Conrad Black: Canadian press baron with an agenda for Britain

By Vincent Graff, UK Independent

24 May 2003

The managing editor of the Franklin Park Herald-Journal doesn't lie awake in bed at night. Not for him angry late-night calls from his proprietor. In fact, you could describe John Korinek's attitude as relaxed. "Conrad Black? Never seen him," Korinek told The Independent from his office in Oak Park, Illinois. Really? You've never met Lord Black? "Who are you talking about? Never heard of him."

Not much happens on the Herald-Journal's patch, one of the more distant outposts of Lord Black of Crossharbour's newspaper empire, which stretches from the United States to London to Israel. But if Korinek - whose top story this week is a report on seven-year-old Patrick Shelton "having himself quite a time at the eighth annual Railroad Daze festival" - is bravely rising above the latest goings- on at his paper's parent company Hollinger International, others within and without Black's multimillion pound empire are taking a more forensic view.

At Hollinger International's annual meeting in New York this week, Black, proprietor of The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, The Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post, promised to loosen his grip on the newspapers' holding company. There will also be, he announced, an independent review of transactions that have netted him a fortune. A few days earlier, Hollinger had issued a statement suspending the rights of some shareholders to sell their stocks for cash. Last month Hollinger's debt was downgraded to "junk" status; and its common shares have fallen by more than 70 per cent in the last year on the Canadian stock market.

The review will be asking some personal questions. Why is the Canadian-born proprietor dipping in to Telegraph group company funds - perfectly legally, but "without the involvement of the group's titles," according to his right-hand-man Dan Colson, chief executive of the Telegraph group - to donate =A310,000 to the Conservative Party? Much more crucially, what will happen to a disputed =A3120m, which US fund management firm Tweedy Brown, a major Hollinger shareholder, claims in a letter to the New York securities and exchange commission was paid to Black and his management but ought to have gone to the shareholders? At the AGM, Black vehemently denied any impropriety - but nonetheless, today might not be a good day to swap places with him.

In normal times, the deal might appear to be an enticing one, if only for a glance into a world that, depending on to your point of view, features either the grandest of the great and the good or a trip to a sinister political Jurassic Park.

Black is urbane and intelligent. Like that other Canadian press giant, Lord Beaverbrook, he is also an impressive historian - he has just finished writing a biography of Franklin D Roosevelt, and is said to be able to name every single galleon in the Spanish Armada. As broad as a rugby prop and sometimes as menacing, he can deploy a doleful tone in conversation that throws his interlocutors off balance. But don't let that fool you. He loves debate, but enters it for only one reason - to prove he is right. This is not a man who changes his mind readily. "His idea is that if his brilliance shines on you for long enough, you'll come round to his way of thinking," says an acquaintance. "He is grotesquely certain about everything - and that adverb is very important," says former Sunday Telegraph editor Sir Peregrine Worsthorne.

Max Hastings, his editor at The Daily Telegraph for more than a decade, has described how Black is "seldom unconscious of his responsibilities as a member of the rich man's trade union".

Black's friends are the sort who think small talk is for small people and who, if they aren't calling the shots any more, feel they ought to be: Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Perle, Lord Carrington. In his time, he has also struck up friendships with some more off-beam figures - the Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Mohamed al-Fayed and the late Sir James Goldsmith. "The list is certainly not my definition of the great and the good," winces Worsthorne. "Conrad bestrides a very small world like a colossus." Black is a leading member - is there any other type? - of the Bilderberg group, the high- powered think-tank that meets in near-secret and is much beloved of conspiracy theorists as a result.

Born on 25 August 1944 in Montreal, Conrad Moffat Black grew up in Toronto, a precocious young boy who developed a taste for business from his father, George, a president of a big Canadian brewing company who was fired at the age of 47 and went on to earn his fortune buying and selling shares.

One day the young Conrad came home to find a fruit machine installed in the family drawing room. This was, his father explained, to show him that gambling offers a poorer rate of return than the stock market. George saw to it that the boy bought his first shares, $60 worth of General Motors, at eight. George's final words to his son, before crashing through the balustrade of a staircase and falling to his death, are said to have been: "Life is hell, most people are bastards and everything is bullshit."

By the time Black had left university - Laval, a French-speaking college in Quebec - he had bought two companies, both local newspapers - The Eastern Township Advertiser in Knowlton, near Montreal, and the Sherbrooke Record, also in Quebec. He had also begun writing - students of his journalism still fondly savour his "morality tale" sports reports, which he wrote as recently as the late Eighties - but it would be wrong to assume he developed an affinity for the people who put newspapers together. "The fact of the matter is, unfortunately, that Conrad has a real contempt for journalists," says someone who observed Black at very close quarters. "He doesn't give a shit about them."

