Conrad Black's appearance on Have I Got News For You won't do anything to rehabilitate the reputation of an unrepentant fraudster, but it will allow him to show that he at least believes he has nothing to be ashamed of and that he can re-enter British society with his head held high.
To that degree, the invitation serves Black's purpose very well. He can flaunt his shamelessness and then repair to the various exclusive dinner parties being held to welcome Mr and Mrs Black to London. (In this column, at least, he has been stripped of his title, though in reality he is Baron Black of Crossharbour, PC, Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great and, weirdly indeed, still a member of the British legislature.)
Despite spending more than three years in Florida jails, the humiliation of being deported on his release last May from the United States – probably never to return – and having to appeal against being stripped of the Order of Canada, Black's hubris and sense of entitlement remain astonishingly unimpaired. With this record, most people wouldn't entertain an appearance on the TV programme, but his character is incapable of contrition and is immunised against mockery. In his own mind, he still fits Boris Johnson's assessment: "An obvious man of destiny, not least because he exudes a sense of purpose, drive and ambition."
So, the show will be an object lesson in the sorts of traits that propel one of the dodgiest outsiders to have run British newspapers over the last 50 years and forced their agendas on our national life. But that is the only marginal gain. It may be good television to watch him being baited, but the show's producer, Hat Trick Productions, is wrong to give him the platform because in some way it does endorse his denial of grave criminality. This seems particularly true after the show's long-running host Angus Deayton was sacked because of misbehaviour that pales in comparison to Black's.
When someone has served a prison sentence, it is right that society allows redemption and degrees of forgiveness. Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer have both acted with discretion and some humility since leaving prison and people have been rightly willing to overlook their convictions.
But Black is a different story. Lest the producers or, indeed, any of the society hostesses in a flutter at the idea of Conrad and Barbara's return need reminding of his crimes, they have only to read last week's judgment in a US Federal. Judge William Hart wrote: "Black's violations of the securities laws in the case occurred over two years, part of a wide-ranging fraud. Black has advanced no reason to believe that he now has any respect for the securities laws or any regret for the losses or costs his violations have caused. He is intransigent in his denunciation of the courts and the justice system." The former newspaper baron, who once presided over the Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Jerusalem Post and many smaller titles, must now pay Sun-Times Media – what was once Hollinger – $3.8m plus $2.3m interest.
It's important that Judge Hart added the $2.3m interest penalty because of Black's refusal to admit responsibility. Black may have had significant parts of his original conviction overturned on appeal, but it's still true that he stole $6.1m of shareholders' money in transactions disguised as management fees.Tom Bower's excellent book, Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge, makes clear that other people's money was spent on a billionaire lifestyle for himself and his columnist wife, Barbara Amiel, when Black was only ever in the multimillionaire class.
Facing exposure, he tried to cover up by removing files from his offices, but failed to notice the gaze of a CCTV camera. As one investor said to him in a tense meeting before his downfall: "I've been listening to what my distinguished colleagues have been saying. They're trying to be polite but what they're saying is that they consider you a thief and I can't say that I disagree with that." That judgment remains true today. It ought to be said that Black is consistent in his belief that the crimes of rich businessmen should be subject to special understanding and leniency.
In 1991, when Gerald Ronson, one of the Guinness Four, was released from jail early and found himself being presented to the Queen Mother at a charity do, I was asked to write about this swift rehabilitation in the Daily Telegraph. Conrad Black exploded when he read what was a very critical article and demanded that the then editor, Max Hastings, provide space for him to denounce my column. At Hastings's suggestion, he settled for a letter of complaint to his own paper.
I suppose he was being open about the interference and it is true to say that in the early years he ran the Telegraph group well, but the incident was symbolic of a robber baron mentality that was to end in his imprisonment. I have little doubt that it is has as much to do with politics as morals, or at least his journey to the wilder regions of conservatism, made hand in hand with his fiercely rightwing and hyper-materialist wife. This allowed him to think that he was entitled to that money because they were who they were and they were right on just about everything, from their support of Israel to the championing of Iain Duncan Smith.
It is clear that the Blacks still have a great love, but it was expressed in an autoerotic neo-conservatism that allowed them to behave as they did – a narcissistic entitlement that generally prompted uncritical adoration in the circles they moved in. Lady Thatcher and Lord Carrington were his sponsors when he was made a peer; politicians fawned at his annual summer party; Conrad and Barbara ruled. Only Andrew Neil asked the press magnate if he might not be in contravention of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which insists on enhanced accounting procedures in US public companies; Neil was fobbed off.
None of this would be necessary to say if Black accepted that he was guilty of taking shareholders' and creditors' money; after all, he suffered a shocking downfall and imprisonment.
But he doesn't accept he was wrong and instead he takes to the pulpit of various blogs, with that snowplough of a literary style, to lecture us about the themes of the day, the sweep of history and men of destiny. For him, the theft of $6.1m is still evidently the trifling obsession of pygmies.
Original Article
Source: guardian
Author: Henry Porter
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