Alexander Lebedev's Standard bill puts paid to ad-funded Independent

Ever since he sealed his Independent deal, Alexander Lebedev's Fleet Street rivals have been watching him with undisguised alarm. The word on the street held that he was thinking of taking the Indie free – or part-free, dishing out his daily without charge inside the M25. Boost circulation, boost ad prices, boost profitability. QED. But Mr Lebedev hasn't done that yet – and, in familiar election campaign speak, has "no plans" to make a free move "at the moment". He says he doesn't want to hurt a British press he greatly admires. He promised Gordon Brown that he wouldn't cause competitive problems before he bought the two papers. Now he's thinking great investigative global collaborations instead. Which those anxious rivals might find reassuring if his son, Evgeny, the Indie chairman over here, didn't seem to be singing from a slightly different hymn sheet. Yet facts have a way of making their own case in such matters – and though they're in precious short supply when you try to examine the Resource Bank of Lebedev, one small aside in last week's interview (with the Guardian ) shed light in a dark corner. When Mr Lebedev bought the Evening Standard 17 months ago, he promised to invest £30m over three years to make it strong again. But now, he says, that lump sum has gone already. Why? Because of the decision to scrap a cover price and rely on nothing but advertising instead. Can he take that £30m, though, and turn it into a loss of £20m in the first 12 months of his ownership, plus £10m for the first half of his second year? Nothing so precise, of course: you'd expect rising ad revenue as the free wheeze became established. But the rate of loss is still pretty severe – and the logistical problems of dishing out a nil-cost Indie around greater London seem equally daunting, unless you decide just to leave heaps of them at central city dumps until free Standards arrive to take their place. Tentative conclusion: there's no such thing as a "free" newspaper. Somehow or other, somebody always has to pay the (rather big) bill.