Conrad Black

Air Canada has outwitted the superstorm and I am about to return to Canada after my nine-day stay in London following an absence of seven years, and nine years since I actually lived there. I was launching the British edition of my book, A Matter of Principle, which describes the legal onslaught against me in the United States that consumed most of those years. As these matters have been amply aired in the London media this past week, I avoid them here. As Truman Capote famously said to a British (male) television interviewer, ‘Why don’t you read the book, darling?

It is unusual in Canada to have had the same address for 60 years, and for an urban house to have ten acres around it (testimony to my father’s foresight), and these facts made it especially painful not to set eyes on my home for five years while I struggled in the American Gulag. It has been an affecting return, with many kindnesses and very few echoes of the appalling defamations that announced the beginning of my travails (and have ended in generous libel settlements in my favour). Given the correlation of forces between the US government and me, it is ending as well as it could, and the remaining relatively trivial legal skirmishing should also be favourable.

It is hard for me to monitor this from my prison cell in Florida as I wait for the spurious and failed prosecution of me to flounder to an end, but it seems to me that Britain has failed adequately to recognise that Margaret Thatcher was correct in almost everything she said about Eurofederalism. She was a prophet who was sent packing because of her prescience, amid all that bunk about being ‘uncaring’. There was too much attention paid to the spivvy parvenus who most ostentatiously gained from her policies, and not enough to the millions of the unashamed bourgeois who gratefully made her the first prime minister since Lord Liverpool to earn three consecutive full terms. Surely it is time her effigy was in Parliament Square, to make George Canning less lonely in his toga.

It has been confusing for anyone relying on the British media to fathom what has happened over the eight years of my persecution in the United States. And the volume of affecting messages I have received from the UK indicates that there remains some curiosity about it there. The short story is that a greenmailing shareholder who was trying to force the sale of the company (Hollinger International), and a quick realisation on the capital appreciation we had made in what had ceased to be a growth industry (newspapers), agitated for what is called in the United States a Special Committee, in 2003. This would look into all grievances of the requesting shareholder, and I agreed at once, as I had nothing to hide.

There was something about the spectacle of the Queen grimly, and Tony Blair cheerfully, holding hands as they sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at the Millennium Dome at the end of 1999 that could have alerted us that the decade ahead would not be a good one. Who could then have imagined that the United States, so overwhelmingly successful after its almost bloodless victory over its only rival, would accelerate the pursuit of the most imprudent economic policy of any serious democracy since Britain under Old Labour? The Americans borrowed trillions of dollars from China and Japan, to buy trillions of dollars of non-essential goods from China and Japan while officially requiring trillions more to be squandered in worthless mortgages.