The Independent has been relaunched (yet again) with a new design and a striking new masthead, in red capitals. The colour scheme may be a reflection of the newspaper’s politics or simply paying due deference to the Soviet past of its owner, Mr Alexander Lebedev, the Russian pugilist and television personality who was a KGB agent in London in the 1980s.
Mr Lebedev claims he whiled away his time in the Soviet embassy merely reading the British newspapers and not harassing Russian exiles like some of his colleagues. Perhaps this is where he first became interested in acquiring a string of loss-making British papers.
Another thought about the Independent‘s new masthead immediately struck us in this office: it appears to be a direct copy of Standpoint‘s. We are naturally pleased if this is the case, though there is a school of thought that it should be a candidate for a new award being set up in homage to its distinguished young columnist who is currently attending a course in elementary journalism in the United States: the Johann Hari Prize for Plagiarism.
