Читать книгу Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge - Tom Bower - Страница 10

CONRAD BLACK DROVE AWAY from Barbara Amiel’s wedding party in a bad mood. Having agreed to give Allan Fotheringham a lift in his limousine, he discovered that his companion was drunk. He didn’t like Fotheringham. The journalist had a habit of telling the truth about the aspiring press tycoon, and one truth was that Black’s finances were not in good shape. He was determined that in the future he would have his revenge. ‘As [Fotheringham] stepped out of the car,’ Black would write years later, ‘he fell flat in front of the doorman.’ Although the story was denied by Fotheringham, Black ordered his editor to run it anyway: ‘Let him sue.’¹

Black disliked most journalists. Their ‘sanctimonious and tendentious’ assertion of independence while greedily grabbing his dollars was as irksome as their refusal to accept his own judgement of himself. In public testimony he had once damned journalists as ‘a very degenerate group. There is a terrible incidence of alcoholism and drug abuse.’ Since then, his contempt had increased as he and David Radler struggled to build a newspaper business.

The original $500 investment in the Knowlton Advertiser in 1966 had grown into the American Publishing Company. The slender profits depended upon Radler’s constant criss-crossing of the country searching for savings and imposing cuts, and monitoring the financial results on a primitive central computer. Radler’s gospel never changed: ‘Count the chairs,’ he habitually ordered. Halving the number of employees was his familiar recipe, regardless of the consequences for the newspaper’s quality. Having exhausted the search in Canada, the two men began scouring America for small community newspapers with circulations as low as 5,000. In particular they wanted free shopping publications, weekly and community newspapers enjoying monopolies and a lot of advertising. By 1986 they owned eighty daily newspapers in thirty states, and fantasised about creating an empire to rival the two Goliaths, the Washington Post and the New York Times. In the meantime Black would have been satisfied with Toronto’s Globe and Mail, but he had recently been outbid by Ken Thomson, not least because under Black’s control the newspaper would have been made to reflect his conservative opinions. ‘I hate its leftish, pompous tenor and the editor’s smarmy pretensions,’ he had said. Ever since, the Globe’s journalists, he believed, had been unfairly scrutinising his business. He heard that the newspaper’s editors were planning an article describing ‘a rapacious, right-wing Bay Street baron’ who ‘milked’ his businesses, ‘destroyed public companies’ and oppressed minority shareholders ‘in a series of complex corporate shuffles designed primarily to fill his own coffers’.

Throughout his life, Black had cared little for the working classes. Politicians, he believed, should encourage and protect the rich rather than mollycoddle the poor. His true colours had been shown at Massey-Ferguson, and in 1985 he expressed similar ire against the employees of Dominion Stores. Radler’s attempt to revive the supermarket chain had failed. Selling the whole company to one buyer had proved impossible. The shabby supermarkets, Black knew, could only be sold piecemeal and the workers given compensation for losing their jobs. He blamed the staff for his predicament. Accusing them of gross larceny, he sniped in public, ‘Lobsters are walking out of my stores.’ The suggestion of theft was akin to throwing fuel on the fire, but Black enjoyed watching the effect of his provocation. ‘I’ll win,’ he told a friend, ‘because I say these things in such an erudite way.’ His verbal assault disguised the true reasons for the sale. Ravelston’s debts had risen to C$150 million, and the banks were pressing for repayment of loans worth C$40 million advanced to Dominion. Some whispered that Black was on the verge of bankruptcy.² His salvation, he decided, was the Dominion Stores pension fund. To profit from the company’s sale, he anticipated using much of the fund’s C$62 million surplus for redundancy payments and to repay the company’s loans, a potentially permissible if controversial move. With skilful negotiation, he persuaded the Pensions Commission of Ontario to authorise his appropriation of those funds.³ The commission’s approval provoked outrage among trade unions. ‘He’s the representative of bloated capitalism at its worst,’ complained one prominent politician. Thrilled to engage in verbal combat, Black accused his critics of being ‘a symbol of swinish, socialist demagoguery’. The trade unions sued the Pensions Commission, claiming that legal requirements were unfulfilled. At the Globe and Mail journalists began investigating Black’s handling of his employees’ pension fund. The article would conclude, ‘He has been wrong when found with his hand near the cookie jar.’⁴

