THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY (SPECIAL HISTORY REPEATING EDITION)
The
Romans were a very powerful people. They called themselves
the masters of the world.
It
is true they were very clever. They had taught themselves
how to fight, how to make swords and armour and how to
build fortresses, better than any of the peoples that lived
then. So it happened that the Romans generally won the
victory over all who fought against them.
But
they were a very greedy people and, as soon as they heard
of a new country, they wanted to conquer it and call it
part of the Roman Empire.
—Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, Our
Island Story
Kevin
Michael Grace,
9.00 pm, 26 July 2007►
MARITAL
WOES
Thanks
to Scott Richert for posting my Conrad Black essay on the Chronicles
website. To those who hunger for more
recent work from me, I have good news. Although I never
managed to place anything with the American
Conservative, I did manage to persuade
the mysterious FJ Sarto to publish me on Taki's Top
Drawer, the mighty publication latterly revivified by Taki
Theodoracopulos, my
hero and one of TAC's
founders.
James
Boswell writes in his Life
of Johnson, “A gentleman who had been
very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his
wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over
experience.” I know exactly what he meant.
My
marriage collapsed January 30. It was sudden and complete.
I fought hard to save it and did all the things one
expects of rejected men. I begged, pleaded and cajoled. I
sulked, raged and sought refuge in drink. I became an
object of pity by asking my friends the same question my
partner refused to answer: Why am I the only one trying
to save this relationship?....[More]
Kevin
Michael Grace,
10.45 am, 18 July 2007►
PRESCIENCE
Hubris: Amiel as Antoinette, Black as Richelieu:
If God exists, they will have to answer for many things
From
the June 2004 Chronicles:
The Fall of Lord
Blackadder and Lady Manolo (of Blahnik)
By Kevin Michael Grace
Mark
Steyn once told me a revealing story about Conrad
Black’s "conservative" Canadian
national newspaper, the National
Post. It seems star columnist David
Frum had ventured this evaluation:
"The Post has a problem. It was started to
save Canada, but Canada isn't worth saving." [See here
for an important qualification—Ed.]
Ah, the authentic voice of
the Canadian neoconservative! Or, as English journalist Geoffrey
Wheatcroft would say, the "self-hating
Canadian." (Same thing, actually—but
Mr
Frum objects to this as well. Ed.)
Steyn remains a Canadian citizen but persists in playing
the "one-man
global content provider," even as the strain of his triple loyalties becomes
crippling. Frum, as we know, coined the infamous phrase "axis
of evil" before finally taking
American citizenship. Conrad Black actually renounced his
Canadian citizenship.
And in a patently insulting
manner. "For a wide range of reasons," he
announced in 2001, "citizenship of Canada is not now
for me competitive with that of the United Kingdom and the
European Union." A year earlier, when he shocked
Canada by selling his newspaper semi-monopoly (except for
half the Post, later sold for $1, and a few minor
local papers) to Izzy
Asper, stalwart defender of Black’s
nemesis, prime minister Jean
Chrétien, he explained: "The
reputation of Canada is not particularly great amongst
American investors, and the big presence we had there was
not doing the valuation of our stock any good." So
long, suckers.
As investors would later
discover, however, most damaging to the valuation of Black’s
media company, Hollinger, was Black himself. And his
"wide range of reasons" was rather narrow. Black
was determined to enter Britain’s House of Lords, and to
do so he was required to quit Canada. The vicious
Chrétien had blocked Black’s ennoblement with reference
to a fiendishly obscure Canadian parliamentary
resolution. Chrétien insisted Canadian
citizens could not accept British honours; laughable, but
Tony Blair took fright. Black got his ermine robe in 2001,
but if he had known in 1999 the disasters that would
befall him—disgrace, divestment, threats of bankruptcy
and imprisonment—he might have said, "Thanks, but
no thanks."
He might have. You
see, Conrad Black, like his hero Napoleon, is never happy
(if that is the right word) unless at war on all fronts.
Perhaps this has something to do with being Canadian.
While so many Canadians discard their birthright as easily as a tissue, Black carries his like a cross.
