Campaigner Carole out of the the door at the Observer

The cuts are already starting at the Observer just days after its sale to loss-making media firm Tortoise was confirmed, with Carole Cadwalladr, Obs hack of 19 years, Pulitzer finalist and scourge of the Brexiteers, announcing she’s off.

Cadwalladr is one of a number of writers on freelance contracts who have had notice that said contracts are up. (Others on fixed-term contracts have been told they are safe with Tortoise until next September and then this will be renegotiated; zero-hours casuals await to learn their fate with many expecting to be discarded once the Tortoise Observer is fully up and running.)

By coincidence, the move comes around the same time that Cadwalladr penned a 2,700-word article for Byline Times questioning some of the money men behind Tortoise’s takeover, headlined ‘Tortoise and the Heir: The ‘Slow News’ Media Firm Behind the Observer Sale and the Curious Company It Keeps’.

The article led Evgeny Lebedev, lesser-spotted Tory peer and owner of the no-longer-in-the-evening Standard to post on X: “The rats have finally turned on each other. @tortoise @guardian Must say thorough investigation and very impressive job @carolecadwall – wish I had someone with your abilities working for my publications!”

Whether Lebedev would really want Cadwalladr is unclear. Because, when she wasn’t busy delving into malpractice by campaigners for Brexit and the opaque funding of Vote Leave, she was also the journalist who broke the story of his father, an ex-KGB agent, meeting then foreign secretary Boris Johnson at a secretive party a month after the Salisbury novichok poisoning.

“The Guardian is cancelling my contract after 19 years continuous employment with no pay-off so totes happy to go to the Indie [which Lebdedev also owns] to continue my investigation into Evgeny’s dad, the ex-KGB spy,” said Cadwalladr on X. “The UK media: so many fine choices.”

Besides, the Independent already has journalists not afraid to get their hands dirty. On its homepage at the time of writing was ‘Is Mrs Brown’s Boys the worst show on TV? An investigation’.