Baron Black of Crossharbour ｜ Lord Conrad Black ｜ EP 181 (lLQZcx_lPzI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lLQZcx_lPzI

Hello everyone. Johnrad Moffatt Black, Baron Black of Cross Harbor, KCSG, born 25 August 1944, is a Canadian-born newspaper publisher, financier and writer. He is the author of 10 books, mostly dealing with Canadian and American history, including biographies of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis and US Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, as well as two memoirs. He is currently writing a political history of the ancient world, concentrating primarily on the Romans and the Greeks. His father was businessman George Montague Black II, who had significant holdings in Canadian manufacturing, retail and media businesses through part ownership of the holding company Ravelston Corporation. In 1978, two years after their father’s death, Conrad and his older brother Montague took majority control of Ravelston. Over the next seven years, they sold off most of their non-media holdings to focus on newspaper publishing. Black controlled Hollinger International, once the world’s third largest English-language newspaper empire, which published The Daily Telegraph in the UK, The Chicago Sun Times, The Jerusalem Post, The National Post in Canada and hundreds of community newspapers across North America, before controversy erupted over the sale of some of the company’s assets. He is one of Canada’s most recognizable and influential figures, and has known many of the great political actors and cultural figures of the last half century. It’s my great pleasure to have him as a guest today. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today. Not at all, Jordan. Always a pleasure to speak with you. Yeah, well, it’s very nice to see you again. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve had the pleasure of speaking. So I’m glad we have this opportunity, even though it’s mediated by electronics. Well, I missed you. So I want to talk to you biographically, essentially. I’d like to walk through your life. And so let’s start as far back as we can. Tell me about your childhood, if you would, and what stands out for you in relationship to your parents. Well, while I was born in Montreal, my parents moved here to Toronto when I was very young, not even a year old, and just at the end of World War II. And we lived in what was then just the edge of metropolitan Toronto. Beyond us were farms. And that was up, for those of your viewers who know Toronto, right after the Bayview Avenue passes York University, the Glendon campus and the Granite Club and Crescent School. Just beyond that was where we lived. And that was the outer limit of the city in terms of the built up area. And so there weren’t many young people around to visit with in the neighborhood. So the result was that I spent more time, I think it was the beginning of the television era. Everyone had a television set, but they just got it in the last few years. And there were only a few channels on the air. And for the most part, you had those funny antennas sitting on top of the receiver or an antenna on the roof of your house. And so I spent a lot of time reading. And that was how I developed my interest in history. And I started reading about interesting historical personalities. And my father, although he was a successful businessman, had been a very accomplished academic as far as he went. But that was in the 30s. And his father came under great financial pressure. So my father became a chartered accountant in the theory that there was, as he put it, no such thing as an unemployed chartered accountant. And in those days, people really had to think in terms of how could they how could they do things that made it as likely as possible that they would be able to make an income and provide and afford to get married and provide for families. And it was a much more financially pressurized era than it is now. And that he graduated in 1937. And we were starting as a society to recover from the Depression by then. But there were still huge numbers of unemployed. And he had to set aside his academic interests. But with that said, he was particularly I was particularly fortunate in having him apart from anything else as a parent who encouraged that historical interest. I knew rather a lot about many of the things that I that I took an interest in early on. And then as a really a remarkable gesture, my parents took my brothers, just the two of us in the family, took my brother and myself to Britain in 1953 at the time of the coronation. And we toured around all these monuments. It was still the war damage in London was still very evident then. So we we saw what the war was like from much closer than anyone experienced it in North America. And and I remember it as very young people do remember visiting the Duke of Wellington’s House and St. Paul’s Cathedral and things like this. And so I always had an interest in history and was encouraged by my parents, my father in particular. And and that was that was a I think that was the only thing that was pretty clean, if not exactly noteworthy, a bit different from most of the people I went to school with because they live closer into town and had more social tone than I did. So you speak of your father fondly by the sounds of it. It sounds to me like he was an encouraging figure in your life from a very young age. Is that a reasonable presumption? Yes, I know. I remember both my parents very fondly. My father and the scenario, I wouldn’t want to, for obvious reasons, get into too much. But later on, he became at times a slightly depressive personality. And and his career was something of an anticlimax. He did very well and made a significant amount of money. And he had he was working with I mean, with slash for a very famous Canadian industrialist, E.P. Taylor, and in the brewing business. And he was the chief executive of what was then the largest. Well, one of the largest brewing companies in the world, but certainly the largest in Canada. It was called Canadian Breweries Limited in those days. And he had a disagreement on policy with Mr. Taylor. And he said, look, instead of instead of having an argument with this, I’ve done this job now for 10 years. And I don’t need the salary. I don’t need it to live in the way I’ve become accustomed to. So I will retire. It’s probably time for change. Jeff continues, you do whatever you want with the company and we remain friends and don’t strain our relations. And that’s what happened. And they remain friends to the end of his life. And but so he he he retired at the age of 47. And he was a well-to-do man. He didn’t lack for anything in a material way. But the balance of his life, nearly 20 years, was an anticlimax. He just sat in his house and read and saw a steadily, slowly, but steadily declining number of people. And and he just never did anything particularly after that. I don’t mean that he should have charged and got a job. But that’s not for me to say and wouldn’t wouldn’t have served any purpose anyway. Unless he was particularly enthused about it. But someone like it’s I’ve found it’s a perfectly good thing and often a very renovating thing to change careers. But but and I’m sure you would in your experience know this and believe the same thing. It is a bad thing to simply do nothing. Just sit in a rocking chair. That that leads to a steady and accelerated level of decline. And that, unfortunately, is what happened to my father. I mean, he was 65 when he died. But but which which is not really a good lottery ticket nowadays. But but it was an anticlimax. But but he always was an interesting man. I would even even after I left, I moved out of the house to go to university when I was. Gee, I was only 18. And apart from that, apart from one year, I didn’t live with my parents again. But I was in Toronto much of the time. And and I always saw them a lot. And and and it was always interesting, always had a good relationship. I had a somewhat turbulent period in my teens. And looking back on it, I can see that my parents treated me with greater patience and probably I would have I run their position. And but I believe that, you know, that was just a phase in our last the last five years. My parents died only only 10 days apart. 10 days apart. And our last 10 years or so, we couldn’t have been more cordial. You know, I was curious about your father, because I’m curious psychologically about the role that fathers in particular play in relationship to encouraging their children, which seems to me a primary paternal role. And so when I see someone who is successful and and and. Who I suspect in some sense, isn’t intrinsically rebellious in their central spirit, maybe that’s wrong. I’m always curious about their relationship with their father. I mean, you started to read early. You were reading history. He obviously did he push books your way? Did he guide your reading? How did that all? Sometimes he in particular, he gave me when I was 13. He handed me a book and he said, obviously, it’s not for me to tell you what to read. But I do recommend this. And if you just read a few pages and I think you will want to continue. And it was A.G. McDonald’s book, Napoleon and his Marshals to people interested in Napoleon. It’s a very famous book. And for example, one of the great tomes on Napoleon, David Chandler’s The Campaigns of Napoleon, a book of 1300 pages of tremendous work of scholarship and very well written in the in the forward credits, A.G. McDonald and people who write about Napoleon often do. It’s a tremendously readable book. And and and and and it gave me a huge interest in Napoleon that I’ve that I’ve kept up. You know, I mean, after a while, you you feel, you know enough about somebody. But but but it was a great it was a great encouragement and incitement and and confirmation of the intrinsic interest in studying these very interesting personalities of the past. And he did a number of things like that and in slightly different fields. Another one some years later, two or three years later, he gave me a copy of Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love. Now, it’s a novel about real people, but the names changed. And and it was a particular satisfaction to me in in later years when I was living in Britain and was the chairman of the Daily Telegraph and I met a lot of these people. My Nancy Mitford, unfortunately, had died, but her sisters, the Duchess of Devonshire, I knew, and the Lady Mosley, the widow of Sir Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader. I met her and Jessica Mitford, who was married to a communist, was very eccentric British family. So wide gap in their political views. And Nancy Mitford herself had a tremendous torrid romance with one of the most prominent figures in the entourage of General de Gaulle. And when he was the president of the Fifth Republic and and and prior to that and so these book, I just cite those two in particular, but they were tremendously readable, interesting books. And they did launch my interest in different fields. He did that a number of times, but he was never oppressive or or dogmatic about it. And actually quite subtle. I remember. My parents took us on Easter holiday in 1955, so I was 10 years old. My brother’s four years older out to the West Coast by train and back. But but we got around a bit in the West Coast and on the train, my father gave us a reward if we would memorize Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg. Now, it’s only 10 sentences, you know, it’s not that hard to memorize it. And we did. But but it did incite my interest in Mr. Lincoln. And of course, he’s one of the great and arresting figures of modern history as well. So, yes, he did that. I there you put me in mind. No doubt, if this was the chief focal point of our discussion, I could identify a good many other things. But I cite I cite those ones. And by the way, on the Nancy Mitford piece, I house that is referred to in a pursuit of love is one that they love to go to, because unlike their own house, it wasn’t drafty. It wasn’t that eccentric British rural nobility’s terribly uncomfortable house without real hot water. And then that kind of thing. It was just a very comfortable house with central heating and so on. And it turned out that a friend of mine rented it. And we went out there to lunch a few times. And it was I mean, I I couldn’t explain it in a way that would be of any interest to anyone that was there other than my wife. But it was it was as if I’d been there before from having read about it. It was just a very interesting connection with my past. How old were you when you started to read seriously? I started when I was nine or 10, I remember reading. I remember reading the first volume of General de Gaulle’s War Memoirs when they were first published in English. They’re the ones that begin all my life. I’ve thought of France in a certain way. And it’s beautifully written by De Gaulle was a wonderful writer. He’s not always historically reliable, but political memoirists rarely are. I mean, the same could be said of Mr. Churchill, but he is a lovely writer. And and so from then on, I was I wasn’t writing. For a while, I read the boy’s book of the Navy. And I think I think we went through the Hardy boys and that kind of thing for approximately one month when I was seven or eight. But I moved on to the history of the Navy or some sports figures, you know, like Ted Williams or something like that. And then I got into I got into the history thing when I was nine and stayed at it after that. So how much how much were you reading when you were a kid, say, nine? Well, I wasn’t a fast reader, but I was I was a retender reader. So when I read something, I tended to remember it well. And a couple of hours a day, every day. And then a little more in the weekends. When would you do that before you went to bed? Did you have a routine? Yes. