Conrad Black: guilty as hell – of being a pig, a prig and a sleazy fraud.

The Daily Mail, another one of those disreputable papers from the UK, has a rather strange profile of the National Post (so appropriately yellow in its colour design) founder. Strange, because it is so revealing not just of Mr. Black but of its oh so British author, who can’t decide if she is a gossip columnist, a Black sympathizer or just another UK hack.

What do we learn from this article? Black’s wife is a disgusting clothes whore and extravagant beyond comprehension:

…the Vogue reporter she’d invited into her Kensington house found ‘a fur closet, a sweater closet, a closet for shirts and T-shirts, and a closet so crammed with evening gowns that the overflow has to be kept in yet more closets downstairs’.

There were a dozen Hermès Birkin bags, and more than 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes. Nevertheless, Black dismisses tales of her wild spending. ‘It is absolute rubbish. She likes expensive things, but she mainly bought them out of her own money. Anything that I spent on her, it was never because she asked for it.’

Because of his incarceration, Black now appreciates the idiocy of the US prison system and the abusive laws that put people there.

This one-time staunch and unyielding Right-winger has, it seems, today recast himself as the defender of the people against the U.S. justice system. He says it is corrupt, debased, sends far more people to prison than it should..

(I wish he’d have a chat with Stephen Harper.)

and

‘But as the States is a “prosecutocracy” [ie ruled by the prosecutors], if they go after him here, whether he’s guilty or not won’t matter as they have catch-all charges that no one can defend themselves against.

and of course, as is de rigueur for any right winger, the pity party of victimization is always prevalent.

‘I have graduated from being a fat cat with its hand in the cookie jar to something of an underdog, because I’m up against the U.S. government, and virtually everyone in the world hates the U.S. government — including most Americans.’

Black befriended a mafia don in prison, saving him from the everyday indignities of prison life. He turned prison lackies into his own personal chefs (nice to have money innit?).

The food at his prison, he says, was ‘a shock to the civilised palate’, but in exchange for offering his fellow lags legal and business advice, he turned them into his personal chefs. ‘They would make food for me — though not as good as what we are about to have here,’ he says, as he tucks into a plump, cold prawn.

Cross posted at Let Freedom Rain.