Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  I remember reading of Giscard d’Estaing’s prowess as de Gaulle’s finance minister when I was sixteen years old and he, aged thirty-four, delivered lengthy and detailed budget speeches to the National Assembly from memory. I also remember when he deserted the general in 1969 “with sadness but with certitude,” providing the margin of victory for de Gaulle’s enemies. I had not, until fairly shortly before, dreamt of having the opportunity to sit in Giscard d’Estaing’s house, brandy in hand, and gently ask the former president of the republic about these times and events.

  Many books have been written about Sir James Goldsmith. His obituaries described him as “one of the most buccaneering and charismatic figures” of our time. On his father’s side, he was descended from a prominent Frankfurt Jewish banking family. His mother was a French Catholic. His own business skills were superb and made him an early billionaire. I met him through Andrew Knight, then editor of The Economist (later for three years the chief executive of The Telegraph plc) at a diner à trois. Afterwards, Goldsmith invited me to lunch at his office and introduced me to his circle, the first of a number of occasions staged in order to try to recruit the Telegraph to one or another of his mad causes.

  When I first arrived in Britain in 1986, Goldsmith was a great legend. I remember seeing his performance at the U.S. senatorial committee over his hostile takeover attempt of one of the country’s leading rubber companies. The utility of a “white knight” was raised. He responded, referring literally to pigmentation and honours: “I’m white, I’m a knight.” His most famous aphorism was “When one marries one’s mistress, it creates a vacancy.” Jimmy had several wives and concurrent bearers of children, and assaulted bourgeois sensibilities. He was a remarkably vital, formidable, powerful presence. Exquisitely mannered, perfectly tailored, physically imposing, graceful like a great cat, very courteous yet evidently capable of savage verbal outbursts, he was the most compelling outsider I have known.

  With his comrades and acolytes, Goldsmith operated a Darwinian parallel establishment that used to be known in its heyday as the Clermont set. It mocked and shocked the British establishment. John Aspinall (Aspers), who founded the Clermont Club in London’s Mayfair in 1962 and used his casino profits to sustain wildlife sanctuaries in Britain for gorillas and tigers, was perhaps his closest friend.

  After Aspinall lost a third keeper in the tiger cages of his splendid private zoo, the local municipality banned people from entering tiger cages. Aspers set up a great controversy, denouncing this as an infringement of the Magna Carta and of the birthright of the British people for a thousand years, hiring aircraft to tow banners proclaiming the right to enter tiger cages above the south shore sea resorts of Britain during the summer, and so forth. He formed a grand coalition from left to right, and when he overpowered the mystified and unoffending local council, he held a party at his casino, where Barbara sat next to the former (and future) far-left mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. (It was he whom Boris Johnson defeated in 2007, calling him “Ken Leavingsoon.”) Other contemporaries included Jonathan Aitken (a member of parliament and Lord Beaverbrook’s grand-nephew), the outrageous but likeable and often brave columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, of a Greek shipping family, and a number of others.

  Aspers campaigned for Jonathan Aitken in his constituency and bellowed at the astonished voters to tear down their schools and hospitals, renounce their state benefits, refuse to pay their taxes, and return to the independent notion of citizenship of olden time. His colourful harangues were immensely popular.

  From my earliest days as a resident in London, I became something of a habitué of these people. They wished to entice me, and the Daily Telegraph, into their counter-establishment. At this they were unsuccessful. I am no upholder of the establishment in Britain or elsewhere, but nor am I an anti-establishment iconoclast. Though I was not prepared to join them in their unholy apostasy, I loved them in a way. They were more loyal to me than was much of London’s orthodox society. They were not going to succeed in establishing a new society, but they were faithful to themselves to the end. Jimmy fought an election campaign at the head of his preposterous Referendum Party, keeping the pancreatic cancer and chemotherapy treatments he was having a complete secret from the press. Although he achieved only about 1 per cent of the vote, he did help ensure that Britain would not join the European Monetary System without a referendum. He died less than eight weeks after the election.

