Blogging Lord Black of Crossharbour

The Canadian chickens are coming home to roost elsewhere, too: Conservative columnist Mark Steyn, long a staple of the Black papers in Canada, is blogging the trial for Maclean's and elucidating the issues (pretty convincingly) over here as well, and the NRO's David Frum, another Black stalwart, recently wrote about how Hollinger's expensive campaign against and ouster of Black has contributed to a precipitous drop in share price.* He's also acting as a conduit for his father-in-law, Canadian media giant Peter Worthington, who is covering the trial for the Toronto Sun.** And then there is Amiel, aka Lady Black, who knows Worthington well, considering she succeeded him as editor of the Toronto Sun in the mid-80s (and were both columnists for years). She also knows Greenspan well, quite apart from her husband: One of Greenspan's early high-profile cases was defending financier Peter Demeter in the murder of his beautiful younger wife, Christine (he was convicted of hiring a killer so he could cash in on the insurance). Following the trial, Amiel and her then-husband wrote a book about the case. Even Portfolio's (and HuffPo's!) Duff McDonald, who wrote the definitive Vanity Fair piece on Black in April 2004 (when his updated book and the Times were still a gleam in Siklos' eye) and won a Canadian National Magazine Award for another Black story in the National Post Business magazine, has gotten back in the game with an Intelligencer piece for New York last month.*** Canadians are on the beat.

 

To be a Canadian watching the Conrad Black drama play out is to have all sorts of associations: Remembering his launch of the National Post (what! Challenging The Globe & Mail!), recalling the outbreak of nationalistic indignation when he threw over his Canadian citizenship to accept British peerage; seeing photos of Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, in the paper, looking fancy; and a general awareness that this guy was a massive, massive titan.