Читать книгу Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge - Tom Bower - Страница 11

‘CAN YOU ARRANGE IT?’ Conrad Black repeatedly asked Andrew Knight during March 1986. Impatient to reap the prizes due to the Telegraph’s proprietor, Black yearned to meet Margaret Thatcher, one of his idols.

During the few weeks since he had become recognised as the Telegraph’s owner, Black’s lifestyle had changed markedly. Friends had begun introducing him to London society. Jennifer d’Abo, a successful businesswoman, hosted pizza dinners in her kitchen. Witty and light-hearted, Black amused d’Abo’s guests with his endless insights and information apparently gleaned from many sources – either his newspaper editors or politicians. The word spread that the Telegraph’s new owner was a desirable social catch. David Metcalfe, an insurance broker, grandson of Lord Curzon, was another eager host. At a succession of cocktail receptions, dinners and weekend parties, Black’s warmth and intelligence were noted and he was embraced. ‘A loyal and good friend,’ concluded Metcalfe and others who accepted Black at face value. ‘Conrad believed,’ Metcalfe would tell a friend, ‘that the world was his oyster, and London society reassured him that his performance was acceptable.’ Since the City establishment had been joined by Max Hastings, Peregrine Worsthorne and the veteran former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes in endorsing their employer, there seemed no reason to dig into his past.

When Black was in London countless invitations to parties, dinners and opening nights at the theatre and Covent Garden began arriving, flattering his self-esteem. His lust for more than ‘a ringside seat at everything’ grew, inflating his opinion of himself and validating his importance in Canada. The opportunities to meet British and foreign politicians in London fed his hunger to consort with the mega-rich and the powerful in the White House, Buckingham Palace and Downing Street. The Telegraph was not merely the means to earn an income and propagate his ideas, but had become his passport to social climbing. ‘Who’s that?’ Black asked Paul Johnson’s wife Marigold when they met at a party in the French Embassy. ‘And who’s that? And that person, is he important?’ Marigold Johnson was shocked. ‘I realise the allegation is about that I am somewhat of a seeker of celebrities,’ Black later admitted, ‘and in one sense I suppose that’s true. But my purpose is that celebrities who are justly celebrated can be very useful to you.’¹ The casualties were the celebrities’ wives, including those of Jacob Rothschild and the Duke of Marlborough. ‘I won’t again sit next to a man who lectures me throughout dinner,’ said one wife, ‘about the layout of the navies at the Battle of Jutland or reels off a list of all the kings of Sweden since the eighteenth century.’ Black’s new friends were undecided whether his amusing lectures reflected arrogance, insecurity or insensitivity. Like others, the Johnsons were puzzled by Black’s parochialism. On his first visit to their house he looked shocked by a plate of mussels, especially when other guests ate them by hand. As a preliminary to meeting Margaret Thatcher, Andrew Knight arranged to call on Charles Powell, Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser, in Downing Street. ‘What do you think Powell thought of me,’ Black repeatedly asked Knight afterwards. The judgement in Downing Street, Knight did not reveal, was that Black was ‘a provincial hick’.

‘Hello Margaret,’ smiled Black as he entered Chequers with Andrew Knight on 2 April 1986. Thatcher’s close staff, accustomed to calling her ‘Prime Minister’, were surprised by Black’s assumption of equality. They were to be even more surprised by his conduct. After the pleasantries, Black embarked on a monologue, lecturing his hostess about her place in British history alongside Pitt and Disraeli. His fluent performance was honed as much to massage his own ego as to flatter his audience. He was too enraptured by his own verbal elegance to notice his hostess’s astonishment. Propriety required that she mask her impatience and ‘listen carefully’. The Conservative Party relied on the Telegraph group, and it was politic to humour its owner. Her concealment succeeded. Unknown to her visitor, Thatcher rarely listened to what she was told. Her only interest was what she would say in reply. Impervious to her true sentiments, Black was pleased, as they bade farewell, that Thatcher ‘patted me most considerately on the shoulder and said, “That is very good, Mr Black. Do come back.”’ As his Rolls-Royce drove down the gravel driveway, Black asked Knight impatiently, ‘How did it go? What do you think she thought of me? Do you think she respected me?’ For several days he repeated the questions. ‘I’m sure she thought you know more about the history of the Tory Party than she does,’ replied Knight, protecting Black from the truth, ‘but that only goes so far.’