Conrad likes newspapers only because they give him a seat at high table, as he has admitted: "The deferences and preferments that this culture bestows upon the owners of great newspapers are satisfying. I mean, I tend to think that they're slightly exaggerated at times, but as the beneficiary - a beneficiary - of that system, it would certainly be hypocrisy for me to complain about it."

He seized majority control of the Telegraph titles from the gentlemanly but ineffectual Berry family in December 1985, a few months after first investing in the company. His link with the company came from his Bilderberg colleague Andrew Knight, later to become his chief executive at the Telegraph papers.

In the early days, Black knew he was an outsider and trod carefully, as one of his senior colleagues of the time recalls. "He was a lot less self-confident and more diffident than he is now. He used to leave it alone a lot more, so long as it was doing well."

Worsthorne recalls: "He had no experience of English life when he bought the papers. He played a cautious game. He was still living in Toronto and had not yet taken residence here. He was not yet a powerful figure in English life. He was very chary about throwing his weight around. He couldn't have been a more supportive proprietor."

This was to change over time. Now the non-interventionary Black is impossible to recognise. When his peerage was announced less than two years ago, The Daily Telegraph managed to find space for nearly 500 words on the event. Most other newspapers did not have room for such fulsome reports, given that a few hours after Downing Street revealed Black's good fortune, hijacked aeroplanes had flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

Sir Max Hastings, in his memoir, Editor, describes how the number of calls from Black increased as time went on. "I knew it was time to hoist storm signals when the chairman declared - with only a nod towards irony or conscious extravagance - that 'This snivelling product of some pinko journalism school administered by the John Pilger-Christopher Hitchens Trust for the Propagation of Liberal Mendacity does not give me a high comfort level, Max'."

The trend became particularly noticeable after 1992, when Black married Barbara Amiel - nowadays a star columnist in her husband's paper. Her strong views, on America, Israel and anything else, began to hold sway. Black was on the phone one day in February 1994, after the Telegraph's fashion pages has predicted the imminent descent of hemlines, writes Hastings. "Short skirts would rule the world, said Conrad, and if our fashion pages knew what was good for them they would renounce any such heresy." Hastings spent "a good many hours pondering how to square Mrs Chairman's strong views" with those of his fashion editor.

But it is in the field of politics the influence is most noticeable. With Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle at his side, Black has steered the Daily Telegraph's editor, Charles Moore, further and further to the Euro-sceptic Zionist right; nowadays it appears to be talking to a neo-conservative clique of true believers.

"I don't think Conrad is doing the Telegraph any good at all," says Worsthorne. "He is turning it into a paper that no longer reads as authentically a voice of the English conservative. It has become an American neo-conservative paper. The neo-Conservatives are riding high at the moment, but if things change the Telegraph will be left on a very deserted shore. It's a great, great risk."

Another former senior figure adds: "The truth about Conrad is that he is a brilliant deal-maker, but mad when it come to politics. He is getting increasingly reckless and it is very much to the disadvantage of The Daily Telegraph. The other thing - and this is a serious problem - is that he is trying to attract young, forward-thinking readers with his feature pages, while presenting his brand of neanderthal politics on the centre pages. The paper has had a complete loss of identity. It is facing in four directions at once."

It is probably too late for Black to change his ways. Charles Moore must now be accustomed to late-night rants from his boss. He could, of course, seek a relocation. Alas, unless things change very rapidly, there is no vacancy at the Franklin Park Herald-Journal.

LIFE STORY

Born 25 August 1944 Conrad Moffat Black, Montreal, Canada. Son of George Black and Jean Elizabeth Riley

Family Married (first) Joanna Catherine Louise Hishon, 1978; 2 sons, 1 daughter (marriage dissolved 1992). (Second) Barbara Amiel (right), 1992

Education Carleton University, Canada (BA History and Political Science, 1965); Laval University, Canada (LLL Law, 1970); McGill University, Canada (MA History, 1973)

Business Career Chair, Sterling Newspapers from 1971. Chair, Hollinger Inc USA since 1985, Hollinger International Canada since 1986 and the Telegraph Group, London. Director, Canadian Imperial bank of Commerce since 1977, and Sotheby's since 1997

Publications A Life in Progress (1993); Duplessis (1977)

Honours Order of Canada 1990; Privy Councillor (Canada) 1992; Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great (Holy See) 2001. Raised to the peerage as Lord Black of Crossharbour in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in 2001

Clubs Athenaeum, Beefsteak, Garrick, Whites

He says "There's no doubt that the political leaders believe that the newspaper owners have a big influence."

They say "He is grotesquely certain about everything - and that adverb is very important." - Sir Peregrine Worsthorne

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