Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ however, protected the book from ridicule when it was published in 1980.

      Rescuing Canada from socialism and ‘the spiritual and moral bankruptcy into which it has fallen’ was the heart of Amiel’s cause.³⁸ Like Conrad Black, she condemned the Globe and Mail and the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau for distorting the policies of anti-Marxists and conservatives. The Liberal ‘thought police’, she wrote, were conducting a ‘witch-hunt’ against those championing the individual against the state. She railed against the bureaucrats promoting political correctness, multi-culturalism and the conditions of working women, and their fellow travellers who were championing sexual harassment prosecutions, denigrating prostitutes, inventing child abuse as a political weapon, lamenting men’s abuse of the clitoris and generally suppressing opportunities. Her black cleaner in New York, she complained, had refused to move out of a poor neighbourhood and seek a better education for her children because she expected improvements to be brought to her at public expense.³⁹ The Canadian media and political establishment, she protested, were deliberately concealing the horrors in China and the Soviet Union. Forgetting her former support for the anti-Vietnam war movement, she confessed to having ‘little sympathy or respect for draft-dodgers’, and ‘loathed the sight of pretend-moralists’.⁴⁰ She was, she wrote, thrilled that Jane Fonda had been arrested by US Customs for carrying drugs which turned out to be Codeine given to her by Amiel for a headache. ‘I was filled with a warm glow,’ she wrote. ‘It was my contribution to the war effort.’⁴¹

      Confessions also included a florid description of Amiel’s English roots. After interviewing most of her family during her stay in London in 1971, she described herself as born into a family of British Marxists. The exaggeration justified what she admitted were ‘snide remarks’ about Bernard Buckman. In ungrateful language, she condemned her uncle as an unprincipled, rich hypocrite, living in his big, sunlit Hampstead home where ‘the clichés bounced off the cut crystal’ while indulging in ‘wilful blindness’ about China and the Soviet Union’s repression and bloodshed.⁴² One assertion which hurt the Buckmans was that the family was ‘financed by mainland China’.⁴³ ‘She’s abused our hospitality and twisted the family history,’ Bernard Buckman told his wife Irene. ‘Forgive her,’ urged Irene, uneasy about her niece’s mistreatment by the Amiels. But even Irene was puzzled by Barbara’s inaccurate reconstruction of her background in her attempt to prove her new values. In a book extolling the importance of a journalist’s honesty, complained Irene, Barbara’s inventions were surprising.

      The contrast between Amiel writing her book in Sam Blyth’s unkempt home, even wearing a coat when the electricity was cut off, and her personal credo was notable. ‘I knew what I wanted,’ she wrote about her time in London in 1971. ‘To be dropped at Selfridges’s or Harrods to pick up fresh salmon and search for quails’ eggs,’ besides taking lessons to be a hostess and sharing a masseur with Lady Weidenfeld.⁴⁴ She had become envious of the Canadian jet set’s use of private planes, ‘clubby travellers wafting across borders with sleek impunity’, living ‘our fantasies’. Her reality check was a conviction that those birds of paradise had no ‘durability’ and that few would survive.⁴⁵

      More revealing, considering her future conduct as Lady Black, was her attitude towards materialism. ‘The true spirit of liberalism,’ she wrote, ‘simply judges everyone on his or her own merit … We are all responsible for ourselves. That is not callous. That is liberation.’⁴⁶ Transgressors, she warned, would be punished: ‘Greed can be held in check by ordinary criminal laws.’⁴⁷ Her most pertinent comment, in the light of Conrad Black’s problems twenty-three years later, was her reproach, in Maclean’s, of John Dean, Richard Nixon’s dishonest legal adviser in the White House during the Watergate scandal. Amiel was scathing about Dean’s ‘moral myopia’ as a party to the President’s cover-up. Instead of accepting personal responsibility for his conduct, she wrote, he ‘still clings to the soothing thought that it was all somebody else’s fault’, blaming ‘the environment [for his crimes] rather than a person’s own morality’.⁴⁸

      In January 1981, soon after the book’s publication, Amiel and Blyth visited Mozambique. She wanted to witness the damage wreaked by Western aid on native agriculture while sustaining Marxist regimes. The journey ended in embarrassment. Attempting to enter the country without visas, they were arrested and imprisoned for some days. She would later claim to have eaten her press pass to avoid recognition. ‘That would have been difficult,’ said Peter Newman. ‘It’s plastic.’ Others quipped that the hardest bit to swallow would have been Newman’s signature, or her own. Amiel’s plight, and her melodramatic plea that her life was in danger, provoked anger from the Canadian ambassador, who was irritated by her behaviour, and from rival journalists. But Peter Worthington, the editor of the Toronto Sun, was surprised by the apparent jealousy. ‘She’s sailing through life like the Spanish Armada,’ he said, apparently unaware that the Armada was destroyed by the English navy and a storm. Amiel’s values and humour, he decided, were ideal for his newspaper. On her return she was appointed a columnist on the Sun, and her life became even more hectic.

      Living in squalor with Blyth while renting a comfortable apartment in Forest Hill, she wrote regularly about her abortion, her drugs, her family feuds and her love life. Playing the Jewish card, the impoverished Jew became the aggrieved Jew championing prejudice. Her private life became as varied as her writing. ‘I’ve got this penchant for young men,’ she told a girlfriend. Blyth became just one of several young boyfriends, including twenty-four-year-old journalist Daniel Richler, whom she met during a radio debate. Their affair began soon afterwards. Arguing and laughing in restaurants, Amiel was carefree about her reputation. Just a month after starting the relationship with Richler, there was a silence followed by a sigh during a telephone conversation. ‘This isn’t going anywhere,’ she declared. The relationship was over. Her ‘penchant’ was for other young men, including Eric Margolis, a freelance journalist specialising in the Middle East whom she met at a lunch hosted by one of her many admirers. The host’s misfortune was that Amiel, impressed by Margolis’s charm and expertise about Islam, decided to pursue him. ‘I’m coming over,’ she announced in a telephone call. ‘I’ve got another date,’ replied Margolis. But finally he succumbed, and discovered what he called ‘an Act of God’, Amiel’s breasts. To her irritation, Margolis was too independent, frequently rejecting her suggestions that she visit his flat. ‘Is there someone else there tonight?’ she asked. If Margolis answered ‘Yes,’ she was sufficiently liberal to cope. But if he replied ‘No, I’m working, babe,’ she became incensed, repeatedly calling, seeking to change his mind. ‘You’re like one of the boys,’ laughed Margolis.

      At the age of forty-one, Amiel had reached a crossroads. Fearing loneliness, she was seeking marriage in order to have children and embed her social and professional ambitions. Margolis, she decided, was ideal to give her life that structure. He was intelligent, independent and good fun. Frustratingly, he did not show the obedience she liked in her men, and was patently weary that she always wanted to win her point. Amiel could not resist bickering that he should be rich and famous. A fraught ten-day trip to Hong Kong and China ended with her demand, ‘Marry me!’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’d end up in jail.’ ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Because I’d wring your neck.’ Amiel did not give up her marital ambitions despite an overture from a new admirer. In 1983 Peter Worthington offered her the editorship of the Toronto Sun’s comment section. She would, Worthington believed, succeed as the newspaper’s ambassador for СКАЧАТЬ