  He had previously been a member of the European parliament. He asked me how I thought he would get on as a legislator, and I replied that he would be a splendid success: he would ravish those women whose appearance warranted it, bribe the men, and reduce the already disorderly parliament in Strasbourg to chaos. He bellowed appreciatively and said that this was his intention exactly.

  Goldsmith’s parental skills were as novel as his marital notions. One day in about 1980, Jimmy discovered that his son from his second marriage, Manos, had sold the silver from Jimmy’s London house to pay gambling debts at Aspinall’s casino. He asked the Daily Telegraph information service to locate the closest community to the exact opposite side of the world from London. The answer was a small town on the south island of New Zealand. Jimmy telephoned the directory information of that town and arranged a menial job, at his own expense, for Manos in a restaurant there. Off the young man went.

  Aspers also succumbed to cancer. I had always thought that when the end was near, John would go among his tigers and not return alive. He had lost half his face to cancer and then was mugged on the streets of Belgravia with his wife. Naturally he fought back. Henry Kissinger and I went out to Kent to see him two weeks before he died. He was as brave as one of his great beasts, though terribly withered by then. There was no self-pity, morbidity, or even apparent sadness. We took our leave with firm handshakes and reciprocal thanks. Henry wept discreetly.

  Had they lived, both Goldsmith and Aspinall would have avoided the squalid and demeaning spectacle I am now undergoing. Their instincts would have told them to get clear of the corporate governance zealots before they could become homicidal Lilliputians.* They would have been invaluable through this difficult time and magnificent allies uncontaminated by the bourgeois notions of hypocritical seemliness that affected many of my acquaintances. Jimmy’s flamboyant and splendid widow, Annabel, and her family, have been fiercely supportive. When the controversy arose over the cover-price cut at the Telegraph and Cazenoves scurried for cover in the almost unbroken City tradition, both men congratulated me on not being intimidated by the false rules of a rigged game. I miss them.

  I sat beside Gianni Agnelli at the secular memorial service for Jimmy Goldsmith in Smith Square. A succession of eulogists, from Margaret Thatcher to Chief Buthelezi, remembered Jimmy, almost all with great eloquence. Toward the end, Gianni said to me, in his exquisite English accent with slightly de-emphasized r’s: “It’s so splendid it almost makes dying worthwhile.” Gianni’s own funeral five years later required special trains to bring mourners to Turin. His family shook hands with more than two hundred and fifty thousand members of the public. All the leadership of the Italian state and church were present; it was an occasion for almost medieval popular grandiosity for the greatest Italian; not the pagan tribute to the Western world’s great outsider that Jimmy had earned.

  In the egalitarian levelling that has made glamour repulsive and social fraternization at any more intellectual a level than the bowling alley into an orgy of toadyism or vulgar exhibitionism, going out to a sit-down dinner is a sign of Ludovican self-importance. But as a general rule, hospitality is done with sprezzatura – the effort concealed and all done with the appearance of ease, as Anthony Blunt defined it – and brings together good conversation and interesting people, then the palate, eye, and brain can be pleased simultaneously.

  I believe the Advisory Board served its purposes well, including that of facilitating business opportunities for the company and sharing know-how. By 2002, I had decided it would be wound up. The cost
s had spiralled up and it was also becoming too time-consuming. Our journalists had benefited as much as I thought they could, and besides, many of its members were getting on in years and beginning to lose touch. With the multiplication of advisory boards, general meetings, and symposiums, it was also becoming more difficult each year to get a good outside speaker. Allan Gotlieb argued strongly in support of retaining the Advisory Board on the grounds that it was the principal source of my standing and influence in the world, which to me was a convincing display that the time was more than ripe for its cessation.

  A favourite insult of the prosecution at my trial in 2007 was to speak contemptuously of my wanting to go to tea with the Queen, as if such an outing were a vain frivolity. Had the Queen asked me to tea, I would have considered it a remarkable invitation. The Queen is a woman who has been at the forefront of much of contemporary history, has met almost all the people that our times have honoured. In a purely ex officio role as chairman of the Telegraph, I did meet the Royal Family, including the Queen, and more often the Queen Mother, who was a neverending source of anecdotal history and gave me several remembrances of Franklin Roosevelt.