Or perhaps Black’s wrath is
genetic. His father, George Black, a brewery executive,
retired from business (and largely from life) at 48. Soon
after the death of his wife in 1976, after spending the
evening with Conrad, he walked up his circular staircase
and then crashed through the banister to the floor below.
His son rushed him to hospital, but he died the next day.
In 1982, Black told biographer Peter
Newman his father’s last words to him
that night had been: "Life is hell, most people are
bastards, and everything is bullshit." (Black later
denied this account to biographer Richard Siklos, author
of the fine Shades
of Black.)
Conrad Black was always
singular. Born in 1944, he grew up in his own wing of the
later death-haunted Toronto home. He was chauffeured to
school at the elite Upper
Canada College (UCC). An autodidact
obsessed with military history and strategy, he bought his
first stock at eight but was hardly a laissez-faire
capitalist. He recounts in his autobiography,
One
of the few substantive political differences I had had
with my father was over his view that Franklin D Roosevelt
was a socialist, if not a communist. He has always been,
next to Abraham Lincoln, the American leader I most
admired.
Napoleon, FDR and Lincoln:
not the heroes of a conservative, rather the heroes of a
power worshipper. But Black is not a man who has ever had
much use for authority, when not wielded by him. He
compared UCC to a "concentration camp" and was
expelled in 1959 after selling examination papers he and
three others had stolen. According to his autobiography,
he is "neither proud nor ashamed of what
happened." Black first felony was highly profitable
("a margin of 100 per cent, as I had no cost of
sales"); he realized $1,400 (about C$9,500 today).
Black entered poorly regarded
Carleton University in Ottawa, where he remained a
diffident student and enjoyed an old-fashioned, chaste
bachelordom of cards, tobacco and booze. After graduation,
he enrolled in Toronto’s prestigious Osgoode Hall law
school but left after a year.
It was only after Black moved
to Quebec in 1966 that he began to make something of
himself. Black was that rarest of Anglo-Canadians, a
Francophile. Black learned French (something few Anglos
did or do), took a law degree at Laval in Quebec City and
a MA in history from McGill in Montreal and began his
laudatory biography
of Maurice
Duplessis, published in 1977. Duplessis,
premier of Quebec from 1936 to 1939 and from 1944 until
his death in 1959, was fiercely Catholic, conservative and
nationalist. His Quebec was hated by Pierre Trudeau and
swept away by the Quiet
Revolution.
It was in Quebec that Black
got into journalism and met his lifelong partners: David
Radler and Peter
White. Radler became Black’s chief
operating officer and hatchet man; White has been a prime
mover in Conservative politics for decades and was prime
minister Brian Mulroney’s principal secretary.
They began buying small
Quebec (and later British Columbian) newspapers. Radler
"phased-out" employees by the cartload and made
the papers profitable. Black handled the editorial side
and developed his prose style—orotund, sesquipedalian,
bombastic—the worst of Winston Churchill and William
Buckley.
In the 1970s, Conrad Black
(with the initial help of his brother Monte) became Canada’s
most controversial businessman. He established the modus
operandi that has served him well: holding companies
controlling holding companies controlling holding
companies, almost into infinity. It would take stupendous
essay or a stupendous flow chart to establish what Black
owns and whereby he owns it.
Black sweet-talked his way
into control of Argus Corp and stripped its assets. He
abandoned manufacturer Massey-Ferguson and sold Dominion
Stores, after management had removed $62 million from its
union pension fund (reduced to $30 million after court
action) and after Black had accused the supermarket chain’s
employees of being thieves. He admitted it was
"sad" so many employees had lost their jobs but
added, "It’s sometimes difficult for me to work
myself into an absolute lachrymose fit about a work force
that steals on that scale."
An attempt to sweet-talk his
way into control of Hanna Mining of Cleveland turned sour.
Hanna filed a fraud and racketeering suit against Black,
and he narrowly avoided being charged in 1982 with
misrepresentation by the Securities and Exchange
Commission. Black ultimately settled with Hanna and signed
an SEC consent decree.
The Ontario Securities
Commission recommended Black be charged, but he was not.
Black was now established as Canada’s unacceptable face
of capitalism: if not a crook, then certainly sailing
dangerously close to the wind. Black did not see it that
way. He execrated his opponents as conspirators or
"socialists" determined to hobble the
successful.
