Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  Walker, Carroll, Metcalfe, and Wakefield were all fired by Richter, more or less publicly, with the acquiescence and tongue-lashing of the perceptive Campbell, who had put them in their jobs in the first place after firing our directors and had tipped his figurative wig to his protegé Walker as the man of the hour. Now they were castigated by the judge, the receiver, and the Glassman group, with loud noises echoing behind them that the shareholders would seek restitution. Up until a few days before, Walker had been babbling on to the press about all that he would accomplish, about his munificences to the shareholders, and about Campbell’s protection of him. Campbell’s other lapidary comment on one of the other individuals in this case was: “If Mr. Strosberg tells me something, I believe it.”

  The coup de grâce for Walker was a brilliant letter to the National Post by Peter White, published July 5. He wrote that he and I had been scraping the bottom of the barrel to find this group of directors, who were not engaged as managers, and that he would not hire any of them “to run a lemonade stand in July.” Our intelligence reports from within 10 Toronto Street indicated utter pandemonium, with the ostensible executives running down the halls like frightened schoolchildren. They ordered payroll to prepay their salaries for July, but payroll refused. Walker and Carroll vanished into a greater obscurity than that from which they had been plucked.

  Inc. stock sank like a stone. It was evident there was no chance either of privatization or of proper business management. The benefit of Inc.’s existence now was as a well from which accountants, lawyers, and a rotating list of greedy directors could all draw money, paying themselves enormous sums of it for administering the back-breaking task of vacuuming up Inc.’s cash. In spite of the $100 million from the Telegraph sale and the $20 million I had lent it, the stock had declined by more than 90 per cent from our offer in less than two years. The Canadian media said almost nothing about this dreadful rape of the public shareholders or about the fact that it was the result of Breeden’s unofficial “lecture” to the OSC.

  Ezra Levant’s Western Standard produced a full exposé of the extravagance and incompetence of the Paris and Walker despotisms. The magazine pointed out that I had refinanced Hollinger Inc. twice in 2004, for a total of $236 million, and loaned it $20 million. “His reward for saving the shareholders from bankruptcy was being ‘thrown out of the company, evicted from the building and represented to the press of the world as some sort of sneak stealing his own papers out of his own building…. The papers were not under any court order and he had a perfect right to remove them. Where’s the due process in all this?’” (Western Standard, July 11, 2005). This was almost the first journalistic treatment, apart from Mark Steyn, of what was really happening to the Hollinger companies, and was typical of the insight and independent-mindedness of Ezra Levant, who was at this time engaged in a battle with Canada’s irresponsible human rights commissions, which he resoundingly and deservedly won.

  And more reporting of the true activities of Walker and his group crept into the media after Peter White’s letter lifted a rock on them.

  I now had no job and no office. I would get to work on writing a book about Richard Nixon, obtain some modest involvement with our continuing interests, and continue to devote myself to enjoying my splendid library. In the familiar precinct of my family home, I was crossing the desert, but I had a compass. I started with intensified Nixon research, not knowing how far it would be possible to go, but it was agreeably diverting work that could be conducted at any time, and painlessly interrupted for legal or other calls.

  I read the Special Committee interviews. It was fantastic that we had been stripped of the company, shunned socially, and suffered such massive damage to our reputation on the strength of such puny allegations. Peter Atkinson had been whiny and sanctimonious but alleged no wrongdoing. Instead, he devoted himself to evading his responsibility for the legal work that led to the controversy in the first place and masqueraded as a voice of probity and moderation in a gluttonous atmosphere. Even David Radler, implausibly, attempted a slight bit of this, joking with Breeden about my British title. They did not realize that Breeden could not be appeased that way. Their specious efforts at dumping blame in my lap would be accepted as evidence against me but would not deliver them from the crosshairs. More alarming was the extent of Radler’s delusional and tactical revisionism revealed in the interviews, as will be discussed in the next chapter.

