It's often fun to get the hired help's take on the great and powerful. And so I turned to Lord Black's old newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, for the staff's review of the expose on Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel in Tom Bower's book, "Dancing on the Edge."
"Many observers say Conrad Black is a good man brought down by a bad woman, a predictable and misogynist 'Lady Macbeth' thesis that damns Barbara Amiel and patronises Black. The author Tom Bower does not subscribe to it. He's clear that Black and his wife Barbara Amiel were always as wicked as each other.
"The theme of this book is described by Black himself, in an email to Bower which the author breezily publishes in his preface: 'You consider this whole matter a heart-warming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just system; have been ostracised, and largely impoverished; and that I am on my way to the prison cell where I belong.'
"But Bower goes to town on colour, helped by those who, now that the great Canadian bear is safely restrained, poke a stick through the railings to bait it. The husband is lazy, greedy and calculating: 'Black rapidly understood his latest chance of taking advantage of another's distress.' The wife snubs friends, screams at servants and dresses expensively but not well: 'Her combination of jewellery and clothes was as questionable as her choice of outfits.'
"Bower's Black is a fat loner of a boy, the wretched product of a loveless marriage, privileged but depressed, expelled from school for selling stolen exam papers to fellow students. He flatters 'old, lonely, rich people' and conceals an 'animal cunning' behind a 'warm embrace of gentle assuredness'. Fortunately, banks with smart names were eager to help him on his climb and we journalists, trusting in the wealth of proprietors, asked no questions. As for Amiel, she gets the kind of working over that turns Heather McCartney seem like a nun in comparison, though you have to warm to a woman who tells Prince Charles, at the Royal Opera House: 'Will you excuse me? I must work the hall.'
"The author, fascinated by her sexual history, encourages us to warm too to her breasts: we learn that 'she was now better fed and dressed, making her breasts appear larger'; that 'her thin waist and large, high breasts were breathtaking' and, in a passage that might have benefited from an explanatory graphic, that she would 'ask a colleague for advice about something she had written, and while he read her pages, rest a breast on his shoulder.' So great was her command of these glands that she could change their shape with the power of thought: 'Depending on her mood, she could appear flat-chested, while on other occasions the size of her breasts fuelled speculation about implants.'
"We have, of course, still to hear the case for the defence, though it is hard, reading this, to see how Black will make the escape he promises when he faces fraud charges next March. Amiel, for her part, stands only in the dock of public opinion, where she is already declared guilty.
"It is remarkable that the Blacks took so much money, and fascinating that so many of the great and the good helped them to do so. But perhaps the most shocking thing, for those who remain naive journalists, is the discovery of how far you can go before sharp practice is examined for illegality rather than praised as good business.
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