Black was once again a hate figure, and the banks were alarmed. Under pressure to sell his assets, including his private plane, he became ill, damaging his relations with his brother Monte, who was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. Unexpectedly, Monte agreed to sell his equal interest in the business for $22.4 million, some suspected because he had proven to be unhelpful to his brother’s schemes. Conrad later justified the transfer as a scheme to help Monte avoid a more expensive divorce settlement. Black raised the purchase money by mortgaging his homes in Palm Beach and Toronto. The comparatively small amount exposed the limited value of the Blacks’ business. Their inheritance and the opportunities after the Argus coup had been squandered. Instead of glorying in his status as a global billionaire, Black was slithering along Bay Street sucking a lifeline.

Monte’s replacement as finance director was John ‘Jack’ Boultbee, an aggressive tax planner.⁵ ‘Jack will bring some imagination to our accounts,’ Black told a friend. Physically, Boultbee was hardly attractive. His hair was dyed black, his suits fitted badly over a paunch, and there were ugly gaps between his teeth. For professional rather than aesthetic reasons, he remained hidden from public view, known as ‘the man behind the curtain’. After his appointment, Black and Radler made no decisions without Boultbee’s scrutiny and approval. He became the brains behind all their schemes, and expected to be rewarded accordingly.

Jack Boultbee had little time to settle into his new position. A Canadian court overruled the Pensions Commission and ordered Black to return C$37.9 million to Dominion’s pension funds. Simultaneously, Don Fullerton, the head of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, told Black, his friend and a fellow director, to repay a C$40 million loan. After selling his 41 per cent stake in Norcen for C$300 million to repay his debts, Black once again reassessed his business. Eight years after the Argus grab, everything had been sold except the collection of small newspapers. Some of Argus’s shareholders complained about the fate of the company’s assets, although Black denied any wrongdoing. Posing as the great capitalist entrepreneur, he had accomplished a vanishing trick, and everyone appeared to have lost money.

During 1985, with Radler and Boultbee’s help, Black again restructured his business. In discussions between them, Boultbee offered ‘scenarios’ to produce profits and avoid taxes. Each one was offered to lawyers and accountants with a request: ‘Will it play?’ If approved, there was a professional’s letter – a ‘good housekeeping certificate’ – giving the trio approval to proceed to the edge of legality. In the succession of complicated transactions, Black once again appeared to his critics to have legitimately profited from asset stripping and insider dealing.⁶ Sterling, the company controlling his newspapers in Canada, was sold to Hollinger, also owned by Black, for $37 million, which he took in Hollinger shares. Most of the cash ended up as management fees in Ravelston, his private company.

Those events had spurred the Globe and Mail to finally publish their investigation, under the headline ‘Citizen Black: Can a Right-Wing Tycoon Buy his Way into the Press?’. Black did not appreciate the criticism. He blamed the ‘Canadian spirit of envy’ for failing to glorify tycoons like himself. With delight, he announced that he would sue the Globe to ‘painfully punish’ his critics by forcing them to prove that his dealings were dishonest. That hurdle, as the newspaper’s lawyers soon discovered, would be more than difficult to surmount.

