Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
Black’s new friends were undecided whether his amusing lectures reflected arrogance, insecurity or insensitivity. Like others, the Johnsons were puzzled by Black’s parochialism. On his first visit to their house he looked shocked by a plate of mussels, especially when other guests ate them by hand. As a preliminary to meeting Margaret Thatcher, Andrew Knight arranged to call on Charles Powell, Thatcher’s foreign policy adviser, in Downing Street. ‘What do you think Powell thought of me,’ Black repeatedly asked Knight afterwards. The judgement in Downing Street, Knight did not reveal, was that Black was ‘a provincial hick’.
‘Hello Margaret,’ smiled Black as he entered Chequers with Andrew Knight on 2 April 1986. Thatcher’s close staff, accustomed to calling her ‘Prime Minister’, were surprised by Black’s assumption of equality. They were to be even more surprised by his conduct. After the pleasantries, Black embarked on a monologue, lecturing his hostess about her place in British history alongside Pitt and Disraeli. His fluent performance was honed as much to massage his own ego as to flatter his audience. He was too enraptured by his own verbal elegance to notice his hostess’s astonishment. Propriety required that she mask her impatience and ‘listen carefully’. The Conservative Party relied on the Telegraph group, and it was politic to humour its owner. Her concealment succeeded. Unknown to her visitor, Thatcher rarely listened to what she was told. Her only interest was what she would say in reply. Impervious to her true sentiments, Black was pleased, as they bade farewell, that Thatcher ‘patted me most considerately on the shoulder and said, “That is very good, Mr Black. Do come back.”’ As his Rolls-Royce drove down the gravel driveway, Black asked Knight impatiently, ‘How did it go? What do you think she thought of me? Do you think she respected me?’ For several days he repeated the questions. ‘I’m sure she thought you know more about the history of the Tory Party than she does,’ replied Knight, protecting Black from the truth, ‘but that only goes so far.’
Before their meeting, Thatcher had been aware of Black’s opposition to hanging, not because he was against capital punishment, but because he felt hanging was ‘too good for them’. She had wrongly assumed that that was said in jest. After their meeting, she told her aides that compared to Black, ‘I’m a liberal wet.’ An intimidating bore, she concluded of the new proprietor. Unlike Rupert Murdoch, whom she genuinely liked, she decided to tolerate Black because the Telegraph was important, but he would be classified as ‘low profile’.
Over the following days Black regaled many about his successful visit. Among his listeners was Peter Munk, a self-made Canadian billionaire whose company, Barrick, would become the world’s biggest gold extractor. Shortly after visiting Chequers, Black flew with Munk by helicopter to Highgrove to lunch with Prince Charles. Munk had skied with Charles at Klosters, and offered him an opportunity to persuade a friendly newspaper proprietor to treat the royal family with more consideration. ‘You’ll like Prince Charles,’ Munk told Black. ‘He’s a good guy and you should help him.’ Their encounter began with a tour of Highgrove’s organic garden. At the beginning of lunch Charles explained his vegetarianism. Black seized the cue. Throughout the meal, a torrent of history poured from him, describing the British royal family’s eating habits. Ignoring Charles’s obvious distaste for the excruciating details of his grandfather George VI’s tendencies, Black did not stop until minutes before he departed. ‘Not a success,’ Charles later told an aide. Gossip about Black’s behaviour spread around London. ‘He’s such a heavy personality to escort around,’ Knight told a friend. ‘I have to keep him away from the paper to prevent revolt.’ Black himself was sensitive to that danger. Without protest, he even obeyed Knight’s instruction to stay away during the Queen’s visit to the newspaper’s new premises as part of her tour of London’s Docklands. That was a worthwhile price to pay if he was to shed his tarnished reputation in Canada. With patience he could emerge as a cleansed, acceptable character in London, and become influential and rich.
Max Hastings, an excellent journalist, historian and analyst, was a valuable ally in that quest. Energetically, Hastings was transforming the Telegraph into a respectable mouthpiece for independent Conservatism. Black, however, was not wholly enamoured. There were, he noted, some unattractive aspects of Hastings’s Toryism. The editor was critical of Margaret Thatcher’s strident antagonism towards the public services; he bore an Englishman’s mistrust of American politicians; and he was convinced that the Telegraph’s future depended on abandoning its blind support for the Conservative Party. As proprietor, Black was entitled to express his opinions and to seek to persuade his editor to reconsider his newspaper’s position on any issue. His profound knowledge of history and his ability to recite tidal waves of obscure political facts strengthened the credibility of his opinions. The correlative was his myopic intolerance of contrary views and his distrust of those who wrote for his papers. ‘I’m not a particularly great admirer of journalists,’ he said. ‘A great many of them are irresponsible. They have great power, and many of them are extremely reckless.’2 Among those he most distrusted was the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who had suggested in the Spectator in July 1985 that the announcement of President Reagan’s cancer treatment deliberately concealed his more serious Alzheimer’s. In a protest letter to the Spectator, Black criticised Hitchens as ‘a disgrace to the profession [who] should not be employed’. Hitchens’s article, Black continued, was motivated by ‘nasty, macabre, vulgar and insolent claptrap’ which revealed the ‘lack of integrity and serious analysis in British and most foreign reporting of American affairs’. To silence Hitchens, Black threatened to buy every newspaper that offered him employment. Although Hitchens’s article would prove to be accurate, Black showed no remorse. He espoused, as Max Hastings discovered, his own version of the truth.
Black’s disagreement with Hastings’s opinions remained restrained until the US Air Force bombed Libya on 14 April 1986 in retaliation for Colonel Gaddafi’s support of a terrorist attack in Berlin. Black, preparing to fly to Britain to attend the Bilderberg Conference at Gleneagles in Scotland, was infuriated by the Telegraph’s condemnation of President Reagan’s bombardment. His newspaper, he believed, should reflect his own unquestioning support of America. He admonished Hastings for his ‘seriously fallacious analysis of what was really happening’. Colonel Gaddafi had after all, said Black, supplied the IRA with weapons. Black wanted a warmer embrace of Reagan and America. Hastings disagreed. Black’s brand of American Republicanism, he said, was unsuitable for a British audience. On that issue, Black won. ‘Since Conrad was the principal shareholder in the paper,’ Hastings would concede, ‘it would have appeared discourteous to trample gratuitously on his most cherished convictions.’3 That exchange was a precursor to more intervention. Black would forbid the use of the word ‘Irangate’, referring to the secret and illegal supply of weapons by President Reagan to Iran, on the grounds that the Watergate affair was far more serious; and while tolerating Hastings’s support for sanctions against South Africa to end apartheid and his opposition to capital punishment, he would criticise his ‘incorrect thinking’ about Northern Ireland. To Black’s credit, he did not countermand Hastings’s dismissal as a columnist of Margaret Thatcher’s daughter Carol for working as a freelance without permission. The Prime Minister was livid, and pledged never to invite Hastings to Downing Street again.4 Black was embarrassed, but tolerated his editor’s authority, although increasingly Hastings received not only letters of complaint but midnight telephone calls from across the Atlantic, during which Black would nitpick at length, regardless of the time.5 Black’s intolerance towards journalists matched his fierce reaction to those in Canada who had questioned his honesty in business.
Black’s political certainties concealed his personal insecurity. Despite the psychoanalysis thirteen years earlier, he continued to suffer ‘bouts of miscellaneous obsessive fear’ and depression. One cure was his growing interest in religion, especially the mystical teaching of Cardinal Newman, the nineteenth-century English theologian and philosopher.6 In Newman’s view, a man’s personality cannot be called into question, because God reveals Himself in a man’s conscience. Black’s interest