After buying out his brother
Monte, Black turned his attention overseas. By 1985, the
venerable Telegraph newspapers were moribund,
despite being the best-selling British quality newspapers.
Union insubordination was killing them, and the Berry
family, which controlled them, needed new investment
desperately. Black stepped in with £10 million. But dear
old Lord
Hartwell, chief of the Berry clan, had
misapprehended the seriousness of the crisis. He was
forced again to turn to Black, who offered another £20
million—in exchange for 50.1% of the company. Hartwell
surrendered. One month later, Rupert Murdoch crushed the
unions at Wapping.
Black was now the owner of a gold mine, bought for a mere
£30 million. The Telegraphs are now valued at
£700 million.
Conrad Black was now one of
the most powerful men in Britain and determined to
exercise his influence, not merely on his adopted country,
but on the entire "Anglosphere."
A Hollinger advisory board was established. Among those
who accepted $25,000 annually to attend one-day gabfests
were Margaret Thatcher, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Henry
Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard
Perle, George Will and William Buckley.
Telegraph
profits were used to buy the Chicago Sun-Times, the
Jerusalem Post, the London Spectator
and Australia’s Fairfax
newspapers. Fairfax was sold after Black alleged in his
autobiography that prime minister Paul
Keating had attempted to suborn him,
precipitating a national scandal and a parliamentary
investigation.
By 1995, only Gannett and
Rupert Murdoch bested Black in worldwide circulation. But
Black had not forgotten Canada. He bought the Southam
chain in 1996, which, added to the purchase of nearly
every other significant independent paper in English
Canada, made him truly Canada’s newspaper lord. Liberal
and liberal, Southam exemplified everything Black hated
about Canada. Canadian journalists had always been wary of
Black, due mainly to his
habit of suing them. Now they were
terrified.
(Full disclosure: I have had
no dealings of any kind with Conrad Black, although David
Radler once took a malign interest in me. I was promised—by
its editor—the position of deputy editor of the National
Post’s business section, but the
man who blackballed me was neither Conrad
Black nor David Radler.)
To his credit, Black greatly
improved his Canadian newspapers, and the Post did
valuable work exposing Chretien’s
many scandals. To Black’s discredit, he
imposed on them a new orthodoxy as oppressive as the old
had been. The old Southam was old liberal: anti-patriotic,
globalist and reflexively anti-business, anti-Israel and
anti-American. The new Southam was new liberal:
anti-patriotic, globalist and reflexively pro-business,
pro-Israel and pro-American. Under Black, the Post
was obsessed with Israel; reading it, one could not escape
the feeling that Canada had somehow acquired an 11th
province in the Middle East. (This became even worse under
Izzy Asper.) Black’s Post was infatuated with
celebrity and sexual deviance and dismissive of culture.
Black refused, pointedly, to fight the suppression of
press freedom in Canada and suffered two of his papers to
grovel before human rights commissions. A far cry from the
Telegraph.
But it is also to Black’s
credit he did not wreck the Telegraph, although it
became duller and ever more neoconservative (as did the Spectator)
and headed downmarket relentlessly after a cover-price war
with Murdoch’s Times. In England, at least, Black
was something of a model proprietor, refusing to fire AN
Wilson or Taki
even after ugly
public quarrels over Israel, preferring
instead to inveigh against them and his myriad other
enemies in the pages of his publications.
Black inherited many enemies
with his second marriage. His first wife, Shirley, was an
already married company secretary when Black impregnated
her. (She later changed her name to Joanna, after faux sophisticate
Black rejected Catherine as "too common.")
Black converted to
Catholicism in 1986. According to Richard Siklos, he
described
the occasion...to author Ron Graham. It took place in
[Archbishop of Toronto] Cardinal
Carter's private chapel. Apparently Black
told the Cardinal he was ready to join, and Carter said he
would be welcome....
A
debate ensued over The Truth. Eventually, an agreement was
struck. "Then Emmett called for champagne, to
celebrate," Black recalled. "So I didn't exactly
go to them on my knees."