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I know I’d have, you know, I was supposed to do my homework. And there were some television programs I watched that I like. But I wasn’t one of these young people who was who was just stuck, glued in front of a screen every every free moment, the way a lot of youngsters nowadays are with the video games and things. I wasn’t like that. I mean, it is possible. And I look, Jordan, as you and I know, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who do sit staring at a television set all day. But I and they’re all as long as we’ve had television. There have been people who’ve been thoroughly captivated by it. But I was always rather more choosy in programming. I mean, I liked things like war victory at sea, you know, as a drama. But the US Navy. That was a great series. I know that series. It’s it’s great. With Richard Rogers, music was really taken from Wagner, the powerful beginning of showing the, you know, the aerial shots of the Pacific fleet, this colossal Navy moving forward. But and some of the humorous programs like The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason, I like. But but I I would I would know a program to watch and go and watch it for half an hour and then go back and read something. I would just sit there waiting for whatever came next. And were you up all night with with flashlight under the covers reading? Not all night, but often a little bit. And it has to be said that my parents were not overly authoritarian. It was a relatively large house. I could my mother would come up once in the course of the night and make sure everything was fine. But I I I normally hear coming. But in any case, they didn’t get particularly excited about about my reading with a flashlight because they correctly assumed the nine or 10 or 11 year old would fall asleep anyway. So, you know, when he felt like it. So any idea what it is about history in particular that attracted you? Because obviously you you have an intrinsic interest in it. You didn’t even gravitate towards fiction when you were a child. You you gravitated towards nonfiction and history pretty fast. So what is this right now? I must say, I went on a binge of fiction in university. And when I started, as one does, I mean, I find I found that with my own sons and daughter and and, you know, you you you suddenly become interested in writing and you read a lot that he wrote. And you’re on to the next one. So in that way, you know, I read a huge number of novels by famous novelists. And is that is that what you did? You’d find a novelist you really liked and then read everything and then move on to someone else? Basically, and especially the Americans, you know, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck and so on. And and the latter two were alive. I was reading about them reading the words and but but but I got into others, but not as comprehensive. I mean, I think I read four or five of the books of George Eliot and most well, you know, a number of factory and, you know, the obvious ones. And so what what was it about history? Do you think that that attracted you so much and so young? Because many I mean, the personalities I was reading about were terrible. I mean, the personalities I was reading about were terribly interesting. I had extraordinary careers and and it it started to give me. And this sounds ludicrous. You’re you’re you’re you may you and your viewers may conclude that I’m a psychiatric case or something, but it’s not as if I identified at all with, say, a man like Napoleon. It’s just that in his career, you could see points where absolutely everything was at risk. And he persevered successfully and points where he he he was you know, fortune had not smiled upon him and things looked terribly bleak. And then suddenly things opened up. Now it was a revolutionary time, unlike Canada in the 50s and 60s. I mean, you could scarcely think of a less revolutionary place. And and but the pattern of events where people’s fortunes change so quickly and in both directions. I mean, of course, Napoleon ended up in Santolina, but but he actually attempted to commit suicide after he came back from Russia. And and we were referring earlier to Abraham Lincoln. And there were there were moments where. Everything appeared to be terribly gloomy, appeared to be a failure, was was widely mocked for riotous reasons, including his physical appearance, which which in photographs is actually rather impressive. But but it appeared to be hopeless and that he was consigned to being a a failure who had who had tried to prevent the breakup of this country unsuccessfully and had propagated a war that was not successful. And and of course, it all turned. And and and you you you end up appreciating the qualities of these people, both those to emulate and those to try to avoid. Now, Mr. Lincoln’s case, it’s a particularly striking example because it is almost impossible to find something negative to say about him. He was a self-made man, but with none of that chippiness and self-made people of it. And he was a genuine intellectual, but an autodidact. And and but never with any of the pomposity or dogmatism of some intellectuals. And he. He he was always saddened rather than angry at the many betrayals and disappointments he suffered. And while he was a rather morose man in some ways, he had a splendid sense of humor, he had a terribly difficult life and had two sons die as boys. And this tragedy did not these tragedies and afflictions didn’t. Didn’t compromise his ultimate sense of optimism. And he was he was really a a remarkably admirable character as well as the extremely effective statesman. And of course, he was a wonderful wordsmith. I mean, you were talking about the Gettysburg address. I noticed when I first read it under the incitement to memorize it, that for example, where he said. Fundly, well, you know, he said for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live, I mean, just to use the same word as the noun and the verb in the same sentence is slightly artistic. And in the second inaugural, when he said fondly, do we hope fervently, do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away? I mean, that is, in fact, the line of poetry. He was a remarkable wordsmith. And you were you were noticing that the way that words were crafted as well when you were reading history. And not not as well as one does after a bit of practice. But, you know, I started to notice and then started to look for it, you know. So and all right. So you were reading well in advance. Well, in advance of your years, what was it like for you going to school when you were let’s let’s go when you were a child again, before you went to university? Well, I was, you know, you always did the necessary to to be on the same wavelength, if you will, as your friends. So I didn’t want to be thought of as a I didn’t mind being thought of as slightly eccentric. I didn’t want to be thought of as an odd person. And in fairness, a lot of a lot of the other students were interested in a lot of things. I went to relatively, I guess, relatively good schools. I mean, I didn’t like them very much, but I loved university, but I didn’t like school very much. But and I remember in 1958, I was 13, and because it was well known that I was interested in France when the disturbances came in the spring of that year at the end of the Fourth Republic, the our class teacher asked me if I would because this was this was on the front pages of the newspapers and led the news every night, you know, the return of to go from Columbia and 58 and the threat of the revolt by the army in Algeria. And the teacher asked me if I would give a five minute comment on it the following day. So I did. And I’m you know, I was careful to try and not be pompous or and not get into obscure things. And I don’t mean to put on the airs of somebody with any, in fact, great authority in these matters. But I was I was flattered that he asked and I and I made an effort to try and make it interesting. And it was appreciated. And it was it was one of those little experiences in life that was very positive and reassuring to me that these my classmates didn’t think I was just a kook, you know, because they were reading about it, too. And they were in a way saying, well, you know, what’s going on in France? I mean, in Canada and Britain and the United States, you know, you didn’t have the army threatening to return to the capital by parachute and take over the country and everybody going out into the country, 120 miles to talk to a retired general about whether he wanted to take over the government or not. I mean, we didn’t have that in the speaking country. So it was a bit different. Do you remember anything of your ambitions at that time? Well, here, I must say, I was somewhat influenced by my father’s milieu. Toronto in those days was, if I may say it, without I hope sounding like an old dowager or something, a terribly. Plane. Austere place, there wasn’t any flair to it. It had nice residential areas, but but it wasn’t a good looking city at all. Until the first subway was opened in the mid 50s, all the wires were above ground, so you had these creosote soaked blackened telephone poles everywhere. We had done thick clusters of wires and an inordinate amount of that old sort of Victorian reddish, but not red brick, the colour of Queen’s Park. But with, you know, with the dust of years on it. Apart from a few individual buildings like the old Bank of Commerce, for example, and Osgood Hall and some others, there weren’t many nice looking buildings downtown. It was not a nice looking city, the way Montreal was, or let alone New York or something. And and and there, you know, it was a virtuous place, but it was a terribly sober place. You know, you couldn’t go to the cinema on Sundays. There wasn’t a Sunday newspaper. Now, I, of course, was just a boy and I didn’t drink or anything. But older people, I remember a few cousins of mine who were older, so they wanted to go out with a date. They had to go to a to a hotel to find a restaurant that was licensed. I mean, it was that only changed with John Roberts in the 60s. And so my father’s friends. Businessmen, as far as I could see, were the only people that had any sort of style, you know, Mr. Taylor and Mr. MacDougald and Colonel Phillips, who was the chancellor of the university, he was associated with them and others who were friends of his like John Bass and so on, they they had some style and some flair and they were wealthy, but but in a tasteful way and that, you know, so it was kind of an attractive thing to aspire to be wealthy and and and enjoy it, but in a tasteful way, you see. I mean, Mr. Taylor built the Jockey Club was just a bunch of milk wagon horses and fixed races until he took it took it over and fixed it up and made it a great horse racing operation. And so I so I was sort of attracted to the idea of getting into business in a way that I could I could raise my, you know, raise my net worth and standard of living. But but all was I had a if not exactly an academic interest, certainly an interest to study history and potentially to write. Although, although it took me a long time to summon the courage to write. Yeah. So you’ve covered your interest in history and now we’ve delved into a little bit into the origins of your interest in business. So that does leave that third issue hanging to some degree. So let’s go to the time when you went to university. You said you read a tremendous amount of fiction in university. What did you major in and what was it like for you? How do you remember your university experience? A very fondly. I went first to Ottawa. Pardon me, to the to Carlton University. And I had a somewhat rambunctious career in high school and changed schools a number of times. And finally, I came if I may just back up slightly. If anyone is interested in my story, this is an interesting part of it. I it’s not for me to say whether it is in the abstract, interesting enough. But in grade 13, I finally concluded that these schools were so incompetent and most of the teachers in them were so incompetent. And in addition, malicious, some of them that I discovered that you could, in fact, write your matriculation examinations on your own. You didn’t have to do it in a school. So I informed my father that this is what I was going to do in February of my last year in high school, except that in those days, you had nine examinations and you had to pass them all or you didn’t matriculate. So, you know, I was really taking a leap here, but and the examinations were written in the old armory on University Avenue, where the were just immediately to the west of Osgood Hall. It’s now a Supreme Court building, but there was an armory there. And several hundred of us of all ages, mainly older people, came in each day, put down five dollars and we could write the examination. And I worked like a beaver to prepare for those examinations and I passed them all. And if you’ll pardon me, quite a personal recollection. The way my father’s housework, he stayed up late. There’s a habit I got from him. He stayed up late and he slept in. I mean, he got a lot done in a day, but he was operating on a slightly different clock than most people. Well, in those days, the post office delivered the mail to the house at about 830 in the morning. And one particular day in the spring of 1962, my mother got it and she saw this letter from the Ministry of Education addressed to me. So she surmised it might be my results. So she brought it to me. I opened it and I said, well, it was a scrape. I had a 50 and a 51, but I passed everything and I have matriculated. And I’m eligible for university, though. I won’t get into McGill or Toronto, which is what I wanted, but I’ll get into one of them. So she disappeared and something that was unheard of in her house. At about 10 minutes to nine in the morning, I heard the unmistakable footfall of my father in his dressing gowns. It turned out he said, I congratulate you. I extended his hand, I shook hands with him and he went back to bed. Now it sounds absurd, but it was a very moving experience. When he congratulated me, I said, well, you know, you’ve been more than intelligent. And I thank you for that. He said, it’s fine. You know, congratulations. It was, that means a lot. And what do you, what do you, what do you think motivated him to congratulate you at that point? And why do you think it meant so much to you? I had great, we had our differences in those days, not in later years, but, you know, as one does, you need one does have differences with parents sometimes. And, but I, he was a very, very intelligent man and a good man. And I had great respect and admiration for him and for him to congratulate me in a way that wasn’t perfunctory, it wasn’t, you know, well done if you’d, you know, want to hand it to cards or something. It was the way he said it, he imparted a seriousness to it that made it clear to me that he thought that what I had done was a major achievement. And the fact that he thought it was not only confirmed my view that it was in fact, something of achievement, but the fact that he thought it was a major achievement coming from a very successful and intelligent man, which he was and who was after all the principle male figure in my life. It was, it was a milestone. And what do you think made that accomplishment particularly worthy of both memory and note? What did it do for you? Now you have alluded to the fact that you were causing some trouble in high school. Yeah. Look, in a way it legitimized the comparative hell raising of my late high school years. It sort of wiped the slate clean. The score at the end of the game is you win. See, you graduated. So you weren’t just a rebel without a cause. Well, I maybe didn’t have a cause, but at least the rebellion ended with me still in one piece and in defensible shape, morally, if you will. I mean, in terms of the my ability to defend my conduct as a whole, not every part of it. Right. Right. Yeah. So you, I mean, all the nonsense and the foolishness that, and I had my