in 2012 when you accompanied mr lebedev to belarus for an interview with president lukashenko that mr lebedev had secured for the independent, i wondered what evgeny lebedev was like.