Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  Through the Byzantine financial structure the former owners had created, Argus itself owned 14 per cent to 24 per cent of the first four of these companies. Four-fifths of Argus’s shares did not vote. My brother and I now had 57 per cent of a company that had 51 per cent of the company that owned 60 per cent of the shares that voted (i.e., we had 12 per cent of the Argus voting shares and 8.4 per cent of its total equity, as we owned some of the non-voting shares separately). And beneath that were the 14 per cent shareholdings, apart from the radio and television business. Our interest had an apparent economic value of about Can$18 million, and there were significant loans against that. This was my baptism in close-quarters financial manoeuvrings, and I saw both their possibilities and their hazards.

  I set about trying to refashion the company toward something the owners would really own and would have some aptitude to manage. In my 1992 book detailing some of the complicated manoeuvres, I cited Napoleon’s dictum that “mass times speed equals force.” In those early business years, I had had little mass but great speed. My corporate performance was far from Napoleonic, but I got on. Deals now occurred with such profusion and rapidity that the Toronto Star referred to me as “Canada’s answer to [the American television program] Let’s Make a Deal.” I gave the Massey Ferguson shares away to the company pension plans to assist in a refinancing, which did then occur and helped to save the company. Over several years, the Domtar shares were sold, the supermarket and radio and television assets were sold, and energy assets were bought and sold. The group was consolidated, with something close to a real owner, and refocused in the newspaper business. All this activity, which was more financial engineering than operational progress, attracted the interest of regulators, who actually rewrote the Canadian “complex transaction” rules in my honour. The convoluted progress through these various businesses stirred up some controversy in Canada at times, but all was resolved without much difficulty.

  I was a financier, and a fairly agile one, but still only an industrialist in the newspaper business. I did not seek out controversy, but as someone who expressed controversial views trenchantly and hovered about several different vocations, I was bound to attract a fair bit of comment, especially in such an understated country as Canada. I enjoyed debate and political argument but had an imperfect sense of public relations and never saw the need to concern myself with it. As a result, I became a catchment for many traits and opinions I did not hold, dwarfed by a caricature public image that has lurched about like a clumsy monster for decades. Though wounded at times by this portrayal, I never grasped the real danger in it and simply made a virtue of necessity: I boxed on, still am.

  The transition to being truly involved in the newspaper business again came when, on behalf of our company, I acquired control of the Daily Telegraph in London for Can$30 million in 1986. From this, all else follows. The newspaper was suffering from an aging readership, antiquated equipment, all the usual British labour problems, and elderly but conscientious management. We installed an almost entirely new management team and ethos and expanded the Daily Telegraph to be a full-service newspaper. Two-thirds of the aged employees were negotiated into voluntary retirement, which they sought but had been unable to consider under the company’s frugal pension scheme, and the Telegraph titles recovered admirably. Robert Maxwell, the egregious proprietor of the Daily Mirror, whom I did not yet know, said, “Mr. Black has landed Britain’s biggest fish with history’s smallest hook.”

  AT A MEETING OF THE DIRECTORS of The Telegraph plc in December 1986, the owner, Lord Hartwell, fainted. His loss of consciousness was prompted by the realization he had lost control of the newspaper that his family, the Berrys, had acquired in late-Victorian times. The boardroom sounded to me like something out of a Mitford novel. “Daddy, Daddy,” called his son Adrian from one end of the boardroom table. His other son, Nicholas, was hissing at his father for what he thought was a rotten deal and at the Canadian “predators” for taking up the deal. Rank and decorum were firmly maintained throughout by Hartwell’s admirable secretary, who stood over him as the paramedics arrived, pronouncing, “I will not allow just anyone to lay hands on Lord Hartwell.”*

  Hartwell had done his best to maintain the editorial excellence of The Telegraph plc but had dragged it almost to bankruptcy largely through an ambitious attempt to install modern presses in two vast plants in Manchester and London. But he had made no effort to arrange demanning from the unionized workforces, nor to arrange long-term financing with banks, and just kept writing large and extraordinary construction payments against a current account.

  Hartwell, who fortunately suffered nothing more than a fainting spell, remained chairman for another two years as we sorted things out. I would not consider treating him abruptly. The fissiparous Nicholas Berry vowed eternal vengeance and did everything in his power to poison the waters with concocted stories about my associates and me. Adrian Berry, an exceedingly amiable British eccentric liked by all, with esoteric scientific interests that entirely possessed him, remained at the Telegraph as its science writer and a director. Mercifully, the pestilential Nicholas peevishly resigned.

  Gaining control of The Telegraph plc in the U.K. changed my life. As its proprietor, I finally had a meaningful political voice (which I did not at that point have in Canada) and access to echelons of international decision-making I had not previously enjoyed, because of the influence of one newspaper and the British custom of deference to national newspaper owners.

  For seventeen years the fortunes of the Telegraph and its staff were pre-eminent in my thoughts. Running a leading British quality newspaper requires some agility. The waters are shark-infested, with seventeen national newspapers, including the Sundays, which are considered separate and often have different titles, competing in London.