Black drew strength for his battle from the like-minded supporters of raw capitalism gathering in May 1985 for the Bilderberg Conference at Arrowhead, near New York. He regarded his fellow guests as close friends, akin to his family. Among them was Andrew Knight, the editor of the Economist. Knight was more than an intelligent, genial, successful editor. As a global networker, he was entrusted with indiscretions and secrets. ‘Let’s have another fiery Armagnac,’ Black suggested. Over several drinks after midnight, Black confided his frustration at having failed to buy a major Canadian newspaper. Naturally, he omitted mentioning the distrust of himself in his own country. ‘Canada’s a backwater,’ he complained. ‘I sometimes wish I was an American and could own the Washington Post.’ ‘If you’re looking for a big newspaper, Conrad,’ replied Knight, in what would undoubtedly be the most decisive sentence ever uttered in Black’s career, ‘the Daily Telegraph might be a possible target.’ Too much Armagnac had flowed for Knight to notice Black’s reaction.

The Telegraph was among the world’s most successful broadsheets, selling 1.2 million copies daily, 750,000 more than the London Times and 300,000 less than the New York Times. But the headline success disguised dire problems. The Telegraph’s sales were 300,000 lower than five years earlier, and the company was losing about £1 million a month. The reasons were painful. Compared to its rivals, the Telegraph’s advertising revenues had fallen steeply, and the trade unions were effectively blackmailing the company. Every year the employees hired to compose, print and distribute the newspaper were illicitly pocketing millions of pounds, either by threatening to strike just before the paper was due to be printed, or by signing on under names like ‘Mickey Mouse’ and disappearing to work in another newspaper or as taxi drivers. Within its decrepit headquarters in Fleet Street, the Telegraph’s ageing executives appeared helpless, and refused to recruit younger experts to stem the haemorrhage of money.

Isolating himself in a sanctum on the top floor of the Telegraph’s building was Lord Hartwell, formerly Michael Berry, the newspaper’s seventy-five-year-old chairman and editor-in-chief. Abstemious and shy, Hartwell cared passionately about journalism, reading every word he published. His solution to the trade unions’ theft was radical. Two modern printing plants were under construction in London’s Docklands area and in Manchester. By using computers rather than traditional printing craftsmen, he could expel his dishonest employees from the industry forever. Hartwell’s experts had estimated the modernisation would cost £130 million.

One aspect of the Telegraph’s poor management was the inaccurate accounts prepared by Coopers Lybrand, the auditors. Consistently, the company’s costs were underestimated. The Telegraph’s drift towards insolvency had remained unnoticed until, halfway into the Docklands plant’s construction, Hartwell was told that the building costs had increased by £89 million. Unperturbed, he asked his old friend Evelyn de Rothschild, the chairman of the merchant bank N.M. Rothschild, to find lenders on the market. Trusting the famous bankers to care for his interests, Hartwell approved Rothschild’s prospectus to raise the money. The result was disappointing. A group of banks agreed to lend £50 million only if Hartwell provided a further £30 million. To Hartwell’s surprise, by May 1985 he had found only £20 million. A further £10 million was needed before the loan could be secured. Sketchy rumours about Hartwell’s plight had reached Andrew Knight before he flew to America for the Bilderberg Conference. He returned to London with the news of Black’s enthusiastic interest.

Travelling on the Tube from Heathrow airport to London, Knight was surprised to read a Times report of the Telegraph’s failure to find sufficient money. He immediately telephoned Evelyn de Rothschild. ‘I think Michael Richardson must have leaked it,’ said Rothschild. Richardson was the bank’s director responsible for raising the loan. Greedy and sly, Richardson would in later years find it difficult to prove his integrity, but in 1985 he was still trusted. ‘We need another £10 million,’ continued Rothschild, ‘and can’t find anyone.’ ‘Would any money be welcome?’ asked Knight. ‘Even from a North American?’ ‘I would see no problem,’ replied Rothschild. By the next day, Knight had received the prospectus and other reports. ‘Horrendous,’ he muttered. At the outset, Richardson had failed to warn Hartwell that £130 million would be insufficient to build the new printing plants, and had subsequently refused to seek out other reputable investors.