  If Brendan Sullivan was right and the Department of Justice would uphold everything for a year, this would merely prolong the Breeden gravy train and build shareholder impatience for a resolution of it. (I overrated the shareholders’ sense of self-preservation.) By then, I could buy out the receivership, as some of my assets would ripen, privatize Hollinger Inc., and move on Breeden. He would not be able to pull the same rabbit out of the hat at the Ontario Securities Commission two years in a row.

  I HAD A CONTINUING SENSE of relief to be free from the Telegraph. Advertising in the London national newspapers had generally collapsed, a very tricky situation for even skilled and experienced newspaper publishers. The Barclays had little idea what to do; their circulation was evaporating and they had no natural instincts as publishers. In firing Dominic Lawson as editor for the Sunday Telegraph; replacing him with the pleasant and perky Sarah Sands; retaining Martin Newland; and making Boris Johnson, MP, answerable at the Spectator to Andrew Neil, whom David Barclay himself had not spoken of very positively, they assured the continued decline of the group. I regretted that Murdoch might be the beneficiary of it. All the newspapers were losing ground; the British national newspaper industry was in full decline, the Telegraph among the most precipitately so. I grieved for the titles I had known, and for what they might have still been, though not for the journalists who had attacked Barbara and me.

  A journalist wrote my “living will,” flagged on the front page of the weekend Globe and Mail. It was an unsuccessful attempt at vivacity of wit. The next week the same newspaper ran a column by Jan Wong, an enthusiastic veteran of China’s Cultural Revolution who had confessed to denouncing several people in her zeal. “May God forgive me,” she wrote in her autobiography. Whatever God’s will in this matter, her little errors in China, which probably cost her victims their lives or liberty, hadn’t restrained her. She now devised a scheme to purge Toronto of its dishonest citizens. She left eleven wallets around Toronto, each with a twenty-dollar bill inside and identification showing an Asian family, including a boy in a wheelchair, together with a note and telephone number requesting any finder to call J. Wong. Ten of the wallets were left in public places such as parks and schoolyards. The eleventh was more specific: allegedly thrown over my garden gates and not returned. This was headlined as illustrative of what Ravelston’s receivership had done to me. I had had to steal twenty dollars from a handicapped Asian. George Jonas wrote a withering rebuttal with one of his unerringly accurate arrows: “It’s easier to take the girl out of the Red Guard than to take the Red Guard out of the girl.” (Barbara, ever conscientious to clear me even of such idiocies, spent many hours vainly combing through leaves and debris along the railings and gate at the front of our house.)

  Doug Kelly offered me a column in the National Post about foreign affairs, and I accepted. I wrote an extensive piece for the National Interest on the debacle of the European constitution, which, ever since Giscard d’Estaing unveiled it, I saw as a madly unworkable document, a matrix for utter chaos. Finally, by late June, with criminal action apparently unlikely any time soon and the New York apartment moving toward a sale, I determined that it was time to return to England, not only to show the flag but to actually enjoy friends and spend some weeks with Barbara free of this mad and squalid ethical wasteland. I swept Barbara up like D’artagnan, and we went to Britain and the south of France for a month. The decision was one of my best.

  In the past, beginning in July and peaking in August, when all of Europe went into summer holiday mode, we would spend about three weeks in the sou
th of France, often based in Monte Carlo. From there we could rent a car and visit friends who had second homes in France or drive into Italy. Then we would return to Toronto to spend August at our own home. Monte Carlo and August in Toronto were always the happiest times for us. I, briefly, could have the illusion of not working, though in truth too many days were consumed with endless telephone calls to financiers or lawyers. Barbara rarely gave up her column for more than two weeks and got very twitchy if she was not writing it. “The jig is up,” she would say in a worried little voice. “The columnist replacing me [for the vacation] is really good.” This time, the trip to London and on to Monte Carlo was an almost unqualified success.