full share of it for people at age, it ended well. And it was, look, it’s, it embarrasses me to say this and particularly at this remove in time, but it actually was simply an achievement for somebody who hadn’t been in the habit of really concentrating that much on schoolwork to buckle down, study all of these things. And I had some, I had some good scores. I mean, my overall average was not bad. And to do it all and pass it all the way I did was it was an achievement. Right. Well, it sounds like that’s when you learn to actually do some academic work. That’s right. I think, I think that is, I think that is absolutely correct. Right. And that’s a good, good preparation for university because you do a lot better at university if you can work on your own. I mean, when I went to, especially when you’re going, you’re getting close to the exams and you have to really swat it up. Yes. Yes. I mean, I didn’t work in high school and I learned to work in university and there was a big difference and it was very much worthwhile learning to work. And okay. So you went off to university and you have, I have specific reasons to ask you about university. I’ve had discussions with a number of people recently about their university memories, some young people, including Yeonmi Park, who is a refugee or an escapee from North Korea, who just spent four years at Columbia in New York, which was a dream of hers and described it to me as a complete waste of time and money. And when I pushed her on that insisted that she didn’t have one course or one professor worthy of note, which was terribly shocking to me. And then I followed that up with Rex Murphy, who went to Memorial University in the 1950s and late 1950s and had nothing but positive things to say about his experience. So and for me, when I went to I went to a small college to begin with, but I had excellent professors there. They taught me. They were admirable people. They paid a lot of attention to me and to my friends. I learned to write. I learned to work. I learned. Well, I learned I learned how to buckle down and and be serious about my academic pursuits. So for me, all the memories, almost all the memories of certainly my early university education and my graduate education, for that matter, were positive. So but things may have changed since then, but your experience. Yeah, I imagine that young lady, I from all I hear, most of these well-known American universities just gone to pieces. But I but maybe the maybe the graduate departments are better. I don’t know. But I imagine she at least enjoyed living in New York City. She’d learn something from that. Anyway, such a vital city. But the you actually set this up for me very nicely and put me in mind of a couple of things as an undergraduate. The. I did encounter a professor who did have a very profound impact on my ability to focus on things and and my and my interest in certain subjects. You may even know her for her. I know Naomi Griffiths. She would now be in her early 80s, I think. But she she’s a specialist in Acadian studies. She was very friendly with the late Governor General Romeo LeBlanc. But she was a very fine lecturer and and also a very kindly and sociable person. And then I got to know her a little bit. And and and she she she did help focus me in certain historic areas. But what what happened after I graduated from Carleton was we were I was in 1965 and we were. We were getting into the sort of run up to the centennial and the especially in Ottawa, there was a great emphasis on on, you know, by culturalism. And it was clear that things were starting to really simmer in unpredictable ways in Quebec, unpredictable politically. And it was in the autumn of that year that in the guise of seeking a majority, Mr. Pearson and his advisors, some of whom I got to know quite well subsequently, called an election and their real motive was to bring in some strong federalists from Quebec. They had never really replaced Mr. Salloran as the federal leader in Quebec. And and that was when Pierre Trudeau and Jean Marchand, Gérard Peltier and others came in. And and they were starting to sort of pivot to meet this challenge to federalism from Quebec. And one thing led to another. And. Because I was unsure what I wanted to do for a year, I. Operated, I bought for practically nothing because it wasn’t worth anything from a good friend of mine, who Peter White, who had lived as my sub 10 to my place in Ottawa my last year when he was working with Maurice Sauve, the subsequently the consul to the governor general, but he was then a junior minister in Mr. Pearson’s government. But the first of that avant garde from the sort of new Quebec, and he owned a little newspaper in the Eastern townships about 60 miles east of Montreal and Nolte and Quebec. And I bought a half interest net for five hundred dollars, which is four hundred and ninety nine dollars more than it was worth commercially. But that’s what I did for a while. And it. And that was while you were a student. You know, it was it was after I finished as an undergraduate before I went on to to my next university. And and so what happened was that infected me with interest in the newspaper business. I’d always had some because I was interested in the again, the style of some of these famous newspaper owners, you know, like William Randolph Hearst, for example, the most obvious example, Colonel McCormick on the Chicago Tribune. And up to a point, some of the British press owners, Lord Beaver-Burr, who was alive then, and Lord Northcliff and some others. And but obviously sitting at the Eastern townships producing an eight page half tabloid was a long way from living in San Clemente, you know, Mr. Hearst, famous in California. But they. It also infected me with the interest in Quebec and French Quebec. And even though it was an English paper, you know, obviously one was in a largely French milieu. So the upshot of that was the next year I became a law student at Laval University, French University in Quebec City. And that was a terribly interesting and positive experience. I have to say, even though we were, I think, only 15 English speaking law, I mean, primarily English speaking law students in a faculty of 500 or so. And in the Graduate Arts building where we were, it’s all building, we were, there were thousands of students coming and going and there couldn’t have been more than 50 of us who were basically French speaking and in many cases exclusively French speaking. And it was an entirely positive experience. There was no, absolutely no ethnic antagonism. I mean, people got on well, they didn’t, but not for ethnic reasons. And I have to say those people, all of them, could not have been more welcoming and pleasant as a group. And I’ve always had bias. Yes, questions to come out of that is, what did your undergraduate career do for you? Why were you motivated to buy this newspaper? And why did you go to a French speaking university for law school? Well, they, my undergraduate career was the point at which I turned from being largely a social operative, effectively studying as, frankly, Jordan, I think most young men do as undergraduates, studying chiefly female anatomy and contents of the containers of alcoholic beverages. And I was more successful at the second than the first, but but one got on, you know, and then you did, you studied as much as you needed to. Well, Naomi Griffiths helped motivate me to treat it as a little more than something where you just passed the years and checked the box of going from first to second, graduating year. What did she do to do that? She gave me the vision of actually becoming an authority on some part of history, and also writing about history. Then, so that would be my main answer to your first question. Your last one was why a French university, but your second one was why about the newspaper. I was at Louisiana, as you say, and so frankly, my friend Peter White said, look here, I need an editor of this paper. I’m here in Ottawa, and then at the end of it, the government changed in Quebec, and the Union nationale won. Du Plessis’s old party won with Mr. Daniel Johnson Sr., and he hired Peter White as his chief English language assistant. He was head of the English language section of the premier of Quebec’s office, which is a serious position. In the English community of Quebec, that is an important position, and he conducted it extremely well. Mr. Johnson was a very impressive man, I thought, and still think. He said, look, I’ve got to have an editor for this paper. I’m going to have to close the paper. Why don’t you buy a half interest for nominal sum and be the resident editor for a while until you decide what to do? Then one thing led to another, and he was an alumnus of the law faculty of Laval, and the number of famous English Canadians were most famously Brian Mulroney. He was in Peter’s class, I mean, they’re older than I am, but five or six years older than I am. Michael Mayen’s another, he’s a senator. He’s now, I think, the chancellor of McGill University. His grandfather was the prime minister, and others. Once I got into that media, because of who I knew, I got a little bit into the edges of Quebec politics, and I met Premier Johnson. Our paper served the English residents of the vice premier of Quebec and the subsequent premier, Jean-Jacques Bertrand. I don’t mean know the same, it was any other than, you know, Bonjour or something, but I got to serve into the edge of that. That period coming up in 1967 with the fermentation in Quebec, which was very active politically, but nothing violent about it at that point. It was an exciting atmosphere. And you also said that you had become aware of newspaper owners, approximately, at this point. Well, just the way they lived. I mean, look, I never have aspired to live in the oriental, monarchical fashion of William Randolph First, made most famous in caricature, and in the citizen cane, which Orson Welles officially denied anything to do with Hearst. But as Time magazine put it, lawyers for Mr. William Randolph Hearst have determined otherwise and prosecuted accordingly. But it developed along that way. So I became motivated academically, then had a reason to move to Quebec and get involved in this most modest scale. You can be short of just being a newspaper delivery boy, but in a position where I did everything. I was the publisher and the editor. Manhattan and the assistant who did the actual clerical work. But, you know, I sold the ads. I produced the circulation campaigns such as they were, and I wrote most of the content. So as you know, that’s the way the women in the business do it all. Right. Right. And then I thought it would be a good idea to pursue my studies in Quebec, in a French university. And Peter White helped me. And indeed, the premier allowed his name to stand as a recommendation. Now, in Quebec City in 1966, if someone appeals for it or applies for entry to the law faculty and one of the sponsors is the prime minister of Quebec, I mean, unless it’s a joke and this guy has never got past grade seven, he’s going to be admitted. And it was an entirely positive experience. But you must understand it was a double and ultimately a triple experience, if I may elaborate. I really had to learn the language. I knew the kind of basic French high school graduate in Ontario knows where I know a few words, but I didn’t really know how to put a serious sentence together or speak fluently. And at that age, my early twenties, you know, I wanted to socialize. I didn’t want to live like a monk, you know. And so you really have to pick it up. And so I was learning the language. And also, it came up that in 1969, when I was into my final year in the law school, the Sherbrooke Daily Record, and we’re into a daily newspaper, albeit small, 89,000 circulation, came up for sale on a distressed basis because they overcommitted to buying a press thinking they could sell enough business on the press to pay for it and they didn’t. So they were they were strained. And so Peter White, a third friend of ours, and I bought that paper. So in that space of time, I became, you know, I made a major advance in my academic career, qualified myself as a law graduate, picked up, if I may say, a pretty good, solid competence in French and became a newspaper co-owner. I believe I was the only publisher of a daily newspaper, certainly the only one I’ve ever heard of anywhere, who was at the same time a law student. Now, there may have been others, but I haven’t heard of anything like that. And so that it was really out of that brief period, the rest of, or at least much of the balance of my career was launched. I know that, you know, that happens to everybody, I suppose, but it was a slightly different pattern for me than most. Why law? Yeah, look, it’s the neutral place. It was not that I ever particularly desired to be a lawyer, but you never go wrong with it. You know, it always helps you as a qualification for whatever you’re going to do. And parts of it are an interesting subject. Now, I focused on constitutional and international and, you know, heaven help anyone relying on my recollections of Quebec civil code to get them through a median wall case or some one of these funny minor bits of litigation you get. But, you know, the law is a broad field and there’s lots of stuff that’s interesting in it. I never particularly desired to practice, I never did practice. I had a couple of minimum wage cases where our campaign was the defendant. I got Brian Mulroney, he was a labor lawyer, to coach me a bit. I did exactly what he told me to do. He won the two cases about the best settlement practice I’ve ever had. I will say that it’s been very useful to me. I mean, unfortunately, I’ve had a great deal of legal experience as a client of lawyers, including some very famous lawyers in the United States and Britain and Canada. But that does help you. If you know something about it, the basis of the law, it does help you in dealing with lawyers. So how did you manage your career as a publisher and your studies at that point? Well, I was pretty much an absentee publisher. I would come there when I could and do certain things. I called upon certain advertisers in Montreal and Toronto when I was able to. But that was what, nine months before I graduated. After that, I was a resident publisher, and then we started to build the business and branched out and bought more papers and it grew and grew. So the first paper that you bought, you said the bulk of the writing. So how much time were you spending writing in a week at that point? Oh, when I was the resident publisher of a weekly paper? It took probably eight or ten hours to write the main contents of the paper for each week. It’s not absolutely the chronicles of, it’s not the best collected editorials of the London Times. No, but you had to commit to producing. Yeah, you got to get it to paper. I mean, people are often told that they’re going to be able to do it. But I was a little bit I mean, people are often curious about what it takes to be a writer. And I mean, one of the things that it takes to be a writer is to write and to produce constantly and on a schedule. At least that’s how it seems to me. And it appears that you had a deadline that was continually renewing itself and you had to produce content come hell or high water fundamentally. Yeah, and what you said is very perceptive is now, I mean, you have some reason why you would know this, but I have millions of readers in the United States. I write these columns, four of them, every week in the US. And it’s just what you said. It’s a deadline that comes up all of that. Now, it’s only 1200 words. So it’s not that much writing. But on the other hand, you know, it’s a highly competitive field and you don’t know when it’s going to pay you. No one reads you. So you have to put down something. Yeah. Well, and that’s still 365,000 words. No, not a year. You said weekly. