George Osborne, Britain’s longtime Chancellor of the Exchequer until the fall of the Cameron government, seems to have raised some eyebrows recently with his announcement that, beginning in May, he will become editor of the [London] Evening Standard. And keep his seat in the House of Commons.

To be sure, most of the risen eyebrows belong to opposition Labour members, and Britain does have a tradition of members of Parliament keeping their day jobs—whether as bankers or barristers or novelists or trade union officials. But what struck me about Osborne’s case was not so much the vocation involved—the House of Commons is full of people who might be described as “journalists,” including the incumbent Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson—but the newspaper itself. The Evening Standard (no relation to THE WEEKLY STANDARD) is an old sheet and successful business enterprise; but it’s also a free tabloid, now largely owned by a Russian investor whose father was a senior KGB official.