On 21 January 2009, Evgeny and his father bought a 65% share in the Evening Standard newspaper. The previous owners, Daily Mail and General Trust plc, continue to hold 24.9% of the company. Under the Lebedevs’ ownership, it became a free newspaper in October 2009; circulation tripled immediately to 700,000.

Lebedev attended St Barnabas and St Philip’s Church of England Primary School in Kensington, followed by Holland Park comprehensive and Mill Hill boarding school. He then went on to study the history of art at Christie’s in London. He has lived in the UK ever since, and became a British citizen (with dual nationality) in 2010.

On 25 March 2010, just weeks before it was due to close, Lebedev bought The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. On 26 October, the i newspaper was launched, the first national daily newspaper to be launched in the UK since The Independent in 1986, at a time of falling newspaper circulations and title closures worldwide. In 2011, he launched The Journalism Foundation, to promote “free and independent journalism throughout the world”, although it was closed down after a year.

Lebedev is the patron of the Evening Standard’s Dispossessed Fund, which helps to address poverty in London, and has raised over £13m since its launch in 2010. In 2018, he launched #AIDSFree, a cross-title campaign between The Independent and Evening Standard to raise money for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. In 2019, he announced that both newspapers’ would launch a multiple-year campaign to tackle homelessness in London and around the world.

Lebedev co-owns The Grapes, a riverside pub in Limehouse, London, with Sir Ian McKellen and Sean Mathias, and he purchased the Château Gütsch in Lucerne, Switzerland in 2012, before turning it into a luxury hotel-restaurant.

In February 2016, it was announced that Independent Press Ltd had reached an agreement to sell the i to Johnston Press, and that The Independent would become digital-only from March 2016. In 2019, it was reported that Lebedev sold a 30% stake in the publications to a private Saudi investor. After a second regulator concluded no investigation was necessary, Ofcom judged that the sale had not led to “any influence” on the news outlets controlled by the British-Russian businessman.

He had maintained close friendship with Boris Johnson since the late 2000s, with Lebedev′s Evening Standard going all out in support of Johnson as the Mayor of London. The friendship caused concern in the UK′s security circles who assessed both Johnson and Lebedev as security risks. According to a media report, that evaluation of Lebedev was in June 2020 changed, the decision allegedly having been made by the Cabinet Office officials such as Dominic Cummings.

In July 2020, he was nominated for peerage by prime minister Johnson, The Guardian calling his ″a surprise name among the 36 life peerage nominations which have led to accusations of “cronyism” against the prime minister″ and Mark Galeotti opining the move indicated Johnson′s eagerness “to show contempt for Britain′s intelligence agencies.”