Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour (born 25 August 1944) is a Canadian and British writer, former politician, newspaper publisher, and financier.
Black's father was businessman George Montegu 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 Montegu took majority control of Ravelston. Over the next seven years, Conrad Black sold off most of their non-media holdings to focus on newspaper publishing. He controlled Hollinger International, once the world's third-largest English-language newspaper empire, which published The Daily Telegraph (UK), Chicago Sun-Times (US), The Jerusalem Post (Israel), National Post (Canada), and hundreds of community newspapers in North America, before controversy erupted over the sale of some of the company's assets.
Black was granted a life peerage in 2001 and gave up his Canadian citizenship to accept the title in light of the Nickle Resolution, which bans British honours for Canadian citizens. He regained his Canadian citizenship in 2023.
In 2007, Black was convicted on four counts of fraud in a United States district court in Chicago. While two of the criminal fraud charges were overturned on appeal, a conviction for felony fraud and obstruction of justice was upheld in 2010 and he was re-sentenced to 42 months in prison and a fine of $125,000. In 2019, President Donald Trump granted him a federal pardon.
Black is a longtime columnist and author, and has written a column for the National Post since he founded it in 1998. He has written eleven books, mostly in the fields of Canadian and American history, including biographies of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis and US presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, as well as two memoirs. He has also hosted two interview shows on the Canadian cable network VisionTV. A political conservative, he belonged to the UK's Conservative Party, but also has some idiosyncratic views, including his support for Roosevelt's New Deal.
Black was born in Montreal, Quebec, to a family originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba. His father, George Montegu Black Jr., a chartered accountant, was the president of Canadian Breweries Limited, a brewing conglomerate that had earlier absorbed Winnipeg Breweries, which he had inherited from his father George Montegu Black Sr. Conrad Black's mother was the former Jean Elizabeth Riley, a daughter of Conrad Stephenson Riley, whose father founded The Great-West Life Assurance Company, and a great-granddaughter of an early co-owner of The Daily Telegraph. His father was a shareholder in The Daily Telegraph.
Biographer George Tombs said of Black's motivations: "He was born into a very large family of athletic, handsome people. He wasn't particularly athletic or handsome like they were, so he developed a different skill — wordplay, which he practised a lot with his father." Black has written that his father was "cultured [and] humorous" and that his mother was a "natural, convivial