Indeed. In 2000, during a
strike at the Black-owned Calgary Herald, Black
excoriated strike supporter Bishop
Fred Henry as a "jumped-up little
twerp" and a "prime candidate for an
exorcism." Ironically, perhaps, Henry is the only
Canadian bishop faithful enough to the Magisterium to have
threatened a pro-abortion Catholic politician (Joe
Clark) with sanctions.
Shirley/Joanna divorced Black
and married a defrocked priest. Conrad wed the
thrice-divorced Jewish atheist Barbara
Amiel at the Chelsea Registry Office in
1992. Yet Black is consistently described as Canada’s
leading Catholic layman. British born, childless (Black
has three) and four years older than her husband, the
pneumatic Amiel is a once-talented journalist who edited
the Toronto Sun, a fiercely anti-Trudeau tabloid,
in the 1980s. She was also, reputedly, the model for the
villainess in Margaret Atwood’s The
Robber Bride. When Black met her, she
wrote a column for the Times, since translated to
the Telegraph, where it remains. [Long gone now.
Ed.]
Black was dubbed Blackadder
(after the Rowan Atkinson character) by the Canadian
scandal sheet Frank. Amiel has proved to be his
Lady Macbeth. Or, more to the point, his Lady Manolo (of Blahnik).
An Observer profile commented,
"To understand Barbara, you must first understand
that she has been very keen to be very rich for a very
long time." Amiel herself told Vogue, "I
have an extravagance that knows no bounds" and posed
for pictures that proved it.
Under Amiel’s tutelage, the
bumptious Black became a social lion and then a life peer.
But questions began to be asked (particularly by
institutional investors Tweedy
Browne): who was paying for the private
jets, the maintenance of the mansions in Toronto, Palm
Beach and London, the apartment in New York and the tab at
Le Cirque 2000, the $8 million for FDR’s papers for Black’s
door-stopping biography? Why were the Telegraphs
forced to shed staff and resources even as they continued
to turn a handsome profit?
As late as 2003, Black fired
back in characteristic fashion; Tweedy Browne were
"corporate governance terrorists." Black,
champion of Napoleon, now appealed to the ancien regime:
"I'm not prepared to re-enact the French
Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of
nobility." In November, Lord Black’s Bastille was
stormed. The Hollinger
board announced it had discovered $32
million in secret and unauthorized payments, $7 million
each to Black and Radler, which they agreed to pay back.
(Black reneged.) Black, Radler and their minions were
fired, and Black’s assets were put up for sale.
Lawsuits against Black, for
$200 million (and counting—and
counting. Ed.), were filed. His
fortune, whatever it was, is beyond his grasp. Black had
seemingly forgotten, or more likely arrogantly ignored,
that Hollinger was a public company of which he was a
minority shareholder. When he and Radler sold properties
such as Southam, they demanded millions in personal
"non-compete" payments, even though they were in
no condition to compete. They did so even when they sold
properties to themselves. It is impossible to regard these
payments as anything other than kickbacks (in the first
instance) and outright theft (in the second).
In January, Black attempted
to escape from his Elba. He sold the controlling stake in
Hollinger to the Barclay
brothers, owners of Edinburgh’s Scotsman
newspapers. He met his Waterloo, however, the next month
when a Delaware judge quashed the sale and called
him a liar.
No one is terrified of Conrad
Black anymore. He and Lady Black are laughing stocks, in
Canada, America and Britain—although Taki still has kind
words for them. Oh, and remember that SEC consent decree?
As Black filed a false report to the SEC regarding his
illicit compensation, he now is at risk of criminal
charges. Rumour has it he will flee to Canada, which, for
all its sins, has an agreeably lax securities regime. For
such a self-hating Canadian, this would surely be worse
than St Helena.
Kevin
Michael Grace,
10.25 am, 17 July 2007►
THOUGHT
FOR THE DAY
Vendor:
Hey buddy. You forgot your change.
Joe Moore: [Takes the change] Makes
the world go round.
Bobby Blane: What's that?
Joe Moore: Gold.
Bobby Blane: Some people say love.
Joe Moore: Well, they're right, too. It is love. Love of
gold.
—David Mamet, Heist
Kevin
Michael Grace,
8.50 am, 17 July 2007►