  The Telegraph plc had been a way of life for more than a century. A writer might mention the Telegraph in a novel or essay, as George Orwell did in The Lion and the Unicorn, and that reference would be shorthand for an entire set of values, idiosyncracies, and even colour of shoes. The Daily Telegraph was generally thought to be the greatest bastion of the British Conservative Party. The men who built it up, Lord Burnham and Lord Camrose, were influential Conservative peers. The Daily Telegraph had engaged Winston Churchill at various times in his career, including after the Munich Agreement (which the Telegraph commendably opposed). The editor at the time our company invested in it was Bill Deedes, a former minister of the Harold Macmillan Conservative government and said to be the model for Auberon Waugh’s accidental hero in his famous newspaper novel, Scoop. It was the pre-eminent newspaper of middle England, the gin-and-tonic, cricket-watching backbone of the nation. To be proprietor of the Telegraph was instantly to enter to the core of Britain, with all the benefits that implies. Once installed in Britain, I got a free pass on the many tests of accent, lineage, school, and other yardsticks by which the British subtly calibrate one another. I was Canadian, apparently literate, but it was assumed, in the unerringly apt words of my magnificent and distinguished friend Lord Carrington, that “he doesn’t quite get it.” Which I sometimes did not.

  The British had long been accustomed, since their days of empire, to assimilating foreigners into prominent places in their society, especially from their former empire. This was an adjustment to geopolitical realities, not a relaxation of English xenophobia.

  They are contemptuous of those who are abrasively foreign and of those who seem ingratiatingly imitative. It is a subtle and invidious game, and the British are difficult to please. I understood that the natives found me somewhat irrepressible and overbearing, in the manner that fits their caricature of North Americans, though. I was generally credited with literacy and a fair knowledge of British history.

  –

  IN 1986, THE BRITISH SOUL was still absorbing Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher’s long-standing chief adviser, Charles Powell, said that her first meeting with me was “love at first sight, politically speaking.”

/>   Outwardly, the Conservative Party was united behind Thatcher. But from fairly early on in my time in the United Kingdom, I was impressed at the size of the pockets of resentment in her own ranks. She was too pro-American. She was too “uncaring,” had pulled the rug out from under former prime minister and Conservative Party leader Edward Heath when she defeated him for the leadership in 1975. (Except for Stanley Baldwin and Sir Alec-Douglas Home, all British Conservative leaders since Bonar Law in 1923 have been undercut by their own ostensible supporters, even the octogenarian Churchill in 1955.) But most of all, in stylistic terms, she was the champion of “bourgeois triumphalism” (a slightly sniffy phrase coined by our Sunday editor, Peregrine Worsthorne), and she was “that woman” and thought to be a bossy woman (not entirely without reason). My position kept me in touch with all the Conservative factions, although my personal loyalty to Thatcher was well known. It must be said that she was rather insouciant; she could have warded off the problems that came down after the damning resignation speech of her deputy prime minister, Geoffrey Howe, in 1990 and would almost certainly have been re-elected in 1992. But her many victories had dulled her sense of self-preservation. I warned her and her chief loyalists several times of the conspiratorial fermentation among the MPs, obviously without naming anyone, but was treated as a well-meaning alarmist. I had been around politics, albeit in less storied places and with less distinguished leaders, a long time, and I knew unsafe levels of restiveness when I found them. Her enemies were not her peers, her successors were relatively undistinguished, yet “great (Thatcher) fell.”

  Three candidates for the succession emerged from the scrum, and the usual editorial infighting began as to whom the Telegraph would support. Michael Heseltine was a tall, handsome man with thick, wavy blond hair and superbly cut Savile Row suits, an accomplished businessman and former defence minister, and a formidable public speaker. He was the closest in policy terms to Thatcher, with the important exception of the issue that still burns in the United Kingdom while barely being noticed in North America – namely, the degree to which Britain should be assimilated into a unified Europe. Heseltine was an ardent Euro-joiner.

  Douglas Hurd was to the left of the party, a Tory “wet.” His shock of spiralling white hair and his efforts to play down his Eton and Oxford background by wearing buttoned cardigans while talking about his work as a “tenant” farmer (on his family’s land) made him a natural target for such diabolical mimics as Britain’s Rory Bremner, who would play Hurd in a red cardigan sitting surrounded by little children serenading him with a song: “Douglas, you’re useless and so is all that you do. Douglas, you’re clueless and that’s what we think of you.” (The tune was from a popular British sitcom.)

  The Sunday Telegraph endorsed John Major, the son of a trapeze artist from Pittsburgh. He had no university education, let alone an Oxbridge background, and his contribution to the campaign was to talk about Britain’s new “classless society” in flat, unadorned prose that some saw as altogether too representative of his vision.

  I erred on the side of liberality and left the editors to make their own choices. Douglas Hurd exercised an intellectual domination over Max Hastings, the otherwise formidable editor of the Daily Telegraph, as thorough as that which Douglas would soon assert over John Major. We should have gone for Heseltine as the strongest leader, or Major as Thatcher’s choice, but as Worsthorne on the Sunday was supporting Major, and I was happy to have a foot in two camps, and Heseltine was Thatcher’s nemesis, and I felt that I owed it to her inspired leadership that I was in Britain at all, I didn’t overrule Max. I liked all three candidates personally.