Excited by the news, Knight telephoned Black. The time in Toronto was 8 a.m. on Monday, 20 May, and it was Victoria Day, a public holiday. Black was asleep, and to Knight’s surprise refused to take the call until lunchtime. Knight interpreted that rebuff as an amusing idiosyncrasy rather than the lazy arrogance he would later perceive. For a fleeting moment he considered telephoning Katharine Graham, the impeccable owner of the Washington Post who would make an ideal proprietor of the Telegraph. The thought soon evaporated.

Once awake, Black rapidly understood his latest chance of taking advantage of another’s distress. ‘I’ll fax you Rothschild’s papers,’ said Knight. ‘I don’t have a fax machine here,’ replied Black. Noting his casualness, Knight sped to meet Lord Hartwell. ‘Would you be prepared to accept a Canadian investor?’ asked Knight. Trusting the emissary, Hartwell agreed to meet Black in New York. Knight was doubly delighted: first by Hartwell’s eagerness, and second by Rothschild’s failure to undertake any enquiries about Conrad Black’s reputation and probity. Unbriefed, Hartwell flew by Concorde to New York on 28 May, under the mistaken assumption that the money was being offered by Conrad Ritblat, a London property developer. Behind him in the aircraft sat his directors and Michael Richardson, uncertain of his loyalties.

Conrad Black had not yet arrived when the group entered a scruffy suite in the Hilton Hotel at Kennedy airport. Twenty minutes later, he appeared. He was struck by the Dickensian eccentricity of Hartwell and his entourage, seemingly carrying the dust and smells of olde London from which they had reluctantly taken a day’s leave. Hartwell resembled the battered Ford Cortina car in which he daily drove himself to Fleet Street. The others looked like characters from The Pickwick Papers. Sitting next to Hartwell was Black’s old friend Rupert Hambro, who had been in the plane from London. Frustratingly, Hartwell had spent the entire flight scrutinising every word of that day’s Telegraph, which prevented the banker from initiating a probing conversation. His misfortune was rectified by Richardson’s opening remarks: ‘Lord Hartwell needs an investor offering £10 million,’ said the banker, confirming the Telegraph’s plight.

Black required no advice about his tactics. His cultivated performance, concealing a burning ambition to become a media tycoon, suggested a gentle knight coming to the rescue. ‘All I have to worry about is which pocket the money’s coming from,’ he told Hartwell as he described his achievements and his limitless cash flow.⁷ There was no hint that his bankers in Toronto were demanding the repayment of loans, or that he was being publicly described in some quarters as dishonest. Nor did he reveal that he would need to borrow the £10 million he was offering Hartwell. Before committing himself, however, he wanted to tilt the odds in his favour. He and Hambro excused themselves and went for a walk, despite the heat and humidity, in the hotel garden. Hartwell, they agreed, was clearly on his last legs. The question was how to use the loan to capture ownership of the Telegraph. Knight had suggested that Black should only agree to invest £10 million in exchange for one strict condition: if Hartwell needed more money, he would be contractually bound to first ask Black, who would then become the Telegraph’s majority shareholder. ‘It could take five years before he needs the money and you get the newspaper,’ Hambro cautioned. There was, he explained, uncertainty about Britain’s newspaper industry. Eddie Shah, a printer, had provoked a bitter battle outside his premises at Warrington in Lancashire by using non-union labour. If Shah won, the trade unions’ grip over the Telegraph might be weakened, but nothing more. Neither Hambro nor Black knew that Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Times and the Sun, was building a new printing plant in Wapping, near Tower Bridge, and was secretly planning to destroy the print unions by printing all his newspapers with non-union labour. Better-informed than Hambro, Knight had estimated Hartwell’s eventual downfall within two years. Either way, the two men agreed as they returned to the suite, the opportunity was astonishing. ‘It’s a wonderful entrée,’ concluded Hambro. Black nodded. He scented blood.