  In London, the Royal Family is a distinct social entity. They are naturally the ultimate leaders of society and continue to be the subject of a good deal of obsequious deference. They are, to the very limited degree that I know them, courteous and conscientious people. It would be an exaggeration to say that the hereditary principle has endowed the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth with a super-abundantly gifted first family. Their intelligences vary, but they work hard. The Queen Mother and Princess Diana were the great stars, as is now Prince William. Princess Alexandra is the most charming. The Duke of Edinburgh and the Princess Royal are both very intelligent. So, though not overly imaginative, is the Queen. Princess Diana came to dinner with us a couple of times and was very witty as well as very beautiful. She was scheming and was possessed by the fury of a scorned woman. The only brake on her republicanism was her desire to be mother of the King. Though uneducated, and with an office of giggly, jolly-hockey-sticks Sloane-rangers, Princess Diana was running a parallel monarchy in her last few years and was skating rings around the real Royals.

  Royals are different. Polite though they are, they are almost never close to non-royals and have mastered the secret of aloofness. And they have a rural bourgeois perspective, even the wealthy European royals of the Bourbon tradition. I saw this most plainly at a birthday party, I believe it was his sixtieth, for the exiled king of Greece, Constantine, a very amiable man of monarchic mien. The party was held at Highgrove, the home of the Prince of Wales. Guests were primarily from the royal families of Europe. The few of us who were not members of a royal family included some of King Constantine’s wealthy, Greek ship-owning backers and a few others. (Barbara, trapped in her social unease, which was especially acute when it came to royal families, had pleaded illness. This was not unfamiliar to me. When the Duke of Edinburgh came to Toronto and visited our house with newspaper mogul Ken Thomson to see my ship model and naval book collection, I had to plead her absence due to a New York commitment. She was in fact upstairs in her workroom behind a locked door.) Constantine’s birthday party was an insight to royalty at play. Guests were entertained by a slapstick comedian wearing a dinner jacket and carrying a giant cello out of which he produced some dirty laundry, as if from a washing machine. This led to some slapstick of the British lavatory variety. All the royalty were shaking with laughter, tears streaming down their faces, from Princess Caroline of Monaco to the centenarian dowager Queen of Denmark, including both Queens Elizabeth. A delightful and intelligent Greek lady friend of mine was sitting next to me, and we stared at each other in straight-faced disbelief as the crowned and coroneted contents of the current Almanach de Gotha split their sides watching the buffoonery.

  IT WAS INTERESTING TO CIRCULATE simultaneously in relatively exalted circles in London and New York. Where London mixed all manner of people, occupations, and nationalities together, reflecting the capital of an important country and the diverse nature of the crossroads city of the world, New York society was topped out by a few continuators of the Astor-Belmont-Vanderbilt 400 aristocracy of a century before. Beside and around it surged the teeming plutocracy and meritocracy of New York’s mighty competition of achievers and hustlers in every field.

  The different groups would come together at the expensive galas each championed in support of their preferred causes, especially the Metropolitan Museum and Metropolitan Opera, the Museum of Modern Art, and Carnegie Hall. In the great apartments of Park and Fifth Avenues, and along the East River north from 59th Street, apart from the permutated and adoptive aristocracy, only the odd museum director, orchestra conductor, diva, or writer would appear, and only the more culturally involved of the business community.

  It was largely because of Brooke Astor, the crafty and timeless widow of Vincent Astor (who spent her first forty years – socially – climbing slowly, hand over hand, and literally knew the ropes), that the notion of a WASP aristocracy had a golden, fifty-year, Indian summer (WASP in style and foibles, as there were many Roman Catholics and Jews, some African-Americans, and even a few Muslims among them). It was always an unstable and not very legitimate patriciate, afflicted by philistinism, English-imitative, but stylish and brilliantly opulent, and most of its tenured regulars were pleasant and interesting. Their hospitality was always sumptuous.

