Conrad and Lady Black: dancing on the edge
Tom Bower HarperPress, 436pp, £20
ISBN 0007232349
Ambitious, brainy and rich, Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel were society's darlings - before greed and selfishness shamed them.
If you are not a socialist when you begin Conrad and Lady Black: dancing on the edge, you will be by the time you finish it. Greed, conspicuous consumption and a selfishness beyond parody: this is capitalism red in tooth and claw. It is also a compulsive yarn. But then, could it be otherwise when the protagonists are so outrageously over-the-top, so unfettered by convention - and so wickedly appealing?
Anyone who was anyone in political, cultural or media London in the 1990s would have come across the Blacks. Conrad was colossal, with the drawling, self-important charm of a plantation owner and the self-conscious erudition of a bow-tied Ivy League academic. Barbara was feline and soft-voiced, but intellectually aggressive and just neurotic enough to let off a whiff of vulnerability. (I remember, at one dinner party, watching her watching Conrad. Conrad sat next to a stunning, flirtatious blonde; Babs looked as if she'd caught someone burgling her home.) Everyone knew they were socially ambitious, yet it was difficult to fault them: they had brains and money and sex appeal and gave huge parties where you could rub shoulders with Elton John, Peter Mandelson, Anji Hunter, Henry Kissinger and various minor royals; why shouldn't they wish to sit at top table? But I doubt anyone who supped with the Blacks realised just how unscrupulous they were.
Perhaps if their personal histories had been better known, the Blacks would have claimed fewer victims. Conrad Black was born into a wealthy Canadian family, the second son of a highly educated and successful businessman who, early on, became obsessed with promoting his younger son's talents. Guests to the Black residence were commandeered into listening to the precocious five-year-old list the world's ships, both commercial and naval, along with their weight, armour thickness and guns. Young Conrad was expected to play long games of chess and read encyclopaedias - to be tested on their content by Dad. He was also taught to hate the left - the "phoney, envious and mediocre bleeding hearts". An incident in his youth seems particularly relevant: at 14, Black stole the examination papers at school and offered to sell them to fellow schoolmates.
It proved an unpromising start (Black was caught and expelled) to a career built on unwavering self-regard and the gullibility of others. In 1978, Black decided to take over the Argus Corporation, a mammoth Canadian holding company (tractors, a supermarket chain, mining and an energy and pipeline operation were included under its capacious umbrella). Once he had identified the two people whose shares, combined with those owned by him and his brother, would secure him the majority, he ruthlessly acquired their shares.
While financial experts in Canada questioned Black's management of these operations, few in Britain knew of him. That made it possible for Black, with the help of Andrew Knight (then editor of the Economist), to finance a takeover of the ailing Telegraph Group in 1986. Thus Black stepped into the grand tradition of Canadians who became British press barons - Beaverbrook, Graham and Thomson.
Meanwhile, cutting a swathe through a very different milieu, a sexy British journalist called Barbara Amiel was making a name for herself in Canada. Polemical col umnist, tabloid editor, television presenter, man-eater: Amiel has played myriad roles and collected enough juicy anecdotes to merit her own biography (some of the juiciest can be found in her 1980 autobiography, Confessions, a tome so revealing that, before marrying her, Conrad Black wanted to buy up and pulp every remaining copy).
There is Amiel as a young girl living in a brothel (her mum and stepdad, she alleged, had kicked her out). Amiel striding about the Tor onto Sun newsroom wearing a trench coat and nothing else. Amiel (now Lady Black) refusing to speak to her "servants" - the butler warned domestic staff to jump inside a cupboard to avoid being spotted by their employer. And what of the anecdote - missing from Tom Bower's account - about her ringing the comment editor at one paper to tell him what she would be writing her column on? The editor, puzzled to hear water crashing in the background, asked her where she was. "Oh, sorry," she replied, sound ing even more come-hither than usual. "I am . . . hmmm . . . having a shower and just . . . hmmm . . . soaping myself . . ." The man was stunned into silence.
Unlike Black, Amiel was not always a diehard conservative. Her left-wing phase, however, was short-lived: the moneyed men were of the right and Amiel longed for financial security. Despite her tremendous chutzpah and highly employable skills, she only felt secure on the arm of a Mr Big. When, after her marriage to Black, I heard him refer to her as "the little woman", I thought she, the fiery and independent-minded polemicist, would poleaxe him on the double; instead, she smiled and simpered. A mutual friend explained that Amiel found in Black's terms of endearment a huge erotic charge: "Barbara," he told me, "wants to be taken care of."
Black longed to play the role of the great defender - not just of his cherished wife, but of the Conservative Party, and of his new-found Church. In 1988, Black - an expert on Cardinal Newman - had converted to Catholicism. I remember in 1990, when I became editor of the Catholic Herald, courting him as a possible buyer. The paper was ailing, and I needed a fresh injection of capital to revive it. Black was jovial and supportive, and immediately came to my rescue by buying shares in the business. He was conscientious about attending board meetings, and managed to galvanise fellow members to turn around the operation. My part of the bargain was to "stay true to Rome" with my editorial line - and stay put for a couple of years, at least.
While no one (or at least very few) in those days suspected the Blacks of living off their shareholders' money, their stewardship of the Telegraph Group was beginning to raise eyebrows. Dominic Lawson, when editor of the Sunday Telegraph, always defended Black as a hands-off proprietor, but Charles Moore, Lawson's counterpart on the Daily, cannot have been in much doubt about his freedom to edit Barbara Amiel's pieces. These columns were repeatedly and stridently pro-Israel, and gave the Daily Telegraph a reputation as a Zionist propaganda sheet. In 1994, when William Dalrymple wrote a piece in the Spectator about the desecration of Christian graves by Israeli extremists, Black ordered that the author be banned from the Telegraph Group.
Meanwhile, profits from the Telegraph and the other two newspaper groups Black had acquired - Fairfax and Southam - had been squandered. Hollinger, Black's holding company (on whose board sat such luminaries as Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger and Alfred Taubman), had accumulated $1.8bn worth of debts. Bower suggests that Black (whose salary from Hollinger was a modest £290,000 a year) frantically took money from one company, then the next, imposing draconian budget cuts first on the National Post, his Canadian newspaper, then on the Telegraph Group, in order to channel extra funds to his own coffers. According to this account, his shareholders ended up paying for his butler, the maintenance of his Gulfstream, his wife's jewels. But Black managed to avoid suspicions of "corporate kleptocracy" until 2002. By then, though, the public was baying for the blood of those corporate fat cats who, from Enron bosses to Martha Stewart, had cheated their way to immense riches. In 2003, an independent inquiry in America charged Black with fraud and "ethical corruption" - allegations that he vehemently denies. His trial begins next March.
Bower has ensured that we need not wait until then to hear the evidence against Lord Black. With painstaking care, he assembles facts, insights and anecdotes. Even if Lord Black walks free from the courtroom, Bower's chronicle, like the narrator's prison diary in Kind Hearts and Coronets, will have sealed his fate. Yet it is impossible to forecast the Blacks' expulsion from society without a tinge of regret: they may have acted in a despicable way, but they were entertaining to watch. They would make marvellous reality TV: forget the Big Brother house - the Blacks' home would provide hours of amusement.
Cristina Odone writes for the Observer
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