  One of our leading editorial commentators, Sarah Hogg, wife, daughter, and daughter-in-law of Conservative cabinet ministers, was a Euro-joiner and urged upon me, at Max Hastings’s prompting, the view that John Major was not intellectually qualified to be prime minister. I was slightly surprised when she called me a few days after Major’s victory to ask that I say nothing of her opinion of the new leader, as she was about to become head of his Downing Street policy unit. Her appreciation of him rose.

  The Daily Telegraph did its best, along with most of the major national newspapers, to help Major win the general election of 1992. This was the first time a British party had won four full-term consecutive elections since the First Reform Act had expanded the electorate beyond a small and comparatively wealthy group in 1832. But it was not long before we began to have some reservations. An amiable man and a talented former whip, Major was better at organizing and conciliating than he was at leading in a way that rallied the fractious elements of the Conservative Party. Max Hastings parted company with Major more on the basis of this evaluation of his leadership abilities than of his policies. Hastings started the rumour that John Major tucked his shirt inside his underpants, a uniquely British, snobbish (and outrageous) reflection. Major weakly told me that at least where he had gone to school, he did not have to fear for his safety when he picked the soap off the floor of the shower stall, referring to alleged homosexuality in Britain’s famous private-sector schools. There was an unseemly disregard for the prime minister and a pattern of unconfident responses from him.

  The deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph was Charles Moore, former editor of the Spectator. Moore was a particular type of Englishman: reserved, well mannered, difficult to read, a man who had been accepted to Eton and Cambridge because of his considerable intellectual prowess rather than family connections. He and Hastings had a very abrasive relationship. Where Hastings was a closet Euro-joiner and more or less a Red Tory in all matters except taxes and unions, Moore was a Euro-skeptic and High Tory of Edwardian leanings. For Moore, the defining moment in the evolution of his opinions and in his career development was when Hong Kong under British rule (until the 1997 handover to the Chinese) admitted and then forcibly expelled the Vietnamese boat people.

  Moore, who before this had had the standard High Tory doubts about the basic reliability, civility, and good taste of America, suddenly decided that the United States was the only country that had the integrity, courage, and bearing of a great power. Max jubilantly told me that Charles had put in for the position of Washington correspondent.

  I determined that if Moore had come to this realization, it was time for him to move up and not down, and appointed him editor of the Sunday Telegraph. Under Charles Moore, the Major government got a very rough ride, which brought out the proprietary instincts of the Conservative Party. They believed they had the right to the unwavering adherence of what was often called the Torygraph and that anything less than that was a betrayal. To the credit of the editors and the political desk, even Neil Kinnock, the leader of the Labour Party in the 1987 and 1992 elections, told me that though he did not agree with the Telegraph’s editorial positions, he regarded it as a newspaper of scrupulously fair reporting.

  The wheels started to come off the Major government. Chancellor Norman Lamont was dumped in 1992 after the Exchange Rates Mechanism fiasco (fixing the pound opposite European currencies in a narrow band that the pound fell out of), though he had been one of Major’s leading backers for the party leadership. He then became an intractable opponent of the prime minister, accusing him of being “in office but not in power.” At the Bilderberg meeting in Bürgenstock, Switzerland, in 1995, I probed this subject with him over some local wine. He exclaimed, “I am prepared to discuss treason, but not while drinking this ghastly Swiss weasel-piss.” We moved to a more potable French wine.

  John Major decided to clear the air by resigning as party leader and calling an instant vote of his caucus in a new leadership election, where he would stand to replace himself. I learned this while I was a guest of Lord Woodrow Wyatt at the horse races at Ascot. Cellphones were not yet popular in Britain, so I went out to my car, which was equipped with a phone, and called Rupert Murdoch to ask whether he would join in a solid front for Michael Portillo, a possible candidate for the leadership – a rather exotic and unlikely member of the Tory ca
ucus due to his Spanish ancestry and interest in opera. He said he would, so I called Portillo, who said he had just announced he would not run but explained he had rented space and ordered the installation of a large number of telephones because he thought someone else would stand and force Major out, and he could take advantage without the opprobrium. Trying to be a loyalist while really being an opportunist is risky. Portillo’s balancing act undid him, and his promising career as a politician went into decline. Major easily retained the leadership.

  A number of rather odd initiatives were launched to rally the Telegraph to the Tory government’s aid. At one point John Major intervened with the Canadian High Commissioner, Fred Eaton, to ask me to impose moderation on the paper’s reflections on the government. Lord Wyatt, a bibulous, gossip-addicted, and almost incomprehensible salonnier who had lived for years off the Thatcher government’s patronage as head of the horse race betting authority, hatched a scheme to offer me a peerage in exchange for extinguishing the criticism of the Major government in the Daily Telegraph. Wyatt was by now so ineffectual that he never made this plan clear to me, though I would have paid no attention if he had. I discovered the scheme only when reading John Major’s memoirs and Wyatt’s incoherently acidulous, posthumously published diaries. Major demanded to know of Wyatt why I wasn’t responding. Did I not have control of the Daily Telegraph?