The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Because Britain is such a small island, tucked snugly into one horizontal time zone, it can distribute London's 10 daily newspapers to every doorstep in the land, making the English the most avid consumers of newsprint in the world. As such, the puzzling thing is how they allow ambitious and voracious foreigners to capture so much of the propaganda machinery. A tiny man left New Brunswick under a cloud after a cement cartel scandal, landed here to quickly become Lord Beaverbrook, the No. 1 press baron on Fleet Street, and helped Churchill win the war by building the RAF that conquered the Luftwaffe. Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who defeated Churchill in 1945, said Beaverbrook was "the only evil man" he had ever met. Roy Thomson, of downtown Kirkland Lake, Ont., on getting the first private TV franchise in Britain, boasted that it was "like a license to print money." He bought a title and Lord Thomson owned The Times of London and was the first to get into North Sea oil Ð the reason why quiet son Ken Thomson is now the richest man in Canada. From Australia came the "Dirty Digger," Rupert Murdoch, who hates the English because the Oxbridge toffs made fun of his accent when he was sent to private school here, and cynically directs his papers to the left or the right, depending on who is in power at Westminster. And so the headlines of course are now aflame with the perils of Conrad, the boy who fled Canada and tore up his passport because Jean Chretien wouldn't let him have a title. The lawyers and bankers grow richer by the day as the corporate hyenas scrap over the remains of Lord Black's collapsed empire. In an astonishing interview in the National Post some months back, a lifetime Conrad friend, Hal Jackman, predicted the whole thing. The former Ontario lieutenant-governor said Black had "a death wish." Meaning a financial death wish, because his old buddy liked pressing the limits beyond propriety. Jackman, sensing the inevitable, resigned from the board of the Hollinger miasma. So had the millionaire Peter Munk. Former ambassador Allan Gotlieb removed himself from any links. Likewise department store heir Fred Eaton. Likewise publisher Anna Porter. All fearing the fallout from the coming lawsuits prepared by irate shareholders on Wall Street. See 'Colonial' P.# Con't from P.# As could be expected, all his many enemies are dancing on his publishing grave. What is most surprising is that his own troops, who supposedly are still being paid by him, have joined in the fun. While the legal beagles argue over who he can sell to, The Spectator, his excellent and influential magazine, bursts forth with a cover story titled The Lost Tycoon: A Shattering Tale of Ambition, Love and Boardroom Passions. The colour illustration, along with Barbara Amiel's cleavage, naturally includes a moose and hungry wolves, the usual superior Fleet Street reminder of the colonial roots of an uppity lad who lusted for the robes of the House of Lords. The article inside opens by stating that a few weeks back when executives were trying to explain to Lord Black "the full horror of his personal and corporate predicament," wife Barbara swept into the room, "clad only in a leotard and shades." Barbara Black proclaimed, "Oh Conrad. Let's just get out of here. They hate us." The long "Ballad of Connie and Babs" goes on to inform us that Lady Soames, daughter of Winston Churchill, told friends that Conrad Black was "London's biggest bore unhung" and reminded us that last year Babs had invited Vogue magazine to view her 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes at 500 pounds a pop and a dozen Hermes Birkin bags worth more than 100,000 pounds and other such trinkets. So much for loyal employees. The point is that no one, English or otherwise, should be surprised. Hal Jackman was correct. What do you say about a young boy, delivered by chauffeured limo each morning to Canada's most exclusive and expensive boys' private school, Upper Canada College in Toronto, who is expelled for stealing the school's exams and selling them to his rich schoolmates? Is there not a trend there? There were the questions about acquiring the Argus operation from two near-senile widows. Then the uproar over the Dominion Stores employees' pension fund. His capture of his lodestone London Daily Telegraph, largest-selling broadsheet in Britain, from near-senile nobility, was described by those in the know as "catching the biggest fish on Fleet Street with the smallest hook." As a Canadian scribbler back in his old haunts in the deserted Fleet Street where he once worked, I feel somewhat sorry for boy Conrad. But not much. The signs were there from the start.
