Black gets booked
The Sunday Times ran a lengthy excerpt this past weekend from Tom Bower’s new, vigorously unauthorized biography of disgraced newspaper magnate Conrad Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour. In it, Bower reprints an email Black sent him after finding out that Bower would be writing the book, in which he offers two perspectives on himself — one as an “honest businessman,” the other slightly more convincing.
“[Y]ou have made it clear that you consider this whole matter a heart-warming story of two [that is, Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel] sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system; have been ostracised, and largely impoverished; and that I am on my way to the prison cell where I belong.”
Bower also outlines how many of Black’s former chums began treating him as a pariah after his legal troubles became public. More than one — in the spirit of Black himself, perhaps — seems to have cracked open a thesaurus so as to make their verbal blows more… mellifluous.
Simon Heffer, a columnist on Black’s Telegraph, observed: “Barbara has turned Conrad from an homme sérieux into a society petal. He’s besotted with her, like a spaniel.”
Hal Jackman, a rich investor and disillusioned old friend, labelled Black “a parvenu drifting away from reality.
Perhaps now Black truly understands the wisdom his father tried to pass on to his son. According to Bower, George Black’s dying words were “Life is hell, most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit.”
Related links:
Read about Conrad Black in The Sunday Times