Hiding his excitement in a performance that would have been worthy of an Oscar, Black formally made his offer of £10 million for 14 per cent of the Telegraph’s shares, on condition that if Hartwell needed to raise more money, Black should have the right of first refusal, and that any investment would give Black a majority shareholding in the company. At that moment Michael Richardson ought to have intervened to warn his client about the possible consequences. Instead, he remained silent. Hartwell, he had decided, was beyond saving. ‘My role,’ he would later say, ‘was to ensure the successful placement of the loan, not to care for the Berry family’s interests.’ Unprotected by Rothschild’s, Hartwell replied without fully understanding the implications of Black’s condition, ‘I don’t think, Mr Black, we can resist that.’ Convinced that he would not need more money, Hartwell agreed to gamble his empire for just £10 million.

As Black watched Concorde take off for London carrying Hartwell and his entourage, he understood the astonishing opportunity organised by Andrew Knight. He had cast the bait, the reel was running, and once the pressure slackened he would jerk the rod and wind in the line. There was a risk, but it was limited. As he returned to his plane he could reflect that only six years after the turmoil and aggression following Bud McDougald’s death, he might be about to become a legitimate media tycoon in London. The outstanding hurdle was whether Hartwell would honour his verbal agreement within a formal contract. Black entrusted the final negotiations and drafting to Dan Colson, a friend from McGill University who was now working as a lawyer in London. Colson was to ensure that the pre-emption clauses giving Black an irrefutable right to the company were watertight.

If anyone in the City or the British establishment had wanted to protect the Telegraph from a foreign predator, there was still time to do so. Black was not entirely unknown in London. In the early 1980s he had appeared at a dinner held by Charles Price III, the American ambassador, and was introduced to Tim Bell, the famous publicist who had been at the heart of organising Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory. Bell, well connected and liked, was among those needed by Black if he was to persuade the establishment in London of his wealth and honesty. Gratifyingly for Black, that was unnecessary in 1985. Although Knight was aware of Black’s reputation, he remained silent, while others did not bother to attempt to discover the truth from contacts in Canada. Unlike the protests that had greeted Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of The Times in 1981, no one in London understood or even cared about Hartwell’s fate, least of all his financial advisers. ‘Rothschild’s,’ the banker David Montagu would say, ‘handed the Berry family’s balls to Black on a silver platter.’

Hartwell’s fate was inescapably sealed on 13 June 1985. After the agreement was signed, Black’s behaviour was orchestrated by Knight. ‘Don’t say a word when the announcement is made,’ he ordered, ‘and stay in Toronto, out of sight.’ Without protest, Black obeyed. If his reputation was discussed in London, he knew, there could still be problems once Hartwell’s plight became terminal.

In anticipation of the crisis, Andrew Knight organised a group of advisers to represent Black on the Telegraph’s board. Besides Rupert Hambro and David Montagu, employed by Jacob Rothschild’s small merchant bank after his family bank had been sold to Merrill Lynch, Knight selected Frank Rogers, an experienced newspaper executive, and Lord Rawlinson, a former Conservative MP and law officer. If anyone in London could have understood Black’s pedigree it was Jacob Rothschild. Renowned for combining his serious patronage of the arts with partnerships alongside buccaneers like James Goldsmith and Lord Hanson, Rothschild had in 1969 advised Saul Steinberg, a rising New York tycoon, during the takeover of the Labour MP Robert Maxwell’s publishing business. In the course of the negotiations Rothschild had publicly exposed Maxwell as a crook, causing his downfall and disgrace. Yet in 1985 neither Rothschild nor David Montagu appears to have considered asking about Black’s reputation in Canada, or to have looked at old newspaper cuttings. Even among the City’s most honest scions there was a laissez-faire response to the foreign incomers passing through the capital, even to someone who had landed a remarkable deal at the Telegraph.

At Knight’s suggestion, David Montagu was appointed chairman of the Telegraph’s audit committee. Within weeks he unearthed Coopers Lybrand’s negligence. The prospectus issued by Evelyn de Rothschild’s bank to raise the original £80 million had stated that during the following six months the Telegraph would earn £5.5 million. Instead, it had lost £14.4 million. ‘An unutterable shambles,’ Montagu told Black, confirming that the Telegraph’s financial problems were worse than anyone imagined.

