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

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СКАЧАТЬ million’ over the years, he did not possess any meaningful sum of money.¹¹ At first he asked his closest friends, including Fred Eaton, ‘Do you want a piece of the action?’ Eaton prevaricated, while others, wary of Black since the Norcen scandal, refused outright. Finally, having sold his other assets, Black scraped together £20 million, helped by his directorship of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

      In his hour of triumph, Black was elated but realistic. He knew his personal handicaps. He was unqualified to combat the British trade unions’ regular blackmail, and his financial experience of small newspapers across North America was inadequate to resolve the Telegraph’s plight. ‘Let Radler sort them out,’ he suggested to Andrew Knight. ‘Out of the question,’ replied Knight. The appearance in Fleet Street for just one hour of the ratty, uncouth hypochondriac, obsessed by fetishes about germs, would raise destructive questions about Black himself. ‘Radler is forbidden to come to London,’ ordered Knight. ‘He’s not the sort of person I’d like to see inside the Telegraph building.’ ‘Yes,’ agreed Black. ‘I don’t think the Telegraph is quite ready for David.’ A few days earlier, Knight had been invited to attend the Hollinger board meeting in Toronto summoned to approve the Telegraph deal. The sight of Radler, Peter White and Monte Black plotting like cronies about ‘a scheme to finesse this’ and ‘get control of that’ had shocked him. ‘They sniggered like bad schoolboys,’ Knight later told David Montagu. The worst, reported Knight, was Monte acting like a buffoon. Before leaving Toronto, Knight heard about the details of the Dominion pensions and Norcen controversy. Black, he realised, would not survive in London without his help.

      Knight agreed to become the Telegraph’s managing director, on condition that he was given the option to buy 5 per cent of the Telegraph’s stock for £1 a share. ‘Outrageous greed,’ snarled Colson. Knight’s request, Black chorused, was a sign of ‘avarice’, and displayed ‘impenetrable arrogance’. In his experience, journalists never had the upper hand. Knight’s insistence was a novelty, but Black reluctantly acknowledged that without Knight the deal would not have occurred, and without Knight he risked losing his £30 million. Wherever he went in Washington and New York, the power-brokers always asked, ‘How’s Andrew?’ Everyone praised Knight, and he realised he was fortunate to have him as an ally. Reluctantly, he succumbed. ‘If you’re Canadian you start with one strike against you,’ he conceded. The price of being a fish in the big pond was to obey. He accepted the contract submitted by Knight, and headed to Palm Beach for Christmas.

      In the sunshine he could reflect that, after seventeen years, he now owned a substantial business. The formula for his partnership with Radler remained their complementary differences. Black liked networking and loathed pernickety chores, while his partner, alias ‘The Refrigerator’ because he was cold and hard, enjoyed sweating the profits by repeatedly probing each newspaper’s finances. Their trusting relationship was cemented by distance: Radler moved to Vancouver, 2,000 miles from Toronto, where he could be with his family, while Black constantly commuted between cities, anticipating the public glory after he took control of the Telegraph. In Florida, mixing with Jayne Wrightsman and the other Palm Beach aristocrats, his fantasies expanded. Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Thomson, the two outstanding Canadian newspaper proprietors, had been treated with deference in Britain. Both had won access to Prime Ministers, and there was every reason, one day, to expect ‘Lord Black’ to follow in their footsteps. Status symbols meant a lot to Black, and although he acknowledged Knight’s warning not to appear as a lusting social mountaineer or a foreign profiteer, he did not intend to emulate Roy Thomson, whose chauffeur would buy a Tube ticket for his employer at Uxbridge station on the Metropolitan Line so he could travel the eight miles to Fleet Street. Black intended to use the Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith which Bud McDougald had appropriated from Massey-Ferguson. Repeating over cocktails in Palm Beach, ‘I’m the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph,’ the image of his destiny unfolded. Not as a mere press baron, but as a world leader – like the power-brokers who featured in countless history books in his library. His youthful fascination for visiting the graves of the famous had not been forgotten. Only the name and the dates were carved on the tombstones of Churchill, de Gaulle, Bismarck and Napoleon. One day, in the long-distant future, his grave might be similarly stark and potent, reflecting his influence on mankind’s fate.

