Partners on thin ice

My one contact with Conrad Black was an exchange of letters following his review in the Daily Telegraph of a book about the 1798 Irish rising. In this he had described the French landing as their most successful military intervention in Britain since Hastings. Helpfully I wrote to remind him of their landing in 1216, when King John’s England was within a whisker of becoming a French province. For the man had, after all, described himself as ‘historian’ on his first marriage certificate.

His reply was brief and dismissive. The French army, he wrote, had just sort of wandered about. Well, in a sense they had, but only in the sense that Monty’s army on D-Day had wandered about Normandy: theirs was the last real foothold gained by a foreign army on English soil.

Still, Black’s idea was a fascinating and hilarious one, that 10,000 Frenchmen should have gone, like ramblers only in full chain mail, on an extended medieval b/b tour of England. ‘Ce soir, mon seigneur, nous allons regarder ce trou qu’on appelle Londres.’ I did think of writing to tell him this, but I then had a small stall inside the Telegraph papers which at the time he owned, and I had formed the impression that this chap might not have much of a sense of humour. From Tom Bower’s Conrad and Lady Black I suspect I may have been wrong.

It is an extraordinary book. For something like two thirds of its length it reads like the sort of fat paperback you see in airports, one of those books described, usually by its publisher, as a ‘page-turner’, the irony being that you turn the pages because you can’t bear to linger on any of them. But then Tom Bower follows the beast into the undergrowth, where you or I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go, that is into the balance sheets which are its natural habitat.