Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge [Hardcover]

Tom Bower has done a huge amount of research to bring us a brilliant insider's view of the outrageous rise and hubristic fall of the Blacks. It's very readable, very damning and very detailed. The detail is necessary to explain the convoluted chicanery of Conrad Black's financial dealings, but it does make some passages a bit hard-going if you aren't prepared to follow the labyrinthine corporate structures. The other aspect that makes the book a bit long is Bower's determination to damn Mrs as well as Mr Black. Although she comes across as a complete nightmare, it is him and not her who is on trial for massive financial fraud. Much more interesting is how the directors of Black's companies, including two of America's top policy makers (Kissinger and Perle), completely failed in their duty to keep track of his activities. He was just such a charismatic and eloquent bombast that they took him on trust. It just seems amazing that he got away with it for so long on nothing more than force of personality. All in all, a very salutary morality tale.

My interest in this book was prompted by Conrad Black's recent release from prison. Amongst the many things Black was threatening to do when he came out, was a threat to sue Tom Bower. Clearly, there were going to be alot of 'juicy' bits to read.
I had read Bower's excellent (and also unauthorised) biographies on Tiny Rowland and Robert Maxwell both of which provoked anger from their subjects. Dancing on the Edge did not disappoint.
As with the previous two biographies, it was thoroughly researched. Bower's style of writing makes the book a gripping read. Neither Black or his wife, Barbara Amiel, emerge with much credit. She, a shameless social climber with breathtaking spending habits; he, equally shamelessly, plundering the accounts of his public companies with aid of pliant directors to fund their extravagant lifestyles.
The conversation which Bower weaves into the narrative seem very authentic. A poignant aspect of the story is that Black and his wife seem genuinely besotted with each other. She has stood by her man whilst he has been in prison despite her 'reduced circumstances'. An enthralling read and proof that once again power really does corrupt.

Now that the levee has broken, you would have to go a long way to garner sympathy for a couple with the industrial-grade hubris of Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel, but in his splendidly vicious "Dancing on the Edge", Tom Bower almost pulls it off. This is a really nasty piece of work (though, as Bower might say, if the shoe fits...) and no effort has been made to present any sort of balance whatsoever: this is a true hatchet job. No, it's more than that: it's a vigorous, double fisted axing.

Even the title is snide: Not "Conrad and Barbara Black", nor "Lord and Lady Black", but "*Conrad* and *Lady* Black" - a snipe at her overweening delight at his ennoblement, and perhaps a snide reference to Black's habit of referring to his wife (from well before his peerage) as "the Little Lady".

Make no mistake, this is a rip-snorter of a read: I've been devouring pages, missing stops on the tube, walking into lamp-posts and zoning out of conference calls on its account: it is the Barbarians at the Gate of the new Millennium - tempered only by the fact that the actors seem so transparently unleavened by the financial expertise, corporate understanding, commercial cunning, capitalist audacity and iron balls of the KKR crowd: the Blacks and their cohorts, as Bower paints them, are as self-absorbed, self-aggrandising and self-enriching as the best of them, but are still fundamentally deluded and dim-witted schmucks.

If you accept that view then what is truly remarkable is that the Blacks lasted as long as they did at the top of the pile. Bower cannot dispute that Conrad Black attracted - and retained for decades - some high-quality totty: Lord Carrington proposed his ennoblement and Baroness Thatcher seconded it (despite Bower's assertion that she found Black "ordinary"); Henry Kissinger sat on Hollinger's board even until the endgame played out (as did Richard Perle and KKR founder Henry Kravis' wife). So either Conrad Black was an extraordinary con-man, or Bower is not giving credit where it is due.

Nor is much credence given to Conrad Black's intellect: Bower would have you believe he had a large vocabulary, a photographic memory and a penchant for gormlessly reciting details of naval battles at dinner parties, and then suddenly he took a couple of months to dash off a rangy biography of Roosevelt, which did nothing but illustrate his own shoddy scholarship. Now I haven't read the FDR book (and nor, at 1245 pages, am I planning to), but the critical reaction to it on this site - which I have a healthy respect for (as one might!) - has been almost unanimously positive. Again, you get the sense that credit might not have been given where due.

Finally, the book is studded with of startling exchanges which are set out as direct quotations - in situations where it is difficult to believe that the remarks could have possibly been recorded nor word-for-word remembered: Amiel's off-the-cuff remarks during dinner parties and to household staff and Black's asides to his co-directors during meetings and on the telephone over a twenty five year period are faithfully reproduced as if lifted from a tape recording. I can't help thinking Bower is talking a biographer's licence here - that's a polite way of saying he made these quotes up - perhaps on the basis of a vaguer recollection like "then Conrad said something rude" or some such.

Bower has certainly done some homework and tracks the financial shenanigans skilfully, and I doubt there will be much sympathy out there amongst the schadenfreude for the misfortune of an unpleasant couple who are in the process of getting what has been coming to them, but all the same this relentlessly vituperative entry leaves the sense that Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel's side isn't the one writing this part of the 21st century's history.

Olly Buxton