Black arrived quietly in London in early September 1985. Over the following days, with Knight as his guide, he was introduced to his new team. In an interlude, he telephoned the Telegraph’s classified sales department from his hotel room. ‘I want to place an advertisement,’ he told the saleswoman. Her reply was staggering. The newspaper, she announced, was full for several weeks. She advised him to try the Guardian or The Times. This was better than Black had imagined. On 24 September Black set out for dinner at Lord Hartwell’s house in Westminster, where at Richardson’s suggestion Hartwell was hosting a celebration to mark the completion of the financing arrangements. ‘There’s a need to tiptoe,’ Knight warned Black, ‘so the deal doesn’t get busted.’ Black was seated next to Nicholas Berry, Hartwell’s forty-three-year-old younger son. He intended to present himself as a family man offering help to another family in unfortunate distress.

The dinner was Nicholas Berry’s introduction to the fate of his inheritance. Until then, Lord Hartwell had excluded his two sons from the family business. During his conversation with Black, Berry concluded that the Canadian had ‘taken advantage of an old man’, and was untrustworthy. Looking across the table at Richardson, he was equally shocked. Not only had Rothschild’s issued a misleading prospectus and failed to protect his father in New York, but Richardson appeared to be courting Black as a potential new client. ‘Anyone but Black,’ he told his father. ‘We’ve got to find an alternative source of money.’ Reports of Berry’s renewed hunt for money soon reached Black. Lord Hanson, the Australian tycoon Robert Holmes à Court and representatives of the Australian Fairfax group were regaled with disparaging comments about Black, and all announced their interest in financing the Telegraph. To their dismay, they all discovered that the contract was watertight. Berry was powerless, but was also angry about N.M. Rothschild’s original failure to introduce these more suitable investors. ‘Sour grapes,’ said Richardson in reply to Berry’s protests. Nicholas Berry, Black concluded, had become ‘a pestilential irritation to us’.⁸

Two months later, Hartwell was sinking. By November the Telegraph’s costs were out of control, and the banks refused to advance more money. On the brink of insolvency, only one source of finance was available. From Toronto, Conrad Black offered to advance £20 million in return for 50.1 per cent of the shares and control of the company. At one stage during the tense negotiations conducted by Dan Colson, Hartwell agreed to Black’s take-over, only to reverse his decision soon afterwards. At a critical meeting, the peer appeared first oblivious to his imminent downfall, and then helpless. He collapsed under the stress, and was carried comatose from the boardroom. ‘If he dies, it will save time,’ quipped David Radler from Toronto. While he was careful never to say anything cruel in public, Black did not shed any crocodile tears over his quarry. Gleefully he reported that ‘Lord Fartwell’, Private Eye’s caricature, was sinking. ‘It had become surrealistic,’ he concluded, ‘as tenacious resistance to the inevitable eventually always does, the surest sign that the endgame was finally afoot.’⁹ Conrad Black could not have anticipated how his scathing homily would become appropriate to himself eighteen years later.

As the hours ticked by, Black and Colson applied the pressure, humiliating Nicholas Berry and forcing his father’s capitulation. On 11 December 1985, the decent amateur surrendered. For just £30 million, Black had won control. To appear magnanimous, he agreed to Knight’s suggestion that Hartwell should remain as the company’s chairman and editor-in-chief, and that it was he who should announce the transfer of ownership at a press conference. Among the journalists gathered was John Fraser, Black’s old school friend, who was now working for the Globe and Mail. ‘He does not want to be any sort of newspaper tycoon,’ Fraser heard Hartwell say. ‘We have not sold out.’ Fraser’s smile widened as Hartwell continued, ‘I’m happy to report that Mr Black is an entirely passive investor with no known interests in the British newspaper business.’ Fraser’s smile grew broader. ‘They’re finished,’ he thought. ‘Everyone from Newfoundland to Victoria will be laughing and cheering Conrad on. They couldn’t even be bothered to make just one phone call to Canada.’

