How many members of the Dinner party will admit to having been close to the Blacks?
All students of what Balmc called La Comedic Humaine are enjoying the spectacle of London, Toronto and Manhattan on the subject of Conrad and Barbara Black. Those cities seem full of their associates, who are now anxious to make it known that they never had much to do with them. They include former members of the relevant boards. Also, assiduous fellow-members of the party which, as I have long argued, controls such cities and to which the Blacks owed allegiance more so even than to Likud: the Dinner party.
The more shameless of these party members, now denying two of their former leaders, are those announcing that they quit this or that Black board or enterprise because 'I asked difficult questions'. They never say what the questions were. Perhaps one of them was 'Has the caviar run out?' An admission that it had would have struck at their pride, you see.
Matters this week reached the latest of what look like being many high moments in the struggle between Conrad Black and his old fief, Hollinger International. The firm accused him and his cronies of engaging in 'a wide range of criminal acts spanning many years, including mail and wire fraud, interstate transportation of stolen property and money-laundering'. That was reminiscent of the passage in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in which Gibbon records that a certain Pope was accused of arson, rape, piracy and murder, and explains, 'The more serious charges were suppressed.' Whoever wrote the Hollinger document had a flair unique among writers of corporate prose and a skill for the telling detail that people would talk about and remember. Barbara Black was accused of tipping the doorman at the expensive New York clothes store Bergdorf Goodman and charging it to Hollinger on expenses. The document also alleges that the Blacks charged Hollinger for 'household staff, including chefs, senior butlers, butlers, under-butlers, chauffeurs and footmen'. That is, by my count, three kinds of butler; butlers being to the Dinner party what whips are to other parties.
It is therefore unsurprising that Dinner party members now detach themselves rather in the way that Labour party members now detach themselves from Mr Blair. The Dinner party, like the Labour party and most other parties, owes allegiance to its leaders only so long as they seem to be in charge or are not in the process of being found out. Dining is a brutal business. Black is now the Duncan Smith of the Dinner party. My own occasional diversion, on meeting former Blackites, is to ask, 'You must he upset at what's happened to them. You were close to them, weren't you?' Admittedly, I have done so only on a couple of occasions. On none has the reply been an admission of such closeness.
I must try it out on Mr Boris Johnson. Black made him, as he did me, one of his editors (of The Spectator). Before that, I was one of his deputy editors (of the Sunday Telegraph). But I was never one of his underbutlers. The trouble is that Mr Johnson would see my game.
'You were very close to them, weren't you, Boris?'
'Ah, well, cripes, yes. Er, no. That is, I had some sort of brief connection with them. But I was busy being shadow Arts Minister when all the trouble came. I thought they were your friends.'
That is the difficulty for us former Black editors, deputy editors and butlers. We fear that we will be made scapegoats. Ill-disposed people will seek to depict me as the Tariq Aziz to Barbara Amiel-Black's Saddam. I knew nothing of her torturing, tipping and shopping of mass distraction. But I could be put on trial. Some black-robed lawyer in The Hague could accuse me of actually being with her in Bergdorf Goodman when she perpetrated that tip. Even though I was not, it would be pointless to deny it. To do so might increase my sentence in a liberal Dutch prison, being tormented by sympathetic social workers helping me to achieve 'closure'. 'Certainly, I saw her do it,' I would lie. 'But I said to her over lunch at L,e Cirque afterwards, "For God's sake, don't charge that tip to your Hollinger expenses, old girl. just this lunch."' Whatever punishment is inflicted on the Blacks, the innocent are going to suffer in all this.
T argued here some time ago that rulers I have two careers: the one that they actually led, and the one that they lead in the history books. Since posterity lasts infinitely longer than any term of office, the one in the books is the more important to them. Consequently, so the argument ran, Mr Blair should resign over his inability to persuade his Cabinet over Europe. Then the history books would depict him as bravely ahead of his time. The alternative is for them to depict him as implicated in a humiliating American war.
This could be extended to President Bush. He would regard defeat in November as blighting his reputation for ever. But a few years afterwards, books would flow from neoconservative and right-wing Republican historians and propagandists, blaming President Kerry for the ignominious American flight from Iraq and the consequent chaos followed by tyranny. Had Mr Bush won in 2004, they would say, Iraq would be a democracy. Ex-President Bush would have won in the books.
Neoconservatives and the Republican Right now claim ex-President Reagan as one of their own. I remember reporting from Washington for the Times on Mr Gorbachev's visit to him in December 1987, when those voices lamented that Mr Gorbachev was as much a communist expansionist as his predecessors, and was tricking Mr Reagan into appeasing him. When the Soviet Union collapsed a few years later, and Mr Gorbachev was swept away, the same voices proclaimed that this was because of Mr Reagan's steadfastness. Mr Reagan's three main uses of force — in the Lebanon, Grenada, and from the air against Libya — were brief. This suggests no evidence that he would have perpetrated an Iraq; quite the opposite. Mr Reagan was what we would think of as a true Tory. But because of the Soviet Union's collapse, he lives on — in the American Right's books and journalism — as a right-wing ideologue.
I suspect that a President Bush or a President Kerry will pursue the same Iraq policy after November: a mix of Iraqisation' and 'internationalisation'. So if Mr Bush is re-elected. the Right will accuse him of selling the pass. He will have few defenders. If he loses, he will be the brave, lost leader.
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