Sometimes you wonder how you would explain the current world to someone who had fallen into a coma in 1985. Google. Bing. Bingle. Angela Shanahan. The KGB takeover of the London media.

Today, the UK Office of Fair Trading said that it will not investigate the proposed takeover of The Independent newspaper by Alexander Lebedev, billionaire and former global economics operative for the glorious USSR’s anti-fascist security service.

Lebedev got his money as the USSR dissolved, and has owned papers in Russia. Indeed he already owns The Evening Standard, London’s surviving evening newspaper – whose future he ensured by turning it into a freesheet, and retaining much of its original form. That earns him some points, since there is nothing so pleasurable as an afternoon newspaper, especially one which is mainly gossip and fizzing opinion.

Now he’s the Indy‘s last chance. Launched in 1986, owned by its journalists, and proudly disdainful of celeb gossip – its coverage of royal births was famously limited to a single para ‘in brief’ – the paper was created for people who wanted serious in-depth coverage of world events and politics, just at the time when the audience who wanted that were starting to die off.

The paper was centrist at a time when The Guardian was further left – even up to the late 90s, the Grauniad had columns by Paul Foot and Mark Steel, both members of the Socialist Workers Party. But as The Guardian moved to the centre-left, and The Telegraph began to cover music and pop culture more recent than King Oliver and His Jazz Gollies at the Palm Court, Frinton-on-sea, the Indy began to be squeezed, its circulation heading south of 250,000.

They responded by successively reinventing themselves – first by the use of startling front page images – symbolic and surreal photos to illustrate stories, rather than mundane place shots. It was such a success that The Guardian nicked it and did it on better paper. In foreign affairs it went rapidly left, with the invaluable Robert Fisk and the insufferable Johann Hari among others.

They turned themselves into a campaigning paper, omitting major stories from the front page in order to bang on about this or that cause – child slaves in Wales, the counterfeit Haggis trade, cruelty to llamas in Bolivia etc – and finally they went tabloid, the other broadsheets following in quick succession. By now they were owned by the Irish entrepreneur Tony O’Reilly, so The Independent idea was dead, but they were ceaselessly inventive in keeping the paper going.

The result is a mess.

The Indy is ugly beyond belief – uglier than the tabloid Times, which is saying something. There is often one story a page, with ads, all clumpy and yurrgh. Aside from Fisk, and right-winger Bruce ‘the Brute’ Anderson, the columnists are a ‘whatthe-, whothe-?’ crowd. Circulation is at around 180,000, and it loses a quarter of a million quid a week.

Lebedev has wanted to buy it for some time, and it’s a measure of our tranquilised, globalised age – or the utter irrelevance of newspapers – that no-one really cares that a Putin confidante and backer will own two of the country’s nine dailies. His initial plans were to make it a morning freesheet and get general London media blowfly Rod Liddle into edit it – until the latter was caught posting racist comments on a Millwall football club fan site. The freesheet idea is on hold and other high-profile editors sought by Lebedev – Newsnight TonyJonesOnSteroids host Jeremy Paxman, and former BBC director-general Greg Dyke – have knocked the post back.

Lebedev wants to get the paper punching hard before the election, but it is hard to see what he can do, other than a cash splurge to try and grab some scoops and investigative pieces. He won’t move wholly to the left of The Guardian, and the right is crowded with the shouty lunatics of Murdochland, plus The Daily Mail and The Telegraph (‘p.26 obituary: Major-Captain Sir Baron Archibald ‘Archie’ Ernle-Erle-Drax-Dreever, third viscount Chumley of that ilk, wounded by his own men at Anzio, champion of perpetual motion technologies and ‘human bonsai’.) The ‘campaignper’ model eventually wearied everyone, and the centrist high-news idea would probably take circulation down.

The future of The Independent is a test of what is still possible with medium-large scale media enterprises. Time was cities like London and New York had a dozen daily newspapers, all – in London at least — precisely graded to a social class. The problem for The Independent is that its intended audience don’t read papers anymore – and if they do, it’s that Muji-style design object, The Guardian (free news included). For me, as for many others, the Indy is Guardian rehab – whenever the Grauniad’s liberal-fabian-bloomsbury-islington-agasaga-cultural studies-Cambridge third sanctimonious alto-urinary stance becomes too much, I slip over to The Indy for a week or so. But I always go back, for the same reason Bill Burroughs never wrote any books about methadone.

I can’t think what would persuade anyone across to the Indy, and the idea of increasing the pool of paper readers is like growing the radiogram market.

But Lebedev is a billionaire, so he must be smart, right? I mean it’s not as if he’s just some bloke who grabbed a slice of the old USSR, and now wants to play at being a media mogul… I mean that would suggest the whole system is coming loose from its moorings, and what are the chances of that?