Conrad Black with his wife Barbara Amiel. The couple regularly used the company’s Gulfstream IV jet to flit between parties in London New York, Toronto and Palm Beach

The crash of the titan ego and fantasist

Conrad Black, former owner of the Daily Telegraph and Tory peer, will finally be undone over greed, lies and a woman, writes Gerald Isaaman

Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge by Tom Bower (HarperPress, £20) order this book

TOM Bower ignores his own pun. “No, it is black and white, as they say,” he declares.
“He isn’t going to get off. It’s been a great life but it won’t be when he goes down. He could, if convicted, get 96 years.”
It is hardly the new year forecast that Conrad Black wants to hear. He thought he ruled triumphant when he became an international newspaper tycoon and British life peer, even Margaret Thatcher eating out of his hand, because he owned the electoral mouthpiece of the Tory party.
Yet the fate of the Canadian former owner of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph will be decided in March.
That’s when Lord Black, now 62, faces fraud and theft charges in Chicago relating to $520 million he milked during his 13 years as the egocentric chairman of Hollinger International.
And Bower, author of this scintillating and almost unbelievable saga of sex and incessant corruption that beats even the fictional affairs of JR Ewing, sees no way out for him.
“It will be a spectacular trial because Conrad wants it to be a show trial,” he says. “He wants it to be a huge extravaganza of himself against his prosecutors and the public. But he may find it difficult to do that because the judge in Chicago is in control of it – not Black.”
After interviewing more than 200 people, Bower is personally convinced of Black’s guilt. But, more than that, he points out: “He is going down because his partner, who spent 36 years working with him has pleaded guilty and is giving evidence against him.”
Not even Black’s prodigious photographic memory – he can recall whole speeches by the likes of Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln – will come to his rescue, even if his evidence does embarrass others like Henry Kissinger and Lord Carrington who accepted Black’s largesse to sit on his board, attend his endless conferences, dinners and sumptuous parties with the world’s power brokers. There are Hampstead connections too, apart from the fact that Bower lives in Thurlow Road.
Black himself lived almost anonymously for a while in Well Road, in a house found for him by fellow colonial Andrew Knight, the Telegraph’s former chief executive who swung the take-over for him – for the price of a five per cent share stake worth millions – and later Black and his wife moved to Robin Grove, Highgate.
That was before Black divorced and married the dazzling columnist Barbara Amiel in 1992, a move that no doubt shattered his life.
Indeed, there may yet be more fireworks to come if the notorious Lady Black also faces trial. It is something that is now being rumoured, as she was a Hollinger director too, enjoyed its riches and put her signature on vital documentary evidence.
Bower seems to be as mesmerised by her as have been all the other men in her life that he details with some relish.
“I have never written about a woman before,” he reveals. “And she is a phenomenally interesting woman.
“Voluptuous? That’s always over done. She is very good looking and has always traded on her looks. Four husbands and 400 boyfriends, you know, and endlessly talking about sex and appearance. That’s her, not me.
“His life-style was comparatively modest, he was living within his means, then when he divorced and married Barbara his expenditure went zooming over what he could afford. He wanted to impress her. And she wanted to be impressed.”
What Bower can’t forgive is that Amiel gave vent to her prejudices in her newspaper and magazine columns, damning the poor and praising the rich.
“She always said how important it was that people took personal responsibility for their lives.
“And I have noted what personal responsibility they took for what they did. So chief hypocrites, Barbara and Conrad, step forward,” he scorns.
It is an indication of why Bower has devoted his vigilant investigations into victims such as the late Robert Maxwell, Sir Richard Branson and Mohammed Al Fayed.
“I never thought Fayed was a crook,” he insists. “Branson did some dodgy deals and could have been prosecuted on the basis of what I wrote, but he then cleaned up his act.
“Branson lost his the national lottery as a result of my book on him. He would have got the contract but my book tilted it against him. Geoffrey Robinson MP was suspended from Parliament as a result of my book. Tiny Rowland died in ignominy and Klaus Barbie died in prison.”
So why is it he tackles only the so-called baddies and risk their wrath in the form of libel writs, which have now reached double figures over the years? “It is a bigger challenge,” he declares. “And I need them alive. I don’t like dead people. It’s the thrill of the chase.”
Not only that, he has on this occasion provided a totally fascinating read about an incredible way of life led by amazing out of touch people for whom truth holds little value in their desire for fame and power and, equally, an insight into the gullibility of national newspapers that con themselves in claiming only they hold the high moral ground for the public good.
Newspaper barons, from Lord Northcliffe, who began his career on as a reporter on the Ham and High, to Lord Black, who started cheating in his exams at school, all had the fatal flaw of becoming fantasists.