  We returned to the familiar end-of-season marvellously eclectic gatherings of people in splendid settings. For just a moment, it was as if very little had changed. The warmth was genuine, not just the standard London shrieks of “We must get together,” “Longing to talk to you,” followed by silence.

  We had told only a few close friends we were coming, but on encountering us at one or other place, others seemed enthusiastic in making plans to get together. Peter Carrington and Jacob Rothschild each invited us to dine with them in public places, where the newspapers would certainly hear of it and did. These were delightful occasions; they brought home the isolation of the bunker in Toronto and the solidarity of the British. The conversation was absorbing, the conviviality uncontrived and uncompetitive. After twenty months in the tenebrous thickets of the American legal gulag and the junior-league Canadian juridical survival camp, returning to the London I had known made the endless, vicious defamations in the press and the avalanche of subpoenas all seem a bad and distant dream.

  Barbara came alive again, meeting her girlfriends over the most peculiar menus and at odd venues. She and Annabelle Weidenfeld favoured a sidewalk bistro off Knightsbridge that had a direct fronting on the neighbouring hotel’s dustbins.

  For me there were useful reconciliations with Charles Moore (who said of the Telegraph: “You’re probably well out of it”); with Boris Johnson, who claimed he would publish a piece of mine; and with Andrew Neil, who revealed how defective Rick Burt had become and how little Burt appreciated his Hollinger depositions. And there was the pleasant London spring season of running into people, from the delightful Barry Humphries (whose alter ego is Dame Edna Everage) and his adorable wife, Lizzie Spender, to the leader of the opposition and my old dining club partner, Michael Howard, at the start of a new Tory leadership race to choose the fifth successor to Margaret Thatcher in the fifteen years since her departure, to the just-retiring prime minister of New South Wales, Bob Carr, head of the Chester A. Arthur Society of Sydney and a very accomplished man, who, since the death of the novelist Morris West, is probably my best friend in Australia.

  I took Barbara to dinner at Annabel’s (named after Annabel Goldsmith), then still run by Annabel’s former husband, Mark Birley, and their son, Robin. We had had our wedding dinner there in 1992 and Barbara has always loved the club.

  Generally we did not refer to our travails except when asked, and then only in the knowing sense that the questioner of course knew the vagaries of the American justice system and the tendency in the United States of litigious fads to get out of control and become plagues. This was rarely a hard sell with the British, as even those who do not resent the United States consider it a half-mad country at the best of times. We made it clear that we would be moving back. I concerted a few points with Rocco Forte about the Catholic Herald, which we now owned jointly.

  The British are sufficiently worldly, respectful of privacy, and fuzzy about commerce that the appearance of well-being and a level of confidence that is fairly impenetrable without being overegged gets one by. I went round to routine places and resumed acquaintances very affectingly, with the great Doug Hayward, tailor, then suffering from a very rapid case of Parkinson’s and now deceased; Roy, my barber at Claridge’s; my book dealers, especially Glenn Mitchell at Maggs; and the captains at White’s club, Harry’s Bar, Mark’s, Annabel’s, and so on.

  At the Brompton Oratory, I met fellow congregants who showed the discreet warmth the British practise so naturally. One of the Oratorians, formerly a Daily Telegraph reporter, told me that they celebrated a mass for me every month. My status on many ceremonial invitation lists had depended solely on my position at the Telegraph; my status as a distinct personality, like everything else now, depended only on me, and I had discovered through this horrible ordeal that I was not so bad a person to depend on.

  In France, we went to Apax founding partner Ronnie Cohen’s sixtieth birthday party in Cannes. Barbara had told me how especially kind he and his wife, the successful Israeli-born film producer Sharon Harel-Cohen, daughter of Yossi Harel, captain of the Holocaust survivor ship Exodus, had been to her at various times during the past few years when she was alone in London: offering her help with seating in the synagogue to which both Barbara and the Cohens belonged, inviting her to break the fast with them on Yom Kippur, and extending in the warmest way the hand of friendship in moments that had a particular importance to her for both religious and personal reasons.