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So it’s 100,000 words a year. It’s a book a year. Right. Yeah, this is true. And now, you know, the news cycles, what it is, there’s always plenty to write about. But that got me into that habit. You’re absolutely right. Where you’re writing to a deadline and you can’t balk at the deadline. If I could make a detour here, but a relevant one, as you know, and many of your viewers would, I was for a time a guest of the people of the United States and the Bureau of Prisons. Now, I ultimately won that battle. I won it entirely. In addition, ultimately, the charges were retroactively withdrawn. And it was an outrage from A to Z. But what I did while I was there was I was a tutor to students who did not succeed in the program the US Bureau of Prisons has of requiring everyone who has not graduated from secondary school to do so. And so they have teachers and examinations every month. And those who were unsuccessful, they would send to me and I recruited other tutors. I recruited a former head of the Torpedo Room of a Nuclear Submarine, my science tutor, because I’m not qualified to do that. And for mathematics, the head of mathematics, former head of mathematics of a large high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, was also a successful commodities trader. And these were people that were imprisoned at the same time? Yes. But, you know, the non-violent things, I think one was a tax case, and the other was a alleged fraudulent use of a credit card or something. But they’re highly qualified people. So the three of us were tutoring these people. And these people would be sent to us, and they would arrive very kind of sullen and suspicious, which the conduct of the American criminal legal system invites and incites and largely justifies. And I would give them a little speech that they didn’t have to do a thing if they didn’t want to. But if they wanted to leave there with their foot on the escalator and an excellent chance to make a good living in a way that didn’t lead straight back to a place like this, I could help them. If they didn’t want that, that was fine. I didn’t care, but I was there if they wanted. But the one thing I didn’t want was for them to imagine that I was part of this awful system. I was a bigger victim of it than they probably were because I didn’t commit any of this. With that, the whole thing turned and they became fully cooperative. Why did that spew? Okay, why did you formulate that speech? Why did you think it was justifiable? And why did it have a positive effect on the people that you were discussing? Because they had, in that great rich country of the United States, and I’m not a socialist, but they had not had a fair deal. Most of them scarcely had any idea who their father was. And from early times, their mother or somebody was saying, somebody’s got to get some money here, we’re going to be out in the street. And they were just cannon fodder in the drug war. I mean, they were at the last edge. They were the last stage of transfer. So some drug eaters picked up, they say, where did you get that from? And they’d finger that person and they were cooked. So off they went to prison terribly over since. One of my students got 25 years for driving a truck loaded with marijuana. He wasn’t even a user himself. Anyway, a lad of 23 or something. Anyway, one thing I am proud of in that same sense as my initial graduation from high school myself was that all of my lads passed, 206. So some of them had to take exams more than once, but they all graduated. How long were you in prison and doing this? Three years and two weeks. How long did it take after you were in prison before you started doing this tutoring and why did you do it? How long after I arrived in prison did it start? Yes. Only about a month because one of my books was in the library and the head of education said, look here, we’ve got to do something with these guys who just keep failing. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with their IQ, but let’s try something different. Instead of our teachers, would you do it? And then I would answer your question about why I gave them a little speech. So it was hardly a speech, but I pretty much said to you what I said to them. It was because I knew that they initially would think I was part of this evil system, that they hated it. And I had to make them understand that I was one of them and not one of the others. And that wasn’t a pretense. It wasn’t a falsehood. I was. I mean, my heart was with the prisoners and not with the- But you were also selling them something. You were selling them literacy as an escape from their current condition. I was selling them self-interest. And as the Australians say, it’s a trier. I mean, that’s one that’ll go. But what I was going to say about them was, and this is going back to what you were saying about meeting deadlines, the American or at least the Florida matriculation system, that’s where it was, required an essay. And so I said, all right, write an essay. And they had various topics that were usually used. So I said, take your pick of these. And some of these fellows literally couldn’t write a word. They had a mental block. They couldn’t write a word. And the way I got around that was I said, look, we’ll change the subject here. You write on the sexiest woman you’ve ever seen. And you can use your imagination. There doesn’t have to be such a woman. You can just make her up. And only I will read this. So if it’ll help you, be as coarse and vulgar as you want. Use any sexual word you want, any way you want it, anything. Just write what comes to mind. And that got them all going. None of them had a mental block after that. Why in the world did you take that tack? And why in the world did they trust you? And then I have another question too, which is why did they pass? Why were you successful when the other teachers, let’s say, or the system that was hypothetically designed to educate them failed? Well, because they wouldn’t put out for them. They thought it was another trick of the establishment to use them. And in their minds, they were obliged to provide them food and shelter. And as long as they just sort of sullenly went along with things, they didn’t harass them too much. And so that was minimum compliance. But it was a survival regime for them. And that was really where their lives were reduced to at that point. And so I produced a sort of spark of light that they could actually better their lot, raise their hireability, and therefore their legitimate, by which I mean legal, income aspiration. Because they matriculated from high school, they were more hireable. And if they hadn’t been, and indeed in the case of a number of them, I assisted them in becoming correspondence students in universities. And indeed, I had a couple of them who started there, then were released and continued physically at the university and graduated. I had one a couple years ago, Ropey, when he graduated from the University of Alabama. It was more than a couple of years ago, and now it’s about six years ago. But he graduated from the University of Alabama. So to the extent I’m in touch with these people, they’re all doing fine. They’re all well-launched, doing fine. Well, you obviously take pleasure in this particular accomplishment. You see, it was ironic, Jordan, because I didn’t, I mean, I had a few teachers I liked. We all remember the teachers we liked, but there weren’t that many of them in my case. And most of them I didn’t like. I bought into the view that really they were teachers because they couldn’t make it in the world of adults. So they sought success in a place where they could assert their authority over smaller people. And I mean, this was my concept of the motivation of some of the teachers I had. But, and you know, Shaw’s famous comment, he who can does, he who cannot teach us. I sort of believed that. I thought there were exceptions, but in general, I thought these teachers were people who couldn’t make it in a more substantial occupation. And that was an unfair judgment. But on the other hand, when I see what level of education those department schools achieve nowadays, I’m not so sure it was an unjust judgment, but in any case, that’s what I thought. But I saw the other side of it when I was tutoring these guys in the prison system. I saw the satisfaction of it. And I will give the Bureau of Prisoners, they devised this graduation ceremony, and all the families would come. And they were emotional occasions. And I’m not a particularly emotional person, but one of the few seriously emotional, positive emotional moments I’ve had was when my two colleagues and I were introduced. And this whole packed room stood up and cheered for about five minutes. And you know, the girlfriends or wives or parents or whatever, of my students would meet my wife in the visiting center and say, oh, your husband is, you know, my guy’s a teacher and we’re so grateful to him and all this stuff. It was very touching. And incidentally, Jordan, prison isn’t the place for those people. I was in a low security place. None of these guys were violent and they weren’t habitual offenders. It wasn’t the right place for them. That’s not the way we should treat these people. They’re not bad people and they’re not unintelligent. And as I say, every one of mine passed. The problem was, they just got a wrong turning early on. So let’s return to the newspaper business. So now you’re out of law school and you have a second newspaper and you’ve graduated. Now you’ve taken on the role as a publisher. Your empire starts to expand at that point. It does, but I had one more one more lap to run on the educational side. I became a master’s candidate and did receive the degree from McGill in French Canada studies. Now this came from, I mean, not that you’ve asked me, I’m volunteering it. Because I knew Premier Johnson a bit, I don’t know how conversant you are with modern Quebec history, but he was often referred to as the son du Plessis he never had. Maurice du Plessis, as you probably know, was the only person in history to serve five terms as premier of Quebec and he died in office. And Jean Lausage told me that if he’d lived, he would have been re-elected. He really knew how to organize that province politically. But he was a bachelor, but he advanced Johnson quite quickly and Johnson was kind of his protege. And he had the same speaking style, very witty way of talking. And he inspired my interest in du Plessis because up until then I had the, what was the conventional English Canadian view, the du Plessis was really a retrograde political character and a scoundrel. I mean, a colorful man and a clever man, no doubt, but a cynic and essentially much too authoritarian. I mean, there’s some truth in that, but the fact is he produced the modernization of Quebec. He built the autoroutes, he built the schools, he built every university except McGill. I mean, he was re-elected because he delivered for the province. But his technique was to get the nationalists and the conservatives to vote together, which is very difficult to do. Either you’re taking the nationalists to vote together, which is very difficult to do. Either you’re too nationalistic and frighten the conservatives, which happened to him in 1939, or you’re not nationalistic enough and they get impatient with you, which is what happened to Jean-Jacques Bertrand in 1970. I mean, du Plessis had it all organized for Paul Sauvé to follow him and Daniel Johnson to follow him. But du Plessis was a strong man. It was almost 70 when he died in office. Those two died in office in the early 50s. And then the whole thing broke up. But my point was that Johnson stirred my curiosity about du Plessis because there clearly was a story to this man that wasn’t being told. He was reviled as the author of The Great Darkness and all that sort of thing. So I went to a colloquy. I happened to get an invitation and it came from Miss Griffiths, who I mentioned, it was my old professor at Carleton, who said, you might be interested in this. I went to it in three rivers and it was a discussion of du Plessis. And there was a panel, there was one pro du Plessis panelist, two anti du Plessis ones. And I went up to the pro du Plessis one and at the end of it, it was the somewhat well known historian Robert Rumi, a Frenchman originally, who was a member of Accion Francaise, you know, Charles Morast. And he was at a demonstration in the Place de la République in 1926. And the person next to him was shot dead. And with that, he left France and never returned, immigrated to Quebec. Anyway, I congratulated him on upholding du Plessis and we conversed for a while. And then I gave him a ride back to Montreal. And it turned out that he had been commissioned by an outfit called, in French, the Society of Friends of the Honorable Maurice du Plessis, to write a book about du Plessis. And they had all du Plessis papers. And so the ideas that came to my mind, well, look, you’re writing in French, would they have any interest in allowing an English-speaking person to look at them and write about that? And he said, well, it’s worth a try, sure, I’ll recommend you say. And then it happened, the head of this outfit was the former Minister of Cultural Affairs in Johnson and Peretron’s government, Jean-Noël Tromble, you may remember. And he’s still alive, he’s very elderly. And so he said, yeah, well, that’s fine, sure, but you know, you’ve got to keep them to yourself, all of which rules are respected. And so I had all this stuff. And then when I saw what I had, I realized I had to do something about it. And this is what takes me back to having developed at least the ambition to write some history. So I calculated that if I enrolled at McGill, citing this as my proposed thesis topic, that would get me halfway through. And if I got halfway through, I’d have the momentum to finish it. And that’s where my first book came from, which is called Render Unto Caesar, The Life of Maurice DiPlessi. And so I got that side of things going at the same time as we built our newspaper company. And