      The formal approval of the Telegraph’s shareholders was due on 20 February 1986. In anticipation, Andrew Knight was executing a revolution. At Knight’s suggestion, Black approved two new editors. Max Hastings for the Daily Telegraph, Black agreed, was a brilliant albeit surprising choice. The military historian, writer and broadcaster was a maverick, but could prove to be inspired. Knight’s selection of Peregrine Worsthorne for the Sunday Telegraph caused Black more concern. Unaware that his life’s ambition to be a newspaper editor was about to be fulfilled, Worsthorne had just lamented in the Spectator, then not owned by the Telegraph group, about the nightmare of a Canadian ruffian and asset stripper buying the Telegraph. Knight overcame Black’s reservations. ‘To my amazement,’ Worsthorne recalled, ‘he offered me the opportunity of my lifetime.’ Others had agreed with Worsthorne that Black’s imminent arrival in London was not a blessing. Charles Moore, the editor of the Spectator, commissioned John Ralston Saul, the noted Canadian writer, to write a piece introducing the Telegraph’s new owner. ‘While Mr Black personally grows ever richer,’ Saul wrote witheringly, ‘some of his companies grow ever poorer.’ To prove his argument, Saul cited how, over the previous five years, Black’s six publicly quoted companies had lost 21 per cent of their value. He observed that by posing as a historian, regurgitating huge amounts from his prolific reading and immersion among the famous at Bilderberg, Black assumed that he possessed unique insight. Black confused, suggested Saul, proximity and scholarship with understanding, and mistook bombastic proclamations for wisdom: ‘The driving force of his personality and his brilliant sense of applied historical perspectives will impress all who meet him. Only with time may they feel that the driving force deforms the perspective so that the masterful conclusions are wrong.’ Considering the fate of Conrad Black’s shareholders, his brother and the Argus widows, Saul concluded: ‘One searches for the spirit of sacrifice in Mr Black’s career and finds self-help.’¹²

      Black was outraged. There was too much truth in Saul’s assessment for comfort. Personal denigration normally provoked an instant writ for defamation, but on this occasion Black was urged by Knight to be cautious. Media owners in Britain did not issue writs, he was told, and if, just days after his coup, his first reaction to criticism was nuclear, people would become suspicious. Accepting the advice, Black confined himself to a letter to the Spectator which, he preened himself, would alert London to his erudition. Saul was accused of being ‘dishonest and malicious’, and possessed of ‘sniggering, puerile, defamatory and cruelly limited talents’. By contrast, in a sanitised version of his own past, Black presented himself as ‘unaware of any minority shareholder discontent’. He continued, ‘I have never had any difficulty with … any regulatory authority.’ No one in London, he assumed, would know about the SEC’s ‘consent’ terms linked to his bid for Hanna, or about the complaints from Argus shareholders. London tasted, for the first time, Black’s ‘truth’.

      Charles Moore did not regard Saul’s analysis as anything more than a provocative and forgettable point of view which entirely failed to prove Black’s dishonesty. Those who did ask Knight about Black’s ‘sketchy reputation in Canada’ were reassured, ‘It’s in the past and isn’t relevant.’ There seemed every reason to accept that endorsement. David Montagu was less sanguine. ‘There are all sort of strains arising,’ he told Black, ‘not least the Spectator article. We must take care. Here’s a list of how to stay clean.’ Radler was to have nothing to do with the Telegraph; Black was to restrict himself to two visits a year to London until he was given the all-clear; and he was to limit himself to 60 per cent ownership of the Telegraph. In return, Montagu had negotiated blue-blooded seal of approval. Cazenove’s, the London establishment’s stockbrokers, would represent the Telegraph, and СКАЧАТЬ