Will Lewis advised Boris Johnsons staff to clean up their phones during Partygate
I’m going to continue to express my amazement that Prince Harry’s lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s British media arm has led to utter chaos in an American newsroom. Harry is suing the Sun and basically everyone who worked for News UK from 2000 through 2012. That included Will Lewis, the newly-installed CEO of the Washington Post, who came up through the sleazy ranks of News UK and then the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. It’s endlessly fascinating to me that Lewis’s problem started not when he spent years doing crime in the name of “journalism,” but when he refused to apply ethical journalism to himself. If he had come into the Post and said “full disclosure, I was up to my ass in shenanigans at the Times of London more than a decade ago and you guys need to report on it thoroughly,” things wouldn’t have gotten this bad. Instead, he’s spent much of the past two months in ass-covering mode, trying to kill any and all American reporting about his criminal past.
So, with Will Lewis fully committed to the Streisand Effect, the American media is now fully engaged with the story and they’re horrified by Lewis’s past. Even funnier, the British media is still dog-eat-dog and they love nothing more than tossing one of their former colleagues under the bus. All of which means that the American media AND the British media are doing deep dives on Lewis and the British man he’s appointed as the Post’s new managing editor, Robert Winnett. You know how I just said that Lewis should have done full disclosure when he came into the Post and he should have made the argument that this went down a decade ago? Well, funny story. Will Lewis was up to his balls in shenanigans as of 2022. From The Guardian:
Will Lewis, the Washington Post publisher, advised Boris Johnson and senior officials at 10 Downing Street to “clean up” their phones in the midst of a Covid-era political scandal, according to claims by three people familiar with the operations inside No 10 at the time.
The advice is alleged to have been given in December 2021 and January 2022 as top officials were under scrutiny for potential violations of pandemic restrictions, a scandal which was known as “Partygate”.
The claims suggest Lewis’s advice contradicted an email sent to staff at No 10 in December 2021 which instructed them not to destroy any material that could be relevant to an investigation into the flagrant breaking of Covid lockdown rules by Johnson and officials who worked for him. Sources said they understood they were being advised to remove photos and messages from their phones that could be damaging in any investigations.
Lewis, the sources alleged, made some of the requests personally as he was carrying out work as an informal adviser to Johnson from late 2021 to July 2022. Lewis was a member of a so-called “brain trust” of Johnson’s close political allies who were leading an effort – codenamed Operation Save Big Dog – that tried but ultimately failed to salvage Johnson’s premiership. Lewis was awarded a knighthood in 2023 for his political service to the conservative prime minister.
The allegations regarding Lewis’s advice relate to a period covered by a civil service investigation and before the Partygate scandal became a police matter. The Metropolitan police launched its investigation on 25 January 2022.
A spokesperson for Lewis said: “This story is categorically untrue.”
A spokesperson for Johnson told the Guardian: “This story is untrue.”
Lewis’s decision to join Johnson as an informal adviser followed his April 2020 departure from Dow Jones, where he served as publisher of the Wall Street Journal. The adviser role was unpaid, according to reports, and came at an increasingly desperate political moment for Johnson.
The more I learn about Will Lewis, the more shocked I am that Jeff Bezos even selected him as CEO of the Post. I was reading through Lewis’s Wiki – no journalist or editor should have a Wiki that detailed and so full of alleged crime – and there is truly a blank time period between 2020 and 2024 where his career was seemingly in the toilet and he was doing pretend journalism work (“combating fake news”) as a cover for his real job as “advisor” to Boris Johnson and Operation Save Big Dog (a code name I’m hearing for the first time and made me bark with laughter). So, the guy who worked for six years in America for WSJ/Dow Jones then returned to the UK to advise the Johnson government to cover up their crimes, and then magically his name is selected out of a hat (???) to become the Post’s new CEO?
So, what is Jeff Bezos really doing here? Bezos issued a statement of vague support to the Post’s newsroom this week. Hilariously, Bezos is on a yacht, on vacation right now. His statement was basically like: journalists and editors need to do their thing but I brought in Lewis so WaPo will grow and make money. I think Bezos needs to answer some questions as to how he even decided to appoint Lewis to the CEO position though. Did anyone do a cursory background check? Did anyone think “hey, this guy has thirty years worth of skeletons across two countries?”
Photos courtesy of Getty, Puck’s IG.
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