we bought within a few months, a daily newspaper in Prince Edward Island, and one in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. So I could say with a semi straight face, we have a newspaper chain that spans the country from ocean to ocean. But I said, you know, the links are rather wide and not many of them. So you’re writing, you’re done your law degree, you’re writing now as well, and you’ve got three newspapers at this point? Well, and there were some weeklys, we were up to probably as many as 10. But then we had some weeklys around Quebec. And then we got we see that there were some available ones in British Columbia, dailies and weeklys. So we built it up. It was still a small company compared to, you know, the ones that own the big newspapers in the country. But we built it up to something, the bit of scale and stature fairly quickly. But it was a very profitable business. And normally, we would make a bid based on the profitability of the present owner. And very rarely were these people who own the papers running them as profitably as they could. They were taking a nice salary for themselves. And they weren’t that concerned with what the profit was. Well, we had an idea of what we could do with profit. And then in those days, you could go to the local bank and say, look, we want to buy this paper. And we want, we were asking you to loan us half the money, we’ll take care of the rest. What we do is we give the vendor a balance of sale notice. So we didn’t put up any, not a cent. But we always did raise the profit. We always raised the quality of the product. And our position always was that the best way to raise the profit was to raise the quality of the product. And even then, people who bought and read a newspaper were what is called ABC1 readers, either high income or high education, relatively speaking. I mean, ignorant people didn’t buy newspapers. And for the most part, poor people didn’t buy newspapers. And people advertisers wouldn’t be interested in, wouldn’t buy a newspaper. But anyone who bought a newspaper is someone an advertiser wants to get to because he has disposable income. How much was your ability to make these newspapers that you purchased profitable and also to see an opportunity there, a consequence of you having done everything when you bought your first newspaper? Considerable, because I knew how much manpower you needed. And almost all of these places had more manpower than they needed. Now, we handled gently, we moved them out. Basically, a lot of them were elderly, so we just gave them early retirement, topped up their pensions a bit and things like that. And they’re small, so you’re not talking about a lot of people. But if you’ve got a newspaper of 50 employees, and you get eight of them to take early retirement, you’ve got the payroll by almost 20%. And it’s not that early retirement. In addition to that, there are all kinds of things to do to enhance revenue. I mean, very few of them had any notion of how you can hype the circulation relatively easily with contests and things like that. I was astounded at the people. And where we really saw this was in England, where the Daily Telegraph, the daily circulation over a million broadsheet papers, the biggest broadsheet paper in Europe. The British loved these, as far as I’m concerned, accurately ridiculous contests. But if you give them a contest, even to get a free subscription to The Spectator, which we also own, they’ll plunge into it. It’s a circulation building. So that’s the sort of thing that an individual sitting in, for argument’s sake, Nelson, British Columbia, having owned this newspaper for 30 years, he wouldn’t know that. It wouldn’t matter if he lived well, was an influential person in his community, made a profit every year, having taken a nice salary for himself, has three or four relatives in the payroll. The company owns his car and owns his speedboat in the lake and all this kind of stuff. I mean, that’s all he needs, which is fine. But the fact is you can double the profits quite quickly. So now do you have a plan at this point? You’re being successful in purchasing newspapers and increasing their profitability, so you’re building up more capital. Are you planning, do you have an aim at this point just to continue expanding? And do you have an end in mind? And we brought it a long way forward. The biggest paper we had when things changed because of that shakeup in the Ravelston Argus thing that you mentioned in your intro, where I started to focus on finance, was Le Soleil in Quebec City, which Sir Wilfred Laurier was once the chairman. And that was a newspaper of about 120,000 circulation a day. It’s not big for Toronto, but that’s what is it. I don’t know the newspaper circulations now. I’ve been out of the business for a long time, but that’s 120,000 papers a day. It’s a respectable size paper. It’s not a huge newspaper, but it’s not like the Nolten Eastern Townships Advertiser. And there was some history to Le Soleil as well, so well-known paper in Quebec. By the way, the history part that I best knew was from my studies of Du Plessis, where it was, as I said, Sir Wilfred was the chairman at one time, was an absolute dyed-in-the-wool liberal newspaper. But the owner, Jacob Nicole, and he owned the newspapers in the Three Rivers and Sherbrooke also. He was one of the few people, was a senator and a legislative councillor to the upper house of Quebec in those days. He was both at the same time. And he was the Liberal Party chairman for 20 years provincially while they were in office, just before Du Plessis, and for nearly 20 years after when they were in office in Ottawa. He was a very powerful man in Quebec. And in the early days of television, he got the license, Douglas threw his political contacts, for Eastern Quebec, South Eastern Quebec, around Sherbrooke. And the best place to put his transmitter was at the top of Mount Orford, which was a provincial park. So he asked Du Plessis if he could put his transmitter there. And Du Plessis said, you know, Jacob, you can put it there, and you don’t have to pay me more than one dollar rent for it, me being the province of Quebec. But not as long as right under the words Le Soleil on your leading newspaper, the words the liberal org. He said, right. At that point, Le Soleil, never mind that Mr. Nicole was a liberal senator and legislative counselor, became a union national newspaper. He just switched like that, and he got his license. Anyway, that’s in a way a red herring, but I thought it might amuse your viewers a bit. Right. So you’re building up a newspaper empire. It’s in Canada. It’s limited to Canada at this point, but you start to expand. Is it first in the US or first in the UK? And how does that? We started to move in the US in, let me think now, we got going there in about 70, 75. We bought a paper just over the border in Vermont, and then it grew. I mean, of course, in a market that size, we fairly rapidly bought a huge number of these small papers. We had a formula to operate them, and you could bundle them together by region. And then when you combine their circulation, it became quite substantial in circulation. We had nothing. And as you said in your intro, we had hundreds of these papers. And were you running writers across the papers, or were these all independent fiefdoms? There were a few that we could run or buy from the outside at a discount for ourselves rather than the unit cost that obtained if we were only buying for one little paper, 10,000 sale or something like that. So we got economies to scale to a degree. But in the papers like that, you absolutely have to serve the local public. And you’re relatively speaking not under threat from television, let alone once it came to the internet, as much in those local papers. Because CBS or the CBC or whatever you want are not going to carry the strawberry festival of the town your paper’s published in. They just have the room for it. So you’re giving people what they can’t get anywhere else. And is that still the case? Are the smaller communities still managing? The internet has become so pervasive now. I think it’s a threat even to those papers, but not as much as it is to a metropolitan paper. So how are you managing your time at this point? You have an increasingly large media empire. You’re also still writing. Well, we divide it into regions. And I had the East and Associates had the West. And then the big turn came in the matter you referred to when the what was called at the time the Argus Group of Companies, the control of it became available. And that was quite an intricate business because the number of voting shares involved was quite small. So because my father had had his position, he died in 1976. So my brother and I, technically we didn’t inherit his stock. We bought it from his estate. But in effect, we inherited it. And then there was a shareholders agreement. The principal associate died and there was some jockeying around. And in any case, in accordance with the shareholders agreement, we bought the other stock. So we had control of the voting shares of this company, which had influential blocks of stock and historically controlling blocks of stock, although in most cases, they weren’t a majority of the shares of a number of famous companies. Massey Ferguson was one of the firm equipment maker, Dominion stores, the grocery stores, Domtar, the forestry products company. And the most interesting in a way was the old Hollinger Mining Company. It didn’t do much mining, but it owned 60% of an outfit that owned big iron ore positions in Labrador and Northern Quebec and long-term contracts to ship the ore that produced about $40millionofroyaltieseveryyearatbasicallynocost.ThesteelcompaniesandtheiraffiliatesintheUnitedStatestooktheoreoutandpaidustheroyalties.Sowehadthatcashtoworkwith.AndthenwhatIdidwas,overaperiod,Ireorientedthatflowofcashandthatbusinessintothenewspaperbusiness.Andwereally,reallytookoffwhenIboughtcontroloftheLondonDailyTelegraph,whichwasinadistressedfinancialstatefor$30 million, which we ultimately sold for $1.327 billion. How long a period of time elapsed between the purchase and the sale? From 1986 to 2004. So 18 years. 18 years, yeah. Well, that’s quite the return on investment. So are you in England? You buy the Telegraph. Are you spending much of your time in Britain at that point? Well, after we bought it, I went there for two years in the summers only. And then I made it my chief residence after that for about 15 years. Yeah. So what was it like moving from Toronto to Britain? Well, I kept my home and my office here. But in the sense you mean it, I mean, yes, moved my main residence. Well, look, moving into Britain as an owner of a big newspaper is not like just getting off the planet Heathrow and going through the Wadats to find a job for yourself. So I was rather well received because of the position I had. But it was very interesting. I was fortunate to get the very tail end of that era when the newspaper owners were very influential people. I mean, I don’t think they are particularly influential now. But it’s not a good business now. But London is one of the world’s greatest cities. And if you’re well situated in London, you meet a tremendous variety of interesting people who either live there or come through there. Virtually everybody you can think of comes through London at some point in a year. And there’s normally some sort of occasion for them. So my wife and I were constantly receiving these formidable sort of stiff, gold edged invitations to come to have dinner with so and so or lunch with so and so or something. And it was a sumptuous life. But I mean, my interest in it was really in the socializing with people as well as at that time. I was a supporter of Mrs. Thatcher. And it was a very interesting and active time politically in Britain as she effectively de-socialized the country. How well did you know her? I got to know her very well. She was my sponsor in the House of Lords. And she and Dennis came to our wedding party. And they often came to dinner with us. So you went to you lived in Britain after you were in Canada. It’d be interesting for me to hear how you would contrast the cultures. What was it like being in Britain? I mean, I know you were in a very fortunate position when you moved there. And so you entered in the upper echelons of society. But you had a chance to see Britain from the inside and to contrast it with Canada and with the US to some degree. So what did you observe and what did you conclude? Well, it was a country being renewed. I mean, Britain at the time that Thatcher was elected, very narrowly elected in 1979, was a country with tight currency controls, top personal tax rate of 98%. So there’s a lot of tax cheating going on. And the British don’t like that. I mean, the real problem with Britain in Europe was not immigration. It was the authoritarianism of directives from Brussels. And the French and the Italians essentially ignore the government as much as they can anyway. And they don’t care what these directives are. They’re not going to pay much attention to them unless they absolutely act it. And the French in particular are not going to take seriously anything that comes from the Belgians, or at least from within Belgium. And the Germans are the leading power in Europe and they’re accustomed to regimentation, so it doesn’t bother them. But the British like to be law abiding. They like to obey the law, but they have to be sensible laws and they have to be imposed by people that are accountable. So if you don’t like what they’re doing, you can throw them out at the voting place. And that was the problem. Well, that, in addition to the economic stagnation, finally boiled over when Thatcher and her friends, Keith Joseph and others, pushed out Ted Heath, Sir Edward Heath, and took the conservative party of Great Britain, conservative and unionist party, to the right, not the extreme right, to a level of conservatism that conservative fiscal policy and tax policy in particular, and attitude to labor unions, that the conservative party had not occupied really since the early days of Stanley Baldwin. And it wasn’t back to them, but it was ideologically a similar position, but obviously refined to reflect changes in society over that period of more than 50 years. And so it was very interesting to see, and she was successful. I mean, I was there for her third election victory. She was the first prime minister since before the first reform act in the early 1830s to win three consecutive full terms, majority terms, as prime minister. And she did it on the basis of radical change to the country. And it was quite exciting. Now, at that time, that was in the late 80s. Now, Brian Mulroney was an old friend of mine. Your question didn’t deal with politics only, but given my position in the newspaper business, politics had a lot to do with it. Brian was doing something about it, but Canada, as old, was operated much closer to the middle of the field. It never got that far