Citizen Black: The strange rise and stranger fall of a media mogul

A media mogul, businessman, historian and knight of the realm, Conrad Black could never be accused of lacking ambition. His turbulent rise to power and celebrity makes for a fascinating story – as does his eventual fall. One year after his release from a Florida prison, we took a look back over this most colourful and divisive of figures.

Conrad Black

‘You are a criminal! You’re a convicted criminal!’.

The scene is a hotel room somewhere in Central London in October 2012. Jeremy Paxman is going in with all guns blazing against Conrad Black, former proprietor of The Telegraph Group, but it’s useless; every new assault augments the drama, redoubles its pugnacity – you can almost feel the spittle hitting your face as Newsnight’s attack dog foams and fumes away on the screen. Black holds firm, raising his voice but eloquently rebuffing Paxman’s patented weave of supercilious disdain and brusqueness. The normally unflappable presenter is becoming bogged down, and the enduring impression is of a man lobbing tennis balls at the walls of a fortress. For one whose name is so tightly welded to the prefix “disgraced media baron”, Black still defends his corner impressively.

At the time of the interview, Black – a decade previously chief executive of the World’s third-largest newspaper group – was in Britain for the first time in seven years. The reason for his return was ostensibly to promote his leviathan second autobiography, A Matter of Principle, but many commentators, notably investigative journalist Tom Bower, perceived the trip as a campaign of rehabilitation, an expedition aimed at re-ingratiating himself into the public life of the country in which he is both a citizen and – for the moment, at least – a life peer. Conrad Black needed a charm offensive – only five months earlier, he was seeing out the end of a prison sentence in Florida, where he had served three years for fraud and obstruction of justice.

Black was born in Montréal in 1944, to Betty and George Montegu Black Jr. George Black had recently been propositioned to work for E.P. Taylor, a local industrialist who would go on to found the Argus Group, Canada’s largest conglomerate. For the next fifteen years, Black senior’s rise seemed unstoppable, culminating in a role as president of the largest brewer in the country. Conrad, meanwhile, cannot claim such grand achievements during this period; as a schoolboy, he was withdrawn and rebellious, obsessed with statistics, Napoléon Bonaparte, political oratory and military history. Richard Siklos speculated in his 1995 biography Shades of Black that this was down to ‘a sense of imprisonment’, and retrospective irony aside, his greatest juvenile achievement was the spectacular theft of a cache of end of year exam papers and their subsequent sale to his classmates. It was, as he joked years later, his ‘first true act of Capitalism’.

By all accounts, Black middled through his history degree at Carlton University in Ottawa too, preferring to establish contact with the sort of milieu he really wanted to be mixing with – that is, stepping stones en route to power and influence. One of the figures Black met in his time in Ottawa was Peter White, an assistant to a minister who shared his ambitions. In 1966, White assisted Black in acquiring his first newspaper, a tiny community title called the Eastern Townships Advertiser based outside Montréal.

Three years and a decent profit later, White and Black set their sights on another rag, this time the much-larger Sherbrooke Record. As it stood, the Record had debts of close to C$200,000 and was careering towards insolvency…

This article was originally published in The Gentleman’s Journal Winter 2013 issue. Buy a back copy or subscribe to receive our Autumn Issue – coming soon.

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