Before their meeting, Thatcher had been aware of Black’s opposition to hanging, not because he was against capital punishment, but because he felt hanging was ‘too good for them’. She had wrongly assumed that that was said in jest. After their meeting, she told her aides that compared to Black, ‘I’m a liberal wet.’ An intimidating bore, she concluded of the new proprietor. Unlike Rupert Murdoch, whom she genuinely liked, she decided to tolerate Black because the Telegraph was important, but he would be classified as ‘low profile’.

Over the following days Black regaled many about his successful visit. Among his listeners was Peter Munk, a self-made Canadian billionaire whose company, Barrick, would become the world’s biggest gold extractor. Shortly after visiting Chequers, Black flew with Munk by helicopter to Highgrove to lunch with Prince Charles. Munk had skied with Charles at Klosters, and offered him an opportunity to persuade a friendly newspaper proprietor to treat the royal family with more consideration. ‘You’ll like Prince Charles,’ Munk told Black. ‘He’s a good guy and you should help him.’ Their encounter began with a tour of Highgrove’s organic garden. At the beginning of lunch Charles explained his vegetarianism. Black seized the cue. Throughout the meal, a torrent of history poured from him, describing the British royal family’s eating habits. Ignoring Charles’s obvious distaste for the excruciating details of his grandfather George VI’s tendencies, Black did not stop until minutes before he departed. ‘Not a success,’ Charles later told an aide. Gossip about Black’s behaviour spread around London. ‘He’s such a heavy personality to escort around,’ Knight told a friend. ‘I have to keep him away from the paper to prevent revolt.’ Black himself was sensitive to that danger. Without protest, he even obeyed Knight’s instruction to stay away during the Queen’s visit to the newspaper’s new premises as part of her tour of London’s Docklands. That was a worthwhile price to pay if he was to shed his tarnished reputation in Canada. With patience he could emerge as a cleansed, acceptable character in London, and become influential and rich.

Max Hastings, an excellent journalist, historian and analyst, was a valuable ally in that quest. Energetically, Hastings was transforming the Telegraph into a respectable mouthpiece for independent Conservatism. Black, however, was not wholly enamoured. There were, he noted, some unattractive aspects of Hastings’s Toryism. The editor was critical of Margaret Thatcher’s strident antagonism towards the public services; he bore an Englishman’s mistrust of American politicians; and he was convinced that the Telegraph’s future depended on abandoning its blind support for the Conservative Party. As proprietor, Black was entitled to express his opinions and to seek to persuade his editor to reconsider his newspaper’s position on any issue. His profound knowledge of history and his ability to recite tidal waves of obscure political facts strengthened the credibility of his opinions. The correlative was his myopic intolerance of contrary views and his distrust of those who wrote for his papers. ‘I’m not a particularly great admirer of journalists,’ he said. ‘A great many of them are irresponsible. They have great power, and many of them are extremely reckless.’² Among those he most distrusted was the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who had suggested in the Spectator in July 1985 that the announcement of President Reagan’s cancer treatment deliberately concealed his more serious Alzheimer’s. In a protest letter to the Spectator, Black criticised Hitchens as ‘a disgrace to the profession [who] should not be employed’. Hitchens’s article, Black continued, was motivated by ‘nasty, macabre, vulgar and insolent claptrap’ which revealed the ‘lack of integrity and serious analysis in British and most foreign reporting of American affairs’. To silence Hitchens, Black threatened to buy every newspaper that offered him employment. Although Hitchens’s article would prove to be accurate, Black showed no remorse. He espoused, as Max Hastings discovered, his own version of the truth.