left, and he didn’t move it as far as Thatcher moved Britain. And in any case, it’s not a unitary state like Britain. It’s a much different system. But I thought Brian was a good prime minister, but you didn’t have that sense of profound change and radical change and exciting policy formulation. I mean, it was one of the few periods in my life where I sort of transmogrified into a sort of semi-policy want, you see, because we had the positions and all this stuff. And the other aspect of it was the Cold War was still going on. And there was still some controversy in Britain in that there was was in the left wing of the Labour Party, especially in the far out old imperialist wing of the Tories as well, this antagonism to the United States. And when I moved there, it was in the latter Reagan years. And of course, he was an important president and had an eventful period as president. And I had happened I knew him too, not knowing him before he was president. And so I wasn’t under the illusion that I was at the centre of things. I wasn’t, but I was actually pretty close to the centre in Britain, because my first trip there as the chief shareholder of the Telegraph company, the prime minister invited me to lunch on Saturday at Checkers. And she said, Look here, you know, we need you. We can’t win without you. Are you with us? And I said, Oh, yeah, I’m with you. And I said, But let me ask you something. And this was right after Mr. Murdoch had made his big changeover and moved to a new plant and decertified and basically dismissed the old, you know, the old pre print and printing unions that used to shut the papers down all the time arbitrarily. And the shop foreman would have, you know, lose a game of darts in his pub or something and come in and call all the workers. It was almost as bad as that. And she, since Murdoch was acting within the law, she ensured that his titles could be produced. I said, Look, I don’t think we’re going to get to the point that Rupert’s at. But we’re putting through voluntary retirements. But you don’t know. And if we need to import people from other countries to help get our papers out, she interrupted me and said, I’ll sign the work permits myself. And that was it as Charles Poehl, her long serving chief secretary, very distinguished public servant in Britain, wrote politically speaking, it was love at first sight. I mean, he was there at that luncheon. And we just got on like smoke and did right to the day she died. Well, she was a little non-convincement, non-convincement, but I knew her well and her very well. And as I said, at our barbers and my wedding party, I thanked her and said, I never would have come to this country or wished to do business in this country if it wasn’t for you. And that was true. So what made her able to do what she did? I mean, she was a woman in a sea of men. She was a radical leader in many ways, obviously on the conservative front. She had apparently had tremendous strength of character. Like what did you see in her that made her able to do what she did? She was an extremely courageous person. And she was that type of person who focused exclusively on relevant sequential facts in analyzing the problem. And she had been, I believe, the education secretary in the Heath government, 70 to 74, and was the co-founder of the Center for Policy Studies. She came to the conclusion, along with a number of others, some of them were intellectually more, frankly, sophisticated than she was, like Keith Joseph, that Britain simply had to change, that what was called the aptly settlement, where it was colloquially in Britain called butskelism after Rab Butler and Hugh Gateskill. Gateskill was the leader of the Labour Party between Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. And Rab Butler was the deputy prime minister and always the runner-up to leader all through the Churchill, Eden, Macmillan years into the Heath period and Cyrillic, that was also. And it was kind of a lookalike government where they agreed most things. And Margaret concluded, this isn’t working. Britain is falling behind. Our standard of living is not keeping pace with the Germans or the French or the Americans. And this is why, and we’ve got to change. And she was absolutely right. But sometimes, stating home truths in simple ways is so far from what people are used to. It sounds more radical than it is. What she was saying wasn’t in fact all that radical. She was saying things like, we can’t have just completely irresponsible work stoppages. We can’t have capricious, middle-level union officials just calling everybody out for the fun of it whenever they’ve had a bad night or something. And we can’t take 98% of people’s income. I mean, it’s nonsense. I mean, it’s just nonsense. It’ll cost 99 cents to collect the 98 cents. I mean, your collection costs get too high. Cheating becomes outrageous. Rich people move away. It’s just nonsense. And she had a way of putting it very clearly and very persuasive. And that group was an ideal team for that time. She had some people, Nigel Lawson, for example, was a former editor of The Spectator, senior writer for the Financial Times, academic economist, but a fine debater. And he put through absolutely radical budgets where they cut the top tax rate between Jeffrey Howe and Nigel. They cut it from 98% to 40%. And she had a group that could argue it in parliament and in the country. She had an academic group led by Keith Joseph and her Center for Policy Studies group, Kenneth Minogue, I don’t know if you know these people, well-known academic economists and specialists in other areas who could put it forward in a way that was where they could defend it against the best debaters of the left. And she was a powerful leader who kept the whip on the backs of the Tory party and said, this is what must be done. And this is why we have to do it. And when she said the lady’s not for turning and sacked half of government and so forth, she showed, I mean, she was right, but there’s no doubt that at times traditional opinion within that party and the Tory grandees didn’t approve of her and they never liked her and they stabbed her in the back in the end. But even those who were involved in that had to admit that she made a tremendous difference and the best of them. For example, Michael Heseltine, very able man, a very good defense secretary and then came back in other roles, but he agreed with her policy. He couldn’t stand her person and she couldn’t stand him, but he was no slacker when it came to the policy. She was the right person for the right time. Now, unfortunately, as so often happens when people in democratic countries have held an elected office for a while, she started to lose her sense of political self-reservation. And I became, because we had a big parliamentary contingent in the press gallery and did a lot of political reporting. And Neil Kinnick, the leader of the opposition labor leader, told me one day that the first parliamentary report he read every morning was ours because even though we were rabidly pro-Thatcher paper, the reporting was always fair and always perceptive. And that was our standard. And that was what I always tried to enforce everywhere in every country in all our papers was to separate reporting and comment, which you rarely get nowadays. And as the agitation with Thatcher’s authoritarianism within the conservative parliamentary party increased, we would hear it naturally and the editors would tell me these things. So I said, all right, look, put 10 more people into the press gallery. They’d give a press pass to anyone that the telegraph asked for, given our position. And I mean, we were the backbone of the nation. We had over a million sales and 98% of them were conservative voters. And I said, for once, I will ignore your expense accounts, which were outrageous. They always are from journalists. And I almost sacked the editor when he expected me to pay for chartering a helicopter to take him to drinks party in Brighton. But I said, look, you know, I’ll ignore all of that. Tell these guys, divide it up, take the entire conservative parliamentary party, every MP, divide them up into groups. And over the next few months, have your guys take them all out and apply them a drink and find out what is really going on there. And when I had all this, I asked for an appointment, the prime minister’s office said to come over later that day. And I said, look, this is what I’ve done. I did obviously I didn’t name anyone. I would be dishonorable. I did not give one name. But for example, the chief whip, rent in his name was we couldn’t wait to see the back of that. And I don’t think she had the clue of this. So I didn’t mention him. I didn’t mention anybody. I said, John, I’m telling you, prime minister, your parliamentary party is seething with this content. There’s an absolute rancid element there. And it’s very it’s gone a long way into that group. And you’ve got to, if you pardon my being so imperious here, you’ve got to, I’m not saying you should accommodate or appease them, but make a few course corrections that, you know, that attract more of them in turn, break the momentum of this. And I should have rubbish, absolute rubbish. She said, they’re all slackers. They’re cowards. I said, of course, they’re cowards. That’s what makes them dangerous. And, you know, and it was only a few weeks later that she pushed girl Jeffrey Howard and the 1922 Society, the group of non cabinet MPs in the governing party, essentially gave her the high jump. And it was it was it was very unfortunate in the and we ran an editorial on on the front page was very rare. The day before, and which I contributed the last sentence, the editor Max Hastings was not a pro thatcher person. But the last sentence was that Margaret Thatcher is one of the great leaders who has arisen in a thousand years of British history. And as long as she wishes to remain as prime minister, she may count on the support of this newspaper. And she wrote the handwritten personal letter thanking. But she went and I told the editor to put a black border around the story. And he said, please, you’re not serious. So I spared that. But that’s how I felt it was. It was it was a tragedy, not a tragedy, but a sadness. She was a great leader. But, you know, Jordan, I don’t believe in turn, I mean, basically, the voters will decide if they’ve got a good person in office, let them keep the person. And in the United States, the only time in the history of that country where anyone saw the third term, the entire future of our civilization depended on his being elected. And that was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, because the Republicans would never have come up with Wendell Easton. Britain and Canada could not have continued in the war. And they wouldn’t have got a war leader as good as that anyway. Wendell Willkie was a good man, but he was no FDR. But if we look back at it in the last, what, 50 or 60 years, the only leaders in, you know, in important countries who’ve left office in good physical health and good political health were the term limited Americans, Eisenhower and Reagan, and maybe Clinton, but more Eisenhower and Reagan. I mean, if they’d been allowed to and chosen to do it, either of them would have won a third term easily. They’re very popular. But, but, you know, but, but, you know, as Roosevelt said, you’ve got to have a new, even though it’s you running for reelection has to be for a new reason. You have to give the people a new reason to vote for it, which he did do. I mean, he was, you know, beat the depression, you know, accelerate prosperity, stay out of war, win the war, you know, he had a different thing each time. But I digress. Margaret Thatcher was, she was very courageous and very admirable. I have, and also a wonderful person in small ways. I mean, the staff of Downing Street and Sheckers loved her. She was terribly polite to these people in a way that, you know, and some of the, some of the labor prime ministers like Callahan weren’t particularly polite. And certainly a man like Ted Heath had no manners anyway, so he wasn’t polite to anyone. He was, I mean, I’d rather like him as a person than he was an interesting man in a way. I didn’t particularly like him politically, but, but he wasn’t very polite. And, but Margaret Thatcher was very polite to those people, no matter how rough she was in her own ministers, she felt they could defend themselves. But, you know, someone serving tea at Downing Street was, couldn’t, so you had to be polite to these people. And she was never condescending about it. I mean, she was from Grantham. Her father was a grocer, and he was ultimately the mayor of Grantham, so he was a well-known man in Grantham. But he, but in the world of Westminster and Belgrade, the great and the good and the dukes of the rich and everything, they looked upon her as a ludicrous figure. I mean, some, you know, some jumped up the battle acts from the Midlands. And, and, and, and she was never particularly self-conscious about that. But it must be said, she was always a little awkward. And in that way, I had a kind of a past, because I wasn’t part of the awful class system in Britain. I wasn’t anything. I was sort of like, like from another planet. But I have to say this about her. She, she did not have a good sense of humor. She, she occasionally said funny things, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t a naturally humorous person, which is not the end of the world, but it’s, it’s nice if you’ve got a better sense of humor. And she was a little oversimplified in the view sometimes. I mean, the fact is, when you get right down to it, she didn’t like Europe, because she didn’t like the main European nationalities. I mean, the Germans and the French didn’t mind the Italians, but she couldn’t take the Italian seriously. But, but, but she rather liked them. But, but she, she never forgave the Germans for the war. And she, and she thought the French were, were, were sharpers and, and sly cunning and devious people. And, and she sort of worked in stereotypes, you know, now if she met an individual person from Germany or France, obviously perfectly polite to them, but fundamentally she, she didn’t trust either of those countries. And she didn’t feel it was really Europe’s job to, to lead the Danes and the Dutch and all these smaller countries that wanted Britain in to help them, you see. And she rather liked the Americans. And, and, and she never forgot, and she told me this many times, she never forgot what the United States did in World War II, how desperate Britain’s condition was and, and how overwhelmingly helpful the Americans were. She had great admiration for Roosevelt. And she, she said, and each year from 1942, we’d seen more and more of the Americans in Britain. And I know there were, there were frictions here and there and things, but to us, it was just wonderfully reassuring more and more these big, tall, strong American boys would arrive ready to invade Europe. And she was, her family were