In Toronto, Black would have agreed. Overnight he had been transformed from a small-time publisher into an international star. ‘I’ve hit the jackpot,’ he laughed to a friend in a telephone conversation. ‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.’¹⁰ Black’s critics wrongly assumed that he had ‘pulled a fast one’, while he himself portrayed the deal as the product of genius, ‘maintaining a kind of symmetry as if you were conducting a symphony orchestra’. In reality, he had merely grasped an offer created by an old man’s short-sightedness and a bank’s incompetence. All that remained was to find £20 million. Despite his claim a few weeks later to have ‘earned more than $100 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 Sir Martin Jacomb, a respected City personality, had accepted a directorship. Altogether, said Montagu, the Telegraph’s new ownership was blessed with ‘a clean bill of health’. Black congratulated him, relieved that Saul’s warning had been ignored. ‘Am I doing all right?’ he asked Montagu, Jacomb and Hambro individually, reflecting his lack of self-confidence; and they, pleased by his civility, his care for Hartwell’s feelings and their impression of Shirley as ‘a perfectly nice, unambitious wife’, agreed that Black could be trusted.

John Ralston Saul’s warning also made no impression among the Telegraph’s staff. As Black walked for the first time through the rabbit warren of dusty, dimly lit offices, he was reassured by the blank faces that confirmed his anonymity. ‘I’ve just seen a very sinister man in the corridor,’ said a breathless journalist, diving into the cartoonist Nicholas Garland’s office. ‘He looks like a mass murderer. Do you think we should tell security?’ ‘Oh, no,’ replied Garland. ‘That’s the new proprietor.’¹³ The few who met Black, including Hastings and Worsthorne, were intrigued by a proprietor who enjoyed discussion, was intelligent and informed and, at Knight’s insistence, promised to make them rich. The senior executives were given share options, chauffeurs and generous expense accounts. ‘It’s like the heavens opening,’ proclaimed Worsthorne. Black could afford to be generous. During the night of 25 January 1986, Rupert Murdoch had moved his entire newspaper operation to Wapping. Confronted with barbed wire and an army of aggressive police, the trade unions’ grip was shattered. Instead of 2,000 printers, Murdoch’s newspapers would now be produced by 570 electricians. With government support, Murdoch was certain to succeed eventually, and Conrad Black would be one of the beneficiaries, although Murdoch’s new strength as a competitor added urgency to Black’s task.

The Telegraph’s circulation was sliding, and the finances were precarious. To attract new and younger readers, Max Hastings introduced features about rock music and fashion, and special pages for women readers. Dozens of older journalists were fired. ‘Max is good at drowning kittens,’ smiled Black, appreciative of his editor’s ruthlessness in his quest to improve the newspaper and earn profits. One of Black’s early contributions was a suggestion to consider employing a Canadian journalist who had recently arrived in London. ‘I think you ought to take a look at her,’ he told Andrew Knight. ‘What’s her name?’ asked Knight. ‘Barbara Amiel.’ ‘I’ll see her,’ Knight replied, but he discovered that Amiel was not interested, and the suggestion came to nothing.

More importantly, Black was concerned about Hastings’s politics. ‘Rupert Murdoch called,’ he told Knight. ‘He told me I was crazy to appoint Hastings as editor.’ ‘He told me the same,’ replied Knight, ‘but I’m ignoring him.’ Hastings’s unpopularity with Thatcherites like Murdoch and the Spectator columnist Paul Johnson justified his appointment, said Knight. Under Hastings, the newspaper would cease to be the Conservative Party’s mouthpiece, and would become more combative and original. ‘One more thing, Conrad,’ said Knight. ‘When you’re unhappy about something in the papers, don’t telephone the editor. Write a letter for publication.’