Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
months later, Hartwell was sinking. By November the Telegraph’s costs were out of control, and the banks refused to advance more money. On the brink of insolvency, only one source of finance was available. From Toronto, Conrad Black offered to advance £20 million in return for 50.1 per cent of the shares and control of the company. At one stage during the tense negotiations conducted by Dan Colson, Hartwell agreed to Black’s take-over, only to reverse his decision soon afterwards. At a critical meeting, the peer appeared first oblivious to his imminent downfall, and then helpless. He collapsed under the stress, and was carried comatose from the boardroom. ‘If he dies, it will save time,’ quipped David Radler from Toronto. While he was careful never to say anything cruel in public, Black did not shed any crocodile tears over his quarry. Gleefully he reported that ‘Lord Fartwell’, Private Eye’s caricature, was sinking. ‘It had become surrealistic,’ he concluded, ‘as tenacious resistance to the inevitable eventually always does, the surest sign that the endgame was finally afoot.’9 Conrad Black could not have anticipated how his scathing homily would become appropriate to himself eighteen years later.
As the hours ticked by, Black and Colson applied the pressure, humiliating Nicholas Berry and forcing his father’s capitulation. On 11 December 1985, the decent amateur surrendered. For just £30 million, Black had won control. To appear magnanimous, he agreed to Knight’s suggestion that Hartwell should remain as the company’s chairman and editor-in-chief, and that it was he who should announce the transfer of ownership at a press conference. Among the journalists gathered was John Fraser, Black’s old school friend, who was now working for the Globe and Mail. ‘He does not want to be any sort of newspaper tycoon,’ Fraser heard Hartwell say. ‘We have not sold out.’ Fraser’s smile widened as Hartwell continued, ‘I’m happy to report that Mr Black is an entirely passive investor with no known interests in the British newspaper business.’ Fraser’s smile grew broader. ‘They’re finished,’ he thought. ‘Everyone from Newfoundland to Victoria will be laughing and cheering Conrad on. They couldn’t even be bothered to make just one phone call to Canada.’
In Toronto, Black would have agreed. Overnight he had been transformed from a small-time publisher into an international star. ‘I’ve hit the jackpot,’ he laughed to a friend in a telephone conversation. ‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.’10 Black’s critics wrongly assumed that he had ‘pulled a fast one’, while he himself portrayed the deal as the product of genius, ‘maintaining a kind of symmetry as if you were conducting a symphony orchestra’. In reality, he had merely grasped an offer created by an old man’s short-sightedness and a bank’s incompetence. All that remained was to find £20 million. Despite his claim a few weeks later to have ‘earned more than $100 million’ over the years, he did not possess any meaningful sum of money.11 At first he asked his closest friends, including Fred Eaton, ‘Do you want a piece of the action?’ Eaton prevaricated, while others, wary of Black since the Norcen scandal, refused outright. Finally, having sold his other assets, Black scraped together £20 million, helped by his directorship of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
In his hour of triumph, Black was elated but realistic. He knew his personal handicaps. He was unqualified to combat the British trade unions’ regular blackmail, and his financial experience of small newspapers across North America was inadequate to resolve the Telegraph’s plight. ‘Let Radler sort them out,’ he suggested to Andrew Knight. ‘Out of the question,’ replied Knight. The appearance in Fleet Street for just one hour of the ratty, uncouth hypochondriac, obsessed by fetishes about germs, would raise destructive questions about Black himself. ‘Radler is forbidden to come to London,’ ordered Knight. ‘He’s not the sort of person I’d like to see inside the Telegraph building.’ ‘Yes,’ agreed Black. ‘I don’t think the Telegraph is quite ready for David.’ A few days earlier, Knight had been invited to attend the Hollinger board meeting in Toronto summoned to approve the Telegraph deal. The sight of Radler, Peter White and Monte Black plotting like cronies about ‘a scheme to finesse this’ and ‘get control of that’ had shocked him. ‘They sniggered like bad schoolboys,’ Knight later told David Montagu. The worst, reported Knight, was Monte acting like a buffoon. Before leaving Toronto, Knight heard about the details of the Dominion pensions and Norcen controversy. Black, he realised, would not survive in London without his help.