practicing Methodists. And every Sunday they would invite an American serviceman that they would see in the church service to come back with them to have lunch. They thought it was the nice thing to do to young men overseas who are missing their families and so on to show some hospitality. I mean, she was a very genuine, traditional, low church Protestant, but tolerant, no, no religious animosities of any kind. Most of her constituents were Jewish. And, and, and, and, and just straight, what you saw was what you got, you know, but a very strong, good, well-rounded leader. But if, if, if what you need, which is what they did need, was someone to make radical change and say the lady is not returning and this, this is what we have a mandate to do and we’re going to do it. She was the perfect leader. Once you got into a, a subtler situation, that would not be her forte. I mean, she, you wouldn’t confuse her with Disraeli or something. I mean, she, if she’d gone to the Congress of Berlin and said it Disraeli, they would have ended up in war with Bismarck. You know, I mean, she probably started the starting as soon as her train left, but, but, but, you know, it was horses for courses and she was a wonderful leader for the time as a person. She was an outstanding person, absolutely loyal, I have great admiration for great admiration and for dentists too. You knew Reagan as well. I did not as well, but I knew him. Yeah, I knew him, I knew him before he was president, when he was president, after he was president. And what were your impressions of him? Extremely formidable man. He was, to start with, one of the most charming men I’ve ever met. I mean, practically all politicians are reasonably charming when they put their minds to it, otherwise they’re in the wrong business. But he was, he was disarmingly pleasant without being stacker and or over ingenuous. He was just a charming guy, good raconteur, terrific raconteur, very good conversational. And I think he was a great leader. I don’t know his name dead about that. He was a wonderful speaker. He kept it to a few basic points. He vulgarized them, as the French say, made these complicated issues simple. And it was almost impossible. Is that something you shared with Thatcher, that capability? Yes. But in a slightly different way. He had a more, he would throw in a humorous aspect that was disarming. And he would also, he’d make it a little more anecdotal in folks, but not where his argument deteriorated. He was a very skillful debater. If you’re interested in this, you can find it on the internet, the debate he had with Robert Kennedy over that business about the left-wing academic in New Jersey, Genovese, where he was a far left and was in dispute about his ability to remain at a state university because he was a communist. And at the end of it, Robert Kennedy said, don’t ever put me into a debate with that guy again. I mean, Reagan, I had some conversations with him where I was astounded, even well after he was president and was supposedly in decline, where he had an astounding recall of the details. He was a much more comprehensively intelligent person than was widely known because he sometimes seemed flat-footed when a direct question was put to him. The American tradition is not one of debating like it is in the parliamentary tradition. He was a governor and then the president, and he never debated with anybody when he chose to, as with Kennedy or when he actually was in the elections. This idea that he was a, what did Clark Clifford call him, an amiable dunce or something? I knew Clifford too, and Reagan was the smartest Clifford, a different type of intelligence, but he was a very intelligent man. He was in a way an inspirational figure because in his life, he only had six jobs. He was a life guardian for people swimming, whatever. Lifeguard. Yeah, lifeguard at Tampico, Illinois. And then he was a baseball announcer in Des Moines, Iowa, California bound in the Great Depression, and then a screen actor, including I think six terms as head of the Screen Actors Guild, but his job was an actor. And then he was the vice president for public and personnel relations for General Electric Corp, and then governor of California and president of the United States. And he only, I believe he only had four elections. He beat Edmund G. Brown, who defeated Richard Nixon four years before by over a million votes, and he defeated Jesse Unruh by over a million votes running for reelection as governor. And he beat President Jimmy Carter by I think nine million votes, and then Walter Mondale, who just died the other day, by over 15 million votes. I mean, it was just a very modest career. He was a graduate of Eureka College, and then he just went all the way up to the top of the country and stayed there. And he undoubtedly was a very good person. I’ve got to say this, Ruben, Jordan, he wasn’t Mr. Nice Guy. He came across brilliantly as Mr. Nice Guy. In that sense, he was a little like FDR. He came across a very charming, nice guy. But Ronald Reagan didn’t go to the funerals of the people who launched his career, like Alfred Bloomingdale and Justin Dart and Henry Salvatore. You know, Nancy Reagan, for all her peculiarities, was a very human person. Reagan had wonderful human qualities. I mean, I don’t know if you or I, if we had a, as General Al Haig said, a round in the chest and a collapsed lung would walk into the emergency room and say, I hope you people are all Republicans, the way he did. I mean, that wasn’t, he wasn’t, you know, recording a film there. I mean, he really did have a bull in his chest. But he was fixated on certain targets. And while he was always, he was always sort of pleasant to everybody, I never got the impression he was awash with human sentiment, where in a way Nancy was, you know. In that way, she was kind of his ambassador to, you know, let your hair down, be spontaneous. Yeah, he sounds like you were fond of her too. Yeah, I didn’t know her as well. I thought she was admirably devoted to him. I mean, like there’s something about that California thing that spooks me a bitch, you know, where she consults these astrologers, seers and all that. Look, whatever works for you, but that kind of thing makes me a bit uneasy. But yeah, she was very nice to you. I have to say, whenever I met her, she was very, very nice. I have to say, whenever I met her, Hillary Clinton was nice, so I don’t like the political leader. All right, so you’re back in Britain, you’re running the Telegraph, and you’re also moving up through the ranks of British society. You’re made a Lord. How did that come about? Well, you know, if you own a big newspaper, you don’t have to do very much for that, you know, you just have to have your party in office. Or indeed, now you don’t even have to have that. I was installed by Blair, but I was put up by the conservative leader at the time, William Egg. That’s basically an ex officio thing. My predecessor, his predecessor, was Lord Hartsfield immediately headed me, and prior to that Lord Kammerer. And what did it mean to you? And what were the responsibilities that are associated with it? Well, it’s what you want to make out of it. But I mean, if I hadn’t had my career interrupted, as it was, I came in as an active peer, and I gave a number of speeches in my arrangement, but the conservative Whips office was that I would not presume to advise the British on their pensions or even their schools, but I’d speak on foreign policy and alliance matters. And that’s what I did. And that was at the time of the Iraq war, when incidentally, Blair needed us, because, well, there are Whips in the House of Commons who can normally control the votes. It’s a life appointment in the Lord, so you can do anything you want. Peers can get stuff, there’s nothing they can do about it. And Blair needed the conservative peers to support his policy. So he phoned a number, just including me, and we did support him. But it’s the, if it’s a serious subject, it is the best debating forum in the world. And, you know, it has this image of being a bunch of, you know, down at the heel, probably drink sodden descendants of people who did brilliantly in 100 years war or something. That isn’t what it is. It’s, the numbers fluctuate, it’s around 800 members now. There are a fixed number of about 100 that are hereditary, but apart from a few specific officeholders, like the Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshall and Premier Duke and the Marcus of Salisbury and a couple of others, the elected, I’m sorry, the hereditary peers are elected by other hereditary. So they have a runoff too. And my friend Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, he didn’t win. He was defeated by his fellow hereditary, Lord Rothschild, Jacob Rothschild. He didn’t run, but he didn’t run because he knew that he wouldn’t win. And by the way, they should, those are two people that should be there. They’re very good people. And obviously influential people. But in a serious debate, you know, you’ll remember you have the previous chiefs of the defense staff, you have the heads of the main universities, you have leading academics, Asa Briggs, for example, you have cultural figures like Andrew Lloyd Webber, Yehudi Menyum, when I began. And you have leaders of great corporations, the main trade unions, the trade union congress and so on. And senior cabinet officials. I mean, when I spoke in the Iraq war debate, it was right after the last previous defense secretary and prior to him, the last previous chief of the defense staff, Field Marshal Brammer. And the way it works is, it’s very fair, the leaders of the parties and House of Lords determine an issue to be debated. And if people in their groups want an issue debated, there’s support for it, they do that. So they meet and they agree, I will give this, make it say a 12 hour debate over several days. And then whoever leads and closes for each party, they’re fixed and they within reason can speak for as long as they want. The rest of the time is divided up equally between all of those who signed their desire to speak, which isn’t put in public place. I mean, public to the people who have any business being in the palace of Westminster, not in the street, but anyone who wants, any peer going by, right? I’ll speak of that. And then divided up equal allocation of time. There’s a clock on all of the four walls, the Lord Chancellor presides and you can see your time and you don’t go over your time. There are no rude interruptions, no bad awful name calling and barnyard imitations. You get nice comments, I think very polite. And you sit down when you’re finished. And if you don’t, there’s a sort of a clerk of Lord Chancellor stands up. And at that point, you really have to say, and everyone does. And then when the debate ends, everyone goes to the peers bar and it continues. But on a serious subject, you get absolutely brilliant speakers. And it’s just extremely well done. What’s the net effect on British policy? It varies. I mean, sometimes the government needs it. And there are always some members of the government who sit next to the Lord, so frequently the attorney general, for example, because they always want an extremely respected barrister as the attorney general of the country. And that person is likely not an MP. So you put him as the Lord’s net researcher. But as a matter of fact, as the business of the country unfolds, generally speaking, the influence isn’t great. I mean, they may add an amendment here or there, but these are technical matters. But the times arise when because there are no whips and there is no discipline. I mean, people vote how they want to vote. The position of the Lord’s can be very important. Then all of a sudden, when I was there and I expect to get back to this one of these days, all of a sudden your phone’s ringing. And you’re from some prominent figure in the government you haven’t heard from for the last five years. They need your vote. Are the debates made available to the public in any form other than printing? Yes. No, no, they’re on television as it comes. Of course, they’re also recorded and available to anyone who wants them, you know, in written form. So, all right. So does your empire, your media empire at this point, does it reach its peak with your acquisition of the telegraph? Are you growing? No, no, we went on after that. We bought the Chicago Sun Times. We bought the Fairfax papers in Australia, very distinguished papers, and then we bought the Southam papers in Canada in 1996 and founded the National Post a little after that. And so at that point, it was right in there was when it was at its height. And it was a big company in that industry. It was a big company compared to Microsoft or something, but it was a big company in that industry. So what’s happened to your relationship with Canada while you’re in Britain? Well, I came back often and I kept my house and office here. So I kept it up well, you know. I mean, I come back a lot and spend practically the whole summer here. So, you know, it wasn’t as if I was absent altogether by any means. And, you know, when we had all the papers here and I’d see the papers, I’d be talking to my associates in one business and another here all the time. I was in the United States a lot, you know, our headquarters was in New York. So I was moving around a lot, you know. And I had home from different cities. Right. And are you pleased with the way things are going at this point in your life? Yeah, I am now. It was a very difficult patch and it was very difficult. But, yes, now I am pleased with how things are going. I have been for some years. You know, sorry, I wasn’t clear. When you’re in the stage of expansion that you just described. Yes, yes. Although I started to have real misgivings about the future of the newspaper business. And they were well-founded misgivings. But we had an exit strategy that was being conducted very successfully until, as you said in your intro, that those problems arose. Shall we talk about that a little bit? Okay. So what happened? You hit a peak. You were running this incredibly influential company. Trouble started to brew. Why? And what do you see when you look back? Well, I took a good look at the internet and I just did not see how newspapers could continue as a growth industry. And so although it was painful. This was when? Starting in the, let me see now, starting, really starting in the early 90s, around 93. We sold Australia the very handsome profit and had it arranged in a way where it came through with no capital gain assessment. And that was a company we bought basically out of bankruptcy. Not because it wasn’t a good company. It just been over levered financially. So it was a financial problem rather than an operational one. And then where it really turned was with when I sold most of the Canadian newspapers to Israel Asper who owned the Global Television Network. And we were continuing to do that. We were rolling these papers out. The idea is we keep the telegraph and basically, and some of the smaller ones in the US that were particularly profitable. If you’ve seen the movie Groundhog, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, we own that paper. 