  Barbara was right when she said that no matter how wicked the British press were – and their wickedness could not be equalled anywhere in North America – the staunchness of our British friends could be relied upon. One of the most pleasant evenings was spent at the fine home of Elton John on Mont St. Alban, above Nice. Our relations with Elton and his partner (now spouse), David Furnish of Scarborough (Ontario), as he emphasizes, have always been excellent. They are delightfully talented and witty people and unwaveringly loyal friends. Barbara is a great fan of them both and credits David with changing her views on same-sex marriage. It did not endear her to a number of her readers when she campaigned for its recognition.

  We also had a pleasant dinner in Monte Carlo with the financier and philanthropist Ezra Zilkha and Cecile, his wife, of New York. Ezra, a loyal friend, was clearly worn down by the pressures of his wife’s illness, and she had the bewigged, reduced, and stoic appearance of someone putting up a gallant fight against a pernicious disease. We spent our last night, August 3, in Nice and had a nostalgic if altogether unsatisfactory evening struggling with gold plastic bathtubs and the exigencies of modern technology, at the Negresco. These brief, happy times spawned the predictable and feeble response by the U.K. tabloids. According to the Mail and the Evening Standard, I had shown outrageous “chutzpah” in accepting the invitations of old friends to lunch and dinner. It was an interlude that was over too soon.

  HORRIBLE THOUGH THE WHOLE Hollinger affair was, as I pointed out to Barbara, it was reassuring to know that we had fought through this ghastly nightmare to this point on our own. What were outmanoeuvring the other factions at Argus Corporation and picking up the Telegraph torch from Michael Hartwell compared with a successful defence against the entire thousand-eyed monster of misplaced, perverted American official zeal, aided by the obedient, imitative Canadians? Ours was a triumph in the making, and in London it was not at all a lonely one. This is the only area where Barbara and I differ: she has no understanding of this ringing approach to misfortune. Her natural instinct is to resign herself to the worst possible outcome. In this, she reminded me of a well-known photo I showed her of European Jews during the Second World War being marched along the streets carrying their small bundles of belongings. Behind one such family walked a little girl, her body language summing up utter despair. This was Barbara’s posture, pessimistic but never unsupportive of me. She was simply preparing to go all the way down with the ship if necessary.

  Despite all the disappointments and the challenges following the involuntary abortion of privatization, this was an infinitely preferable summer to the previous one, when we were awaiting the assault from Breeden’s Special Committee and the likely copycat actions of the SEC and OSC. It seemed, misleadingly, that time was starting to heal some wounds.

  [CHAPTER TEN]

  THE FACT THAT DAVID RADL
ER’S counsel had withdrawn from the joint defence group indicated that Anton Valukas, his lawyer, thought he could really do something with Radler in Chicago as Queen for a Day – the colloquial term for the procedure of exploring what deal a target might make with the prosecutors. I was disgusted and filled with revulsion that I had spent as long as I had in business with Radler. It was obvious that I could not trust him after the Todd Vogt affair. I should have been more suspicious of his endless grabbing for money and his disparagement of public companies. Once I had seen this, my plan was to let the private newspaper companies he had spun out of Hollinger International ripen and then trade some of my shareholdings in them for Radler’s Ravelston shares. I didn’t have the means to buy him out earlier without taking on debt I preferred to avoid. This was a mistake. Time had run out on that plan, as on much else.

  Radler thought he was the sole architect of our financial success and the only one of us who had any idea how to run a business. He told anyone who would listen that I was the social face of our business while he was the real business brains. His fear, exposed by the ordeal of the legal crisis, for which he was largely responsible as head of the division where they originated, seemed to have produced a bitter and galling response that he smarmily concealed in discussion between us. I still doubted that he could promise the U.S. attorney anything useful and thought he would be back to us eventually, pretending that he had only been exploring alternatives, as Atkinson and Kipnis had. I would have to consider how to partition the private companies, disentangle our interests from his, and end the association.