Lord Black of Crossharbour plans to hold a farewell party for friends and neighbours at his waterfront mansion in Palm Beach this week before checking into a Florida prison to start his 6 1/2-year sentence for fraud.

The British peer who once controlled the world’s third largest newspaper group, including the Telegraph titles and the Spectator, will become Prisoner No 18330-424 at the Coleman Federal Correctional Institute at 2pm on Monday.

A federal appeals court turned down his last minute appeal to stay free on bail pending his appeal this summer, but offered some hope that he may eventually get two of his four convictions overturned.

Lord Black has spent the time since his conviction swimming and cycling and dining at Palm Beach’s best restaurants while penning a memoir about his legal travails.

His wife, the columnist Barbara Amiel, is also writing a book about the ordeal and has bought a dog to keep her company when her husband goes to jail.

Brian Stewart, a lifelong friend, visited the couple recently and was pleasantly surprised that they were invited out to dinner parties for two of the four nights he was in Palm Beach.

“I went down worried how it might be, but I found him in good spirits,” Mr Stewart, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation journalist, said. “A lot of the time we spent talking politics or joking about old time as if he had not a care in the world.

“He does have this remarkable ability to compartmentalise. We did talk about the possibility of prison. He is definitely ready for it. He think he can handle it. He thinks he has come through a lot of stress and adversity in his life.

“She has bought a dog, which is a big thing in her life. They were both getting on fabulously well. She has probably been prepared for a bad ending longer than he has. She tends to be more pessimistic,” he said.

The Palm Beach Daily News reported in its gossip column that Lady Black had spent $250,000 on the new collection by fashion designer Oscar de la Renta. But Mr Stewart threw cold water on the report, saying shopping was far from her priority at this time.

He said Lady Black plans to remain in the Palm Beach mansion so she can visit her husband about 90 minutes drive away in Coleman FCI.

Lord Black will be strip-searched, fingerprinted and sujected to a DNA test before changing into a prison uniform on Monday. The clothes he wears to prison will be posted back to his wife.

He will share a cubicle in a prison dormitory with another inmate and subsist on a stodgy diet of dishes such as spaghetti and macaroni cheese.

He will have only limited access to e-mail and might find it impossible to write in jail. But Mr Stewart said: “He will certainly be writing in his head.” The historian and biographer of President Roosevelt and Nixon may also turn his attention behind bars to a book on Canada’s Second World War prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King.

A three-man appeals panel yesterday turned down Lord Black’s last-ditch effort to stay out of jail, but cast doubt on two counts involving his alleged failure to provide “honest services” to shareholders.

The appeals court found a “substantial” question about those two counts. But the panel insisted Lord Black go to jail because it found no such doubt about his conviction for obstruction of justice, after he was caught on CCTV moving boxes out of his Toronto office.

“I think the decision does give him hope, if not of a reversal perhaps of a shorter sentence, on the counts that deal with ’honest services’,” said Hugh Totten, a lawyer at Valorem Law Group who has followed the case. “This is really out-of-the-ordinary for an appeals court.”

"It came back to the obstruction charge and the fact that Black was unable to answer the old Groucho Marx question: ’Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?’”

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