Black’s disagreement with Hastings’s opinions remained restrained until the US Air Force bombed Libya on 14 April 1986 in retaliation for Colonel Gaddafi’s support of a terrorist attack in Berlin. Black, preparing to fly to Britain to attend the Bilderberg Conference at Gleneagles in Scotland, was infuriated by the Telegraph’s condemnation of President Reagan’s bombardment. His newspaper, he believed, should reflect his own unquestioning support of America. He admonished Hastings for his ‘seriously fallacious analysis of what was really happening’. Colonel Gaddafi had after all, said Black, supplied the IRA with weapons. Black wanted a warmer embrace of Reagan and America. Hastings disagreed. Black’s brand of American Republicanism, he said, was unsuitable for a British audience. On that issue, Black won. ‘Since Conrad was the principal shareholder in the paper,’ Hastings would concede, ‘it would have appeared discourteous to trample gratuitously on his most cherished convictions.’³ That exchange was a precursor to more intervention. Black would forbid the use of the word ‘Irangate’, referring to the secret and illegal supply of weapons by President Reagan to Iran, on the grounds that the Watergate affair was far more serious; and while tolerating Hastings’s support for sanctions against South Africa to end apartheid and his opposition to capital punishment, he would criticise his ‘incorrect thinking’ about Northern Ireland. To Black’s credit, he did not countermand Hastings’s dismissal as a columnist of Margaret Thatcher’s daughter Carol for working as a freelance without permission. The Prime Minister was livid, and pledged never to invite Hastings to Downing Street again.⁴ Black was embarrassed, but tolerated his editor’s authority, although increasingly Hastings received not only letters of complaint but midnight telephone calls from across the Atlantic, during which Black would nitpick at length, regardless of the time.⁵ Black’s intolerance towards journalists matched his fierce reaction to those in Canada who had questioned his honesty in business.

Black’s political certainties concealed his personal insecurity. Despite the psychoanalysis thirteen years earlier, he continued to suffer ‘bouts of miscellaneous obsessive fear’ and depression. One cure was his growing interest in religion, especially the mystical teaching of Cardinal Newman, the nineteenth-century English theologian and philosopher.⁶ In Newman’s view, a man’s personality cannot be called into question, because God reveals Himself in a man’s conscience. Black’s interest in Newman provoked intense conversations with God, drawing him closer to the hierarchical Catholic Church. His need for spiritual assurance from the font of undisputed authority was matched by his wife Shirley’s own increasing attachment to the Catholic Church, but this only widened the schism in their marriage as they stumbled over their incompatibility.

At Knight’s suggestion the Blacks had bought a house in Well Road in Hampstead, in north-west London, near Knight’s home. The leafy district had been historically fashionable with writers and artists, but not among London’s social elite. To the inhabitants of Knightsbridge and Belgravia, Black’s choice of neighbourhood, a twenty-five-minute drive from Harrods, reflected his provincialism. Some assumed that he knew no better, while others correctly judged that Shirley felt more comfortable living a middle-class life beyond the carping gripes of London’s socialites. In the interests of his marriage and Knight’s stricture to remain out of sight, Black endorsed his wife’s desire for modesty. Their principal home, they agreed, would remain in Toronto. Their divided lives intensified her misgivings and his turmoil. Her concerns were ignored while he sought to resolve his own confusion. His solution, after long conversations in England with the writer and scholar Malcolm Muggeridge, and in Toronto with Archbishop Carter, was to formally convert to Catholicism. ‘I was resistless against the benign temptations of religious practice,’ Black wrote, but he recognised the need for Catholicism’s ‘sane, rigorous and consoling’ teaching to comfort his spirit. Catholicism’s inflexibility about morality and conscience perfectly suited a man who enjoyed breaking the rules. Notionally, he accepted Cardinal Newman’s opinion that a man’s conscience was the ‘powerful, peremptory, unargumentative, irrational, minatory and definitive [words of] God speaking in our minds’.⁷ That was precisely the process of self-justification that preceded all his misdeeds. On 18 June 1986 Black was formally converted, and thereafter he wanted to be known as a passionate and uncompromising believer. Conrad Black had crossed another Rubicon.

Under the management of Andrew Knight and Max Hastings, the Telegraph’s losses of £15 million in 1986 were transformed in 1987 into a small profit. The paper’s circulation began to increase, and Black bought the conservative weekly the Spectator from the Australian Fairfax Group, which had plunged into financial crisis. Hollinger’s shares in Canada soared as the value of Black’s coup and Rupert Murdoch’s victory in Wapping became evident. ‘I want to build a first-class newspaper company,’ Black told a London newspaper, and added, ‘I am not a seeker after status here,’ denying his expectation of a peerage. No one cast doubt on his claim to possess assets worth C$650 million, and no one queried the huge loans against which he had used his assets as collateral.⁸ Although Black was wealthy, he lived in a comparatively modest home in Hampstead, and while his journalists shared some of the profits, there were limits. Journalists who compared his income with their own when asking for a pay increase were lampooned. ‘I earn a lot because I’m a capitalist,’ he said gleefully, ‘and you are a seeker after the truth.’

In the summer of 1987 the Telegraph moved from Fleet Street to South Quay in London’s Docklands. Under Knight’s plan, the company’s 2,200 printers would be reduced to 507 men supervising automated machines and robots, while the 413 men currently employed to compose the hot metal plates would be replaced by twenty-seven technicians. If the plan succeeded, the Telegraph’s profits in 1988 were projected to rise to £29 million. At that moment, the first fissure in Black’s hitherto unruffled performance opened. ‘They’re mad,’ Dan Colson told him. ‘Don’t let them de-man. There’ll be strikes.’ Colson had assumed a special role in Black’s business, but Knight was appalled by his interference. ‘You’ve got to back myself and the management,’ Knight insisted during a telephone call to Canada. Without an alternative, Black agreed. The redundancies were achieved without strikes, and the Telegraph’s annual profits were projected to rise to £40 million.

This was the beginning of Conrad Black’s halcyon era, and he was flying. His income from the Telegraph, and the prospect of selling his 5 per cent stake in the Southam newspaper group in Canada at a considerable profit, reinvigorated his appetite for deals and expansion. In that atmosphere, he decorated his new office in Docklands with the symbols of tyrants and inspirational leaders, including busts of Cardinal Newman and Napoleon. Few could understand his fascination for the ruthless French warmonger, but the media’s attention to his passion for a despot tickled Black’s self-importance. ‘I’ve never found him an attractive personality,’ Black said about Napoleon, while admitting his fascination for ‘a great talent … a military commander and a mythmaker’.⁹ Hero-worship fed Black’s illusion of his own growing importance among the world’s leaders.

At the 1987 Bilderberg conference by Lake Como in Italy, hosted by Gianni Agnelli, the chairman of Fiat, Black was treated like a head of state, speeding around the area with a police escort. For the next twelve months, in anticipation of the leaders of the Group of Seven countries’ meeting in Toronto, Black assiduously cultivated Margaret Thatcher. 22 June 1988 was his red-letter day. In her speech to the Ottawa Parliament in the morning, Thatcher praised Black as the most important Canadian in London. That evening she appeared as guest of honour at the Hollinger annual dinner. Surrounded by Canada’s elite, Black introduced the world-famous leader, and in reply Thatcher praised her host as a star who was continuing the tradition of Canadians in Fleet Street, mentioning Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Thomson. After great applause, Thatcher was in turn thanked by Henry Kissinger, who also referred to Black in glowing terms. No one could ignore that night’s adulation of their host. Certainly, Black believed, his fellow countrymen would be persuaded to forget their earlier slurs. He anticipated a peerage and much more. He had already called at 10 Downing Street and asked Charles Powell, ‘What does one have to do to get a peerage?’ Unfortunately, Powell had not been helpful, so Black put out feelers among Thatcher’s advisers. His peerage, he believed, would not take long. Like Roy Thomson, he too might be posthumously remembered in St Paul’s Cathedral, although he was unsure whether Thomson’s commemorative plaque in the crypt – ‘He gave a new direction to the British newspaper industry. A strange and adventurous man from nowhere, ennobled by the great virtues of courage and integrity and faithfulness’ – would do him sufficient justice. Only Hal Jackman, bemused by Hollinger paying a fortune to entertain politicians, offered a reality check. ‘Why do you have all these people for dinner, Conrad?’ he asked. ‘Good for business,’ replied Black. ‘More like social climbing,’ laughed Jackman.