CONRAD AND LADY BLACK Dancing on the Edge by Tom Bower Harper Press £20 pp436
What a wonderfully gripping and hilarious book this is. Books about appalling people are almost always terrifically good fun and you would have to go a long way to find a pair more gloriously appalling than Lord and (particularly, Tom Bower emphasises) Lady Black. If the author is correct, they exist in a world that is way, way beyond the reach of satire; impossibly greedy, ruthless, vulgar, self-righteous, pretentious and — quite often, it would appear — fairly stupid. If, like me, you are enchanted by schadenfreude, there is a good belly laugh to be had on pretty much every page. And, oh, especially about her.
A year or two back, Boris Johnson asked me to write a piece about Conrad Black for The Spectator — a magazine that Boris then edited and of which Black was the proprietor. I felt a little lost, to tell you the truth. Black seemed to be in a spot of bother, somehow, with the regulatory authorities over some of his business dealings. I didn’t understand quite what it was he was supposed to have done, so I asked Boris for an explanation.
“Um, well, Rod, think of it a bit like this,” he said. “Imagine your wife had bought a chocolate cake for the children and put it in the fridge for safekeeping. And then, ah, in the middle of the night you crept downstairs and ate a little bit of it. That’s, um, sort of what Conrad’s done.”
I’m not sure Bower would entirely concur with that analysis of events; nor indeed the prosecuting authorities in Chicago where Conrad faces charges that could land him in jail for the rest of his life; still, though, Black continues to bluster, continues — as Bower puts it — to use his verbal dexterity to obscure the facts.
Bower’s latest exposure of awful people is, like all his previous work, meticulously researched and written in clear and uncluttered prose devoid of hyperbole. But then, who needs hyperbole when you have the Blacks to contend with? We are introduced to Conrad as a rather insulated and well-off daddy’s boy, eternally “cosseted . . . by cooks, butlers, nannies, chauffeurs” and the like. A boy, though, in whom the spirit of capitalism burnt through at an early age: at school, he stole examination papers and flogged them to his student colleagues, charging the largest fees for those who were the most stupid and thus needed his help most. The strategies he employed in his early business career in Canada set the blueprint for all that followed; the unconditional and untrammelled pursuit of maximum profit for himself, effected through relentless and ruthless asset-stripping and a complete absence of regard for anybody else, be they employees, shareholders, partners — whoever. “Commerce is not the welfare system,” Black once remarked, mordantly. And with this in mind we can understand how he could then dock a female journalist employee three days’ pay for taking time off to bury her husband. “Arrogant” and “obnoxious” are two of the kinder descriptions of Black from people who worked with him, or for him, in those early years.
His career, though, flourished and with it an apparent sense of both inviolability and irreducible self- righteousness; after all, he was doing the right thing, wasn’t he? These were the Thatcher-Reagan years, and trousering vast sums of money by breaking up, running down or flogging off companies was not merely acceptable, but desirable. And then there was his (inevitable, it seems to Bower) mating with Amiel, who, we are reminded on almost every other page, wished to be taken for an intellectual but nonetheless insisted upon “pressing her breasts into the face” of any solvent man who approached her. Unrestrainedly ambitious, haughty, cruel, prone to spiteful screaming fits at her servants and possessed of the conviction that the (deserving) rich (ie her and Conrad) were perpetually persecuted by those envious of their wealth, Amiel is fingered by Bower as the motor that drove Black to greater and greater depths of greed and apparent chicanery. It is, indeed, difficult to imagine a woman more self-opinionated and snobbish than Lady Black, and one of Conrad’s gross deceptions, for which sadly he will not be arraigned in Chicago, is that this woman was indeed taken for an intellectual by people — newspaper editors and the like — who should have known much better, by dint of her new husband’s immense wealth and patronage and her own supposed good looks and infinite self-confidence. And so, readers of The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator (and, even, for a time, The Sunday Times) were forced to endure her lumpen, interminable, right-wing perorations about Israel and the unfair persecution of the rich; prose copy devoid of anything in the way of genuine insight and utterly, utterly lacking wit or humour. As Bower puts it, she was an “anti-journalist”.
And then the downfall. Black is alleged to have siphoned off cash from Hollinger to sustain a ludicrously pretentious, cartoon lifestyle; some $61m for two private planes (“but you see one always finds oneself on the wrong continent,” Amiel is supposed to have said), the vast houses, her astonishing wardrobe of clothes and shoes, bringing to mind a less contrite version of Imelda Marcos. And the parties they gave (always “A-list” parties) consisting almost entirely of people you would pay good money to avoid. Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, Peter Mandelson, Imran Khan, Elton John and so on, ad nauseum. Wouldn’t you just know that Mandelson would be in there, somewhere?
Eventually, the shareholders started screaming. But I am still not sure what the difference is between the things that Black did that were merely ethically and morally wrong and the stuff he did that somehow transgressed the law and thus brought down the whole caboodle, between the apparently legal asset-stripping and ruthless share dealing, the complete disregard for humanity, and the things that eventually got the goat of his shareholders. So, he allegedly used something called “ non-compete payments” as a means of feathering his own nest? And yet tax-free non-compete payments themselves seem a gigantic swindle. And Black never made any pretence about his motives, after all; he did not wish to build up businesses and create a valuable, lasting legacy of industry; he wanted to make lots of money, is all, and woe betide those who got in his way.
Eventually, I wrote that article about Black for The Spectator and in a rather backhanded way complimented him for being an easy newspaper proprietor to work for; he never interfered, so far as I was aware; certainly I’ve never spoken to him, or his wife. A little later, when the charges against Black were laid bare, Boris cornered me. “Um, you know that stuff I said about Conrad and the chocolate cake, Rod? Well, he may have taken more than just a little slice . . .”
Sure, it seems he may even have eaten the cake and then swallowed the entire fridge. But then he never pretended he wouldn’t. Bower’s hugely entertaining and revelatory book indicts the system, as much as the man. And the demarcation between what he did that was allegedly against the law and what he did that was perfectly legal may well confuse those for whom the pursuit of money is not the sole, defining purpose of life.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £18 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