  As Johnson & Johnson heir David Netto said after being rushed by the Met (Museum), referring to Brooke Astor’s comrades and social heirs, Jayne Wrightsman and Annette de la Renta, “They’re irresistible, if that’s your thing; living treasures, and you don’t meet people like that every day. If you care about the ‘top people,’ you’ll want to hang on. There’s something about them that’s pure magic.” (Rogues’ Gallery, Michael Gross, p. 476.)

  That could include a little youthful hyperbole, but it is a convivial and sometimes swashbuckling group. It was in many ways all an imposture, as most of the doyennes had closets as full of skeletons as of couture, but this is the unwitting source of much of their interest. Although the noblesse oblige tradition of Roosevelts, Harriman, Sumner Welles, Douglas Dillon, David Bruce, the Dukes, and others has died out, Henry Kissinger has filled the public service and intellectual voids and has been bound to their souls with hoops of steel.

  Brooke Astor kindled public curiosity by courting the press, and admitting some of them, such as Barbara Walters and Charlie Rose, to her inner circle, and by gaining publicity for her charitable works and by stepping out in splendid livery and with great panache. She was scrambling much of the way, and was conversationally pretty erratic at times. (She was a practising Episcopalian but gave a country home to Francis J. Cardinal Spellman, and later told me that Spellman had disappointed her because he was a sexual exhibitionist.) Spellman had disappointed her with private indiscretions, which, though not completely implausible, are not easily believable either and do not merit repetition here, but were a diverting conversational gambit.

  Her last seven or eight years she was not really competent, and vulgar litigation has revealed a sad story of her later life. No one has taken up the torch to continue the same notion of a New York aristocracy, and the whole concept is probably long past its sell-by date. I must add one word of special thanks to Jayne Wrightsman, who has been a generous friend through thick and thin for thirty years. She is a voluntary owner of a “Conrad Will Win” T-shirt.

  EARLIER IN THIS CHAPTER I mentioned how my pro-American sentiments were a source of enmity in the U.K. and to a lesser degree in Canada. When the tragedy of September 11, 2001, took place, Barbara and I were in Toronto preparing to leave the next day for New York. There was a tremendous outpouring of sympathy in the world. At a human level, it was hard not to identify with the thousands of innocent victims, the brave firefighters, and the unconquerable spirit of New York. Many were doubtless influenced by the unfamiliar spectacle of the United States as a victim. But it w
as clear from President George W. Bush’s remarks before the day was over that it would not remain a victim for long.

  In all our newspapers, as well as in the House of Lords, of which I was by then a member, and in a number of speeches and articles, I defended the post–September 11 Bush-Blair position, which attracted a rare congeries of opposition. The United States was accused of being trigger-happy. The mantra “They can’t go it alone” was endlessly repeated, but its real meaning, of course, was that the United States could do just that, much to the consternation of those who found their own marginalization grating, but not sufficiently so to galvanize them into doing anything about it.

  I have never understood where the idea arose that the armed forces of the United States could be deployed in response to successive acts of war against the United States only with the permission of the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – particularly France, Russia, and China. It was advocated, in effect, that the United States, having built and sustained an immense military capacity, had to put it at the behest of countries that did not wish the United States well, do not necessarily share its values, and affect a neutrality between, on the one hand, a wronged America and affronted international law and, on the other, the evil of Saddam Hussein. Obviously, no sane person in the United States would subscribe to any such concept.

  In the Iraq debate in the House of Lords at the end of 2002 (where the Conservatives’ votes were necessary to pass approval of the government’s war policy), I said that this interpretation of the relationship between the United States and the United Nations Security Council was an attempt to treat the United States as a great St. Bernard dog, which would take the risks and do the work while others, and not necessarily genuine allies, would hold the leash and give the instructions. One of my noble colleagues leapt excitedly at the metaphor and asked if I had ever tried to restrain a St. Bernard bitch in heat. Another said that the U.S. was not a St. Bernard but a Rottweiler.