Knight agreed to become the Telegraph’s managing director, on condition that he was given the option to buy 5 per cent of the Telegraph’s stock for £1 a share. ‘Outrageous greed,’ snarled Colson. Knight’s request, Black chorused, was a sign of ‘avarice’, and displayed ‘impenetrable arrogance’. In his experience, journalists never had the upper hand. Knight’s insistence was a novelty, but Black reluctantly acknowledged that without Knight the deal would not have occurred, and without Knight he risked losing his £30 million. Wherever he went in Washington and New York, the power-brokers always asked, ‘How’s Andrew?’ Everyone praised Knight, and he realised he was fortunate to have him as an ally. Reluctantly, he succumbed. ‘If you’re Canadian you start with one strike against you,’ he conceded. The price of being a fish in the big pond was to obey. He accepted the contract submitted by Knight, and headed to Palm Beach for Christmas.
In the sunshine he could reflect that, after seventeen years, he now owned a substantial business. The formula for his partnership with Radler remained their complementary differences. Black liked networking and loathed pernickety chores, while his partner, alias ‘The Refrigerator’ because he was cold and hard, enjoyed sweating the profits by repeatedly probing each newspaper’s finances. Their trusting relationship was cemented by distance: Radler moved to Vancouver, 2,000 miles from Toronto, where he could be with his family, while Black constantly commuted between cities, anticipating the public glory after he took control of the Telegraph. In Florida, mixing with Jayne Wrightsman and the other Palm Beach aristocrats, his fantasies expanded. Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Thomson, the two outstanding Canadian newspaper proprietors, had been treated with deference in Britain. Both had won access to Prime Ministers, and there was every reason, one day, to expect ‘Lord Black’ to follow in their footsteps. Status symbols meant a lot to Black, and although he acknowledged Knight’s warning not to appear as a lusting social mountaineer or a foreign profiteer, he did not intend to emulate Roy Thomson, whose chauffeur would buy a Tube ticket for his employer at Uxbridge station on the Metropolitan Line so he could travel the eight miles to Fleet Street. Black intended to use the Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith which Bud McDougald had appropriated from Massey-Ferguson. Repeating over cocktails in Palm Beach, ‘I’m the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph,’ the image of his destiny unfolded. Not as a mere press baron, but as a world leader – like the power-brokers who featured in countless history books in his library. His youthful fascination for visiting the graves of the famous had not been forgotten. Only the name and the dates were carved on the tombstones of Churchill, de Gaulle, Bismarck and Napoleon. One day, in the long-distant future, his grave might be similarly stark and potent, reflecting his influence on mankind’s fate.
The formal approval of the Telegraph’s shareholders was due on 20 February 1986. In anticipation, Andrew Knight was executing a revolution. At Knight’s suggestion, Black approved two new editors. Max Hastings for the Daily Telegraph, Black agreed, was a brilliant albeit surprising choice. The military historian, writer and broadcaster was a maverick, but could prove to be inspired. Knight’s selection of Peregrine Worsthorne for the Sunday Telegraph caused Black more concern. Unaware that his life’s ambition to be a newspaper editor was about to be fulfilled, Worsthorne had just lamented in the Spectator, then not owned by the Telegraph group, about the nightmare of a Canadian ruffian and asset stripper buying the Telegraph. Knight overcame Black’s reservations. ‘To my amazement,’ Worsthorne recalled, ‘he offered me the opportunity of my lifetime.’ Others had agreed with Worsthorne that Black’s imminent arrival in London was not a blessing. Charles Moore, the editor of the Spectator, commissioned John Ralston Saul, the noted Canadian writer, to write a piece introducing the Telegraph’s new owner. ‘While Mr Black personally grows ever richer,’ Saul wrote witheringly, ‘some