50% of its total revenues were pre-tax profit. It was a very rich paper. Not a big paper, but very profitable. And that’s where we were proceeding when the legal problems arose. I mean, we were going to distribute the money, not as dividends, but buying in and canceling shares. In a way that was voluntary. People wouldn’t be, they would tender their shares to us because our offer would be good. And so we would compact the company and keep some cash and reposition it in different businesses. But before we got into the implementation of the expensive part of that, these legal problems arose and then the whole thing moved sideways and downwards after that. What did you see on the horizon for newspapers that made you nervous about the continued viability of the business? I just didn’t see how we could hold the readers against the internet. That the incursions of the internet would be Irresistible. Yeah, we just didn’t ultimately have a defense against it. And we tried various things. We put up internet sites, but they were really just enticements to come into the physical paper. And essentially that was the problem with the newspaper industry’s response. It put things on the internet, but unless you just give your content away free, in which case you’re eventually going to go bankrupt, you’re really trying to entice people to buy your product and pay for huge physical plants that print the papers and the vast networks that distribute them. And that was the problem. The internet had no cost to newsprint and no cost to delivery. Yeah, well, it’s also an incredibly effective place to advertise. And so, you know, my prognosis was right and my remedy was right. There were problems, but they weren’t problems created by me. And what caused the legal problems? Well, we’re getting into a real jungle here, but essentially what happened was that some activist shareholders who were essentially in the greenmail business, they would buy into a company where they saw that ultimately the value of it could be greater, and then agitate for sale. So they would start stirring up shareholders, creating scenes at the shareholders’ meetings and things like this. Well, I never had any problem with the shareholders’ meetings. Right to the end, I never had the slightest problem winning any vote at those meetings. But what they did was they exploited an American provision of the Securities and Exchange Act as amended, that enabled them to set up a special committee to review what they were complaining about, which was that some of these people, when they bought assets from us, paid a non-compete fee to my associates and myself personally. And this is done in that business. And for example, in Canada, when we sold to Izzy Asper, at the same time, the Sun papers were for sale because I believe McLean Hunter had a cross-media problem where they couldn’t own the television, the cable, and the newspaper in the same setting. So you had papers coming up for sale in Calgary and Edmonton and Ottawa, where we had papers. So Asper wanted a non-compete from us. He said we wouldn’t then take his money and go and buy another paper, hire everyone away from the place we just left and compete with them. So that was a reasonable thing to do. But anyway, we had people who complained and said it shouldn’t go to us. And now in the case of Asper, that didn’t go anywhere because he wrote me a letter saying that he wanted this and he wanted it from us and there was no ambiguity about that. But some of the cases in the US were more ambiguous. But we could have managed all of that. But once it got going, the special committee and its council discovered that an associate of mine had done some naughty things. And in the American manner, having done the naughty things, he said, all right, look, I will give evidence against Mr. Black. Never mind that Mr. Black had not done any naughty things. I’ll give evidence against him if you will give me this deal. He said this was done through council. The plea bargain system was completely undermined the entire functioning of the criminal justice system. So this was done. And so the next thing I knew, we were all being charged with things we didn’t do and have ultimately been found not to have done. But meanwhile, it took 15 years of my life to get rid of it all and the asset was destroyed. Everything we’d all worked 30 years to build was reduced to nothing, the bankruptcy. Which incidentally meant that more than one and a half billion dollars of shareholder value on the hands of people other than ourselves just evaporated. That was the singular and supreme triumph of the shareholder governance movement. It was complete fraud. It was a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites taking fees for themselves and ruining companies. How did you survive it? What enabled you to stay functional enough to serve as a tutor, for example? Well, I knew that I had not in fact broken the law, so I was fighting the good fight of the wrongfully accused. I was not innocent as a person, but in terms of the criminal statutes of the United States, I was certainly innocent. So I had the moral righteousness to fight and I had the historic knowledge that the alternative to fighting was to be just absolutely eliminated in every respect, except physically and conceivably in that way too. If I just lost heart altogether, I’d lose the will to live. So you have to fight. It’s the cornered animal you have to fight or you’re going to be wiped out. Then in the area I think you’re getting at, maintenance of morale. It was very difficult times, but I’m of that view that believes that essentially life is privilege and that you make the most of it, however bad it is. Unless you’re terminally ill and the death story can always derive some satisfaction from the privilege of life, even if it’s just going outside, breathing the fresh air and looking at a blue sky and seeing leafy trees moving around in the breeze, it’s still wonderful when you compare it to nothing, which is the alternative. So there is a duty to carry on and both my experience individually and as an observer and such acquaintances I have with history shows that fortunes change. If you persevere long enough, you come through things and live to fight another day. It sounds pretty background. No, I wouldn’t say so. Not when it’s acted out in reality. You said that you’re satisfied with your life at the moment, that it’s full and it’s rich. Oh, it’s good now. I’m following Napoleon’s advice to regain lost territory in the inverse order of their loss. I’m sort of bootstrapping myself up in one way and another. But I have a new perspective now that I would not have had. I’m not saying I’m glad I went through all I did, but it had its rewards and its rich experiences, including the ones you mentioned about the prison. But I would never have had the prominence as a commentator, but I do. I have millions and millions of readers in the United States. I’m astounded at how many people read my stuff. I get invitations to speak and go on tours and things. When we’re not hobbled by the pandemic, go out and cruise in the Mediterranean and talk to people on the cruise ships and things. When this came upon me, I’d written two books, the Du Plessis one and then one about myself, which was really just to deal with accounts of my career that I considered not to be accurate. I just set the records right. I didn’t think they were malicious. I just didn’t think they were very informative. That’s why I did it. But I’d written two books only. As you kindly mentioned, I’ve written eight since then. They’ve all been from modestly to very successful. I like being a writer. I absolutely would not have had the time to do it if I’d had to be a functioning chief executive of a two billion dollar a year sales company. It is a full-time job and you’ve got to do it right. So when you look back, what do you think you did right? There’s lots of people who are watching this interview who are trying to put their lives together in one way or another and looking for guidance in their attempts to do that. What is it that you’ve done or what is it that you’ve seen other people do that you admired and that were successful, that was particularly productive and useful and meaningful, let’s say, and maybe even right? Well, I think people who do what they have an aptitude to do are much happier than that, unfortunately, very large number of people who are stuck in occupations they don’t like. So it’s been my good fortune that either I was able to do what I wanted to do and had some aptitude to do. I was able to make that choice or I lucked into it. I didn’t realize. I had absolutely no idea that I had an aptitude for it, but as it turned out, I did. I mean, it’s like anything else, I guess. I had always assumed that practically anybody who wrote a book of history really knew a lot about it, was a competent writer and did a good job. Well, now that I’ve done some of them, as you said, I wrote a book about President Franklin D. Roosevelt. There’s a vast literature about Roosevelt and some of the people have written about him have been very good, but a lot of them, it’s rubbish, absolute rubbish. It’s not well written and it’s not accurate and they miss a lot of things. It’s even more so the case with Mr. Nixon. So terribly controversial. And indeed, the reason I wrote about those two men was to fill a gap. I never write where I think I have nothing to add. I felt that Roosevelt was divided between worshipers and these people uttering this nonsense about him being a communist, the traitor to his class who gave Eastern Europe away to Stalin, all this kind of nonsense. And the thing to do was to put it out. He was neither a saintly man nor a communist. He was an extremely important and capable and talented political leader and leader of a government, but for the reasons I enumerated, not out of Kant and the emotionalism. And it was Mr. Nixon. He had just been pilloried as essentially a man with a cloven and feet and horns on his head, and he wasn’t. He was a very good president. And by the way, there’s still no probative evidence that he committed the crimes. He admitted himself. He made some serious mistakes and certainly some of the people who was on trial committed crimes, but there’s no evidence that he did. And the one term that he served was one of the most successful in the history of the country. If you take into account that when he came in, there were 550,000 American draftees at the ends of the earth with no exit plan, 200 to 400 coming back dead every week, no relations with China, no arms control talks, riots everywhere in the US every week, all over the place. He stopped all that. He was very, very good president. Anyway, it was reassuring to me that I could actually do that because I’d always assumed before that the people who did it did it adequately. Well, some of them do, but a lot of them don’t. And there’s always room for improvement or almost always. Gradually, my horizons expanded, and now I’m in finance and rebuilding my fortunes somewhat. But the exact opposite to how I began in business, where I mean, as far as anyone in the public would know, where because I took over a company that was made famous by a very famous businessman, E.P. Taylor and Bud MacGillivray in particular, I was in the public eye all the time. And as a young man, it’s naturally going to be irritating to a lot of people. Well, now I’m not. I mean, I am up to a point, but as a commentator, no one has a clue what businesses I’m they’re private and they’re in different countries and they know, you know, no one knows. And so I don’t have that problem of sort of wrestling with a public relations monster all the time. And I think you mentioned in one of the books that I read that you, in retrospect, wish that you would have handled the public relations end of things, I suppose, in a more sophisticated manner or earlier and you didn’t realize how critically important it might be. Is that am I recalling that accurately? Is that a fair summation? Substantially so, yes. But my my my view was there’s no way to avoid a lot of attention. So what I should do is meet it head on and at least cause to be discarded the caricature that all business people are fundamentally stumbled bums of self-expression. I can’t actually give a fluent explanation of what I’m doing. And secondly, to advance the idea that business is in fact not just a bunch of grubby businessmen scruffing for cash. It actually is an interesting subject. And I thought I thought those were correct premises and I was successful at that. But where what you said is exactly right is I didn’t I didn’t appreciate as much as I perhaps should have or would have if I were more experienced how tired people can get of someone who doesn’t have a natural call and her attention. I think this incidentally was one of the chief problems of the immediate former president of the U.S. He he always believed that I’ve known him a long time. He always believed that there was no such thing as bad publicity no matter how apparently negative it was. Well up to a point he was right but not it wasn’t right once he became president because once he got to be the in Roosevelt’s phrase the head of the American people he didn’t need the publicity and he didn’t he didn’t want it and was undignified for him to be seeking it let alone for him to tolerate so much of it to be baiting sessions where his where his enemies challenged him and he responded. I mean he had reached a position where you can safely rise above most of that and just spoke when you have some speak when you have something to say. In my book about Roosevelt there’s a little piece in a letter he sent to someone who had been a colleague of his in the Wilson administration where he was saying how how a president has to know when to be in front of the public and when not and when it will irritate the public and when not. Well I wish I had obviously I never had a position with one percent of the consequence of being president of the U.S. but I wish I had taken that on board even at the modest scale of where I was you know before I embarked on this but but you know part of part of surviving and growing older is you’ll learn things. I think perhaps that’s a good place to stop. Okay well I kept you too long I hope I hope either people find some of it interesting or if not they should put it on when when they’re afraid they may be suffering from insomnia. Well look thank you extremely for for talking with me today and for no it was a pleasure always a pleasure Jordan. I appreciate it very much and and and I hope we get to do it again there’s many things that we didn’t talk about I didn’t talk about any of your opinions about current current affairs or or or about the future many things that I would have liked to have discussed but we can do it another time great.