The irony of Black's conviction is that his adoration of US capitalist culture cuts both ways, as he now looks at 15 years in jail for corporate crime , writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft.
As Conrad Black prepares himself for today's bail hearing, anyone tempted to say: "Poor Conrad!" might remember the reply of Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston's ne'er-do-well son, when someone spoke of "poor Esmond" - the penultimate Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail. "No," Randolph said, "rich, very rich Esmond".
At least until recently, Lord Black seemed rich, very rich, though as events proved he may not have been rich enough or as rich as he wanted to be. His lurid rise and fall is like something from a Victorian novel, in which our hero's fortunes have now fallen very low with his conviction by a Chicago court, where he awaits sentencing.
Maybe "poor Conrad" has not in fact been a widespread reaction. Since sympathy for him has been in short supply in some quarters, it should be recorded that he was not at all a bad newspaper proprietor and that he is a clever man: his biography of Richard Nixon, coincidentally published as his trial reached its climax, is well worth reading.
Still, "arrogant" is an insufficient word for the man. If he ever wanted what is called a good press then it was not a good idea to call journalists drunken spongers - or for Barbara Amiel, Lady Black, to call them "vermin" during the trial - and it was an even worse idea for Black to denounce his own investors as a "bunch of self-righteous hypocrites and ingrates" and to splutter about "corporate governance fascism".
Yet if the case is Greek tragedy as well as Victorian melodrama, with hubris followed by nemesis, no one has seen its full irony, least of all Black himself. Politically, as an ardent neo-conservative, and economically, as a triumphalist free market advocate, Black has always adored the US. But America has been his downfall.
Few press barons have ever been so right-wing. Beaverbrook made speeches in praise of Soviet Russia, and Rupert Murdoch, often portrayed as a reactionary, once kept a bust of Lenin in his room at Oxford, and has been happy enough to cut deals with the rulers of communist China. There was no such compromise from Black, who sneered at even moderate manifestations of European social democracy.
So what happened? Was it crypto-Bolsheviks who laid him low, or those he calls mindless bleeding-heart liberals? No, it was a bunch of hard-headed capitalists on Wall Street. No one believes more sincerely in the market economy than the people of Tweedy Brown - that innocuously named investment firm, which sounds more like a Madison Avenue boutique selling British knitwear. They just think that capitalism means what it says: capital should generate wealth.
When Dominic Lawson was still editor of the Sunday Telegraph he wrote an ill-advised defence of Black which missed the point. He said the investors had known perfectly well what they were doing, and understood the difference between voting and non-voting shares, which had allowed Black to run Hollinger even when he actually owned only a small part of it.
But of course the investors knew that, and they were not buying Hollinger stock in order to control the company. They simply wanted a fair return on their money without being ripped off. What Black never understood is that the Americans take capitalism seriously, which is why they police it so stringently.
Although bombastic about his native country's military history, Black has always been "a self-hating Canadian" in political terms, along with his wife and the ineffable Mark Steyn. They think Canada has been atrophied from within by its national health service, and they admire the US, whose incidence of child mortality is so much higher than the Canadian rate.
They harbour a deep contempt for the European Union, with its social chapters, addiction to welfare and soft attitude to crime and punishment. And here is the final irony of the case.
If there is one acid test that shows up the difference between the US and Europe it is indeed penal policy. While no country can join the EU if it practises capital punishment, the US not only retains the death penalty but also ranks high on the worldwide annual list for executions. It locks up more of its people for longer, too - at one point recently, for each 100,000 EU citizens there were 87 in prison, as against 685 in the US.
That "softness" applies not least to white collar crime. If Black had been prosecuted successfully for the same crimes in London - which he might well not have been, in any case - he would now be looking at two or three years at most in an open prison, with a regime of gardening and chess.
Instead, by acquiring residential and business domiciles he chose America where, if the stern prosecutor in Chicago has anything to do with it, he may well be facing imprisonment in grim conditions for more than 15 years and possibly for the rest of his life. No, maybe we should be saying "poor Conrad" after all.
The writer's latest book is Yo, Blair!
(Financial Times service)