Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
Thirty-four years later, he would proudly admit to having ‘completely undermined the system’ and to have caused ‘utter chaos’.10 Blinded by contempt to the possibility of any flaws in his genius, his last throw was calculated to extract revenge for his injured innocence. He gambled that either the authorities were too stupid to discover his deeds, or that his expulsion would be a painless pleasure.
The extraordinary examination results that followed provoked questions, and Black’s role was discovered. Expulsion was inevitable. He felt no shame, and resisted accepting any blame. He dismissed the school’s principal as an ‘insufferable poltroon’, and derided his wife, whose parting words were that his ‘life was over’, as a ‘desiccated old sorceress’.11 He consoled himself that he had received ‘much moral authority by my failure’, and even John Fraser felt that he was ‘the hero of the hour’. Later, Black described his crime as ‘a fundamental subversive’ plot intended to undermine and overthrow a regime which he compared to that of Nazi Germany. His contempt for those pupils who had exposed his dishonesty matched his scorn for those who were outraged by it. The boys who had bought the stolen papers had wasted their money, but the honest students were also forced to retake the examinations. Black’s condescension towards the innocents, combined with a genuine grievance against those who burnt his effigy on the lawn outside his home, reflected his cavalier arrogance. ‘As I walked out of the gates,’ he wrote self-servingly thirty-four years later, ‘a number of students who literally twenty-four hours before had been begging for assistance – one of them on his knees – were now shaking their fists and shouting words of moralistic execration after me. I’ve never forgotten how cowardly and ungrateful people can be.’12 He blamed the teachers, the school and the system, denying any personal responsibility for his wrongdoing. On the Day of Judgement, Black expected those vilifying him to have to answer for their lack of faith in himself. He was entitled to their praise, not their scorn.
There was a distinctive aspect to Black’s crime. His home environment – the vengeful father, the ineffectual mother and his solitary adoration of history’s heroes – had created an individual who worshipped bronze effigies. Steeped in the blood and glory of history’s heroes, Black’s self-glorification justified trampling on the weak. In his philosophy, society’s masters were permitted to break laws. Veering off the beaten track was imbued in his character. With that notion implanted in his mind, he had lost the only impediment to committing a major crime – a conscience. Black the schoolboy imagined himself to be an unacknowledged genius entitled to break the law. ‘I am neither proud nor ashamed of what happened,’ he wrote. ‘It was an awful system whose odiousness was compounded by banality and pretension.’13
George Black excused his son as a ‘compulsive insubordinate’ eager to prove his credentials as a capitalist.14 The school rejected that explanation, believing that the father was blind to his son’s reckless disregard for rules and morality. Spared any proper parental reprimand, Conrad waited for his mother and father to find a new school. Lonely, he remained in his bedroom listening to long-playing gramophone records of Franklin D. Roosevelt winning the wild applause of a crowd in Madison Square Garden for denouncing American capitalism, the rich and politicians’ deviousness, on his way to becoming President. Roosevelt, he would say admiringly, was a misunderstood hero, defiantly ignoring his physical paralysis to shape the world’s future.
Over the next four years Black passed through two more schools – leaving each because of misbehaviour – before being coached in a crammer to scrape a pass in his final school exams in 1962. His mediocrity reflected his laziness. His reliance on his father’s indulgence and finances was reflected in his unwillingness to focus on his study of journalism and then history at Carleton University in Ottawa, an inferior college. Lodging at the expensive Savoy Hotel in Ottawa rather than in student accommodation, he spent his days sleeping or listening to parliamentary debates, and sharing the hotel restaurant in the evening with senators. The consequence was inevitable. During the summer holidays in 1963, while he was visiting historic and literary sites in France with his elder brother Monte, the college warned that he risked expulsion. His schoolboy notions of genius had been shattered. Laziness had bred failure. Instead of returning to study he remained in France as a tour guide, and later travelled to Spain to meet Brian Stewart, a Canadian friend.
Black arrived in Spain depressed, admitting his inability to cope with life’s normal challenges. His initial escape from despair was to read a biography of the American newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the model for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. The combination of politics, history and power appealed to a dilettante seeking a purpose. In his fantasy, the ostracised upstart dreamt about basking in public adoration. Whatever he said would be believed because he uttered the last, irrefutable word. Undecided whether he should become a historian or try to earn some money, he resolved at least to overcome his laziness and improve his performance at college.
Back in Ottawa, Black had the good fortune to meet Peter White, the ambitious assistant of a minister in the federal government. Through White, six years older than himself, he was introduced to Canadian politics and politicians. At parties, political meetings and in committees, he became immersed in the country’s political system. In the era of ruptured dreams after President Kennedy’s assassination, White, Black and Brian Stewart drove to Atlantic City to witness the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 presidential election campaign. Standing among 23,000 people stirred by Bobby Kennedy’s speech urging support for the civil rights campaign, Black sensed that he was present at a moment of history, adoring the image of a towering politician, serene among the excited masses. The theatre of leadership transformed Johnson into Black’s latest hero.
The daydreams barely changed after his graduation from Carleton University with a poor degree in 1965, and the completion of his first year of a law degree. Financed by some profits earned on the stock exchange, an inheritance of over $200,000 from his grandparents and regular income from his parents, Black spent part of his summer in Ireland with Galen Weston, the future head of the retailing family, and later drove to Eastern Europe. The news from Ottawa was bad. After failing his law exams, he had been expelled from the university. At twenty-two, he was categorised as a flop. ‘It was time,’ he decided, ‘to outgrow mischief and debauchery.’15
Peter White offered Black salvation – a half interest in two small weekly papers, the Knowlton Advertiser and a French-language paper, serving townships near Montreal. The investment would cost Black $500. He settled in Knowlton, a small lakeside community, and single-mindedly began editing the small-circulation newspapers. Living in a poorly heated boathouse, he spent the day struggling to find news and advertisements, and trying to master the finances of printing and distribution. At night he read Joseph Conrad and other classic authors in the hope of furthering his quest to understand life, and after midnight spoke for hours on the telephone with his father about politics, history and the stock markets. At dawn, George Black looked across the lawns to the willow trees and swimming pool, and decided to go to bed. In Knowlton, his son also went to sleep, establishing a lifelong habit of rarely rising before noon.
The escape from ‘mischief and debauchery’ was consolidated the following year, when Montreal hosted the world fair Expo 67, and General de Gaulle visited Canada. The combination of parties and witnessing de Gaulle’s provocative remark that Quebec should declare its independence from Canada taught Black, he would later claim, that he had been ‘a rather silly and undiscriminating rebel’. He enrolled for a law degree at Laval University in Quebec City, an additional challenge because he was one of few English students among the French, although this was a test he endured in comfort. He rented a superb penthouse overlooking the St Lawrence river in the fashionable Port Royal Building close to the entertainment quarter, and drove a Cadillac. Since Peter White had become an assistant to Daniel Johnson, the Premier of Quebec, Conrad Black could combine studying, social life and involvement at the heart of Canada’s political life.
As a conservative in a leftish-liberal