"Osborne Taking This Job Is An Insult To Journalism" Says Stig Abell

19 March 2017, 15:51 | Updated: 19 March 2017, 19:03

George Osborne has been appointed the new Editor of the Evening Standard and Stig Abell is absolutely fuming.

Stig Abell, Sunday afternoon LBC Presenter and Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is not happy about the former Chancellor's new appointment. 

He said: "Firstly Evgeny Lebedev, who runs the Independent and the Standard, often fated as some sort of benign influence on British journalism, and he isn't. 

"He's turned the once-proud Independent into a click-bait website, a sort of online Daily Express of the left, and now he's given a Labour-leaning city newspaper to a non journalist, a serving Tory part-time Editor. 

"Who half the time will be fighting for the norther powerhouse, and the other half of the time, trying to be an Editor in London."

Stig went on to compare the appointment to government propaganda in Russia. 

He continued: "You don't actively purchase it [the paper], you get given it as you wander around the streets of the capital.

"Secondly, just from a journalistic point of view, being an Editor is not a part-time gig."

Stig added: "I can tell you this right now, you cannot edit a paper, even an evening one, in the morning, and then swank off to be a parliamentarian in the afternoon, and a financial advisor in the evening.

"That's because the sort of Editor that George Osborne will be is not actually about editing. He's not going to do any editing. He can't sub a text, he won't be able to write headlines, he won't know about contempt and legal ramifications, he'll spend all his time plotting the ongoing existence of a paper." 

Stig wasn't done there. Watch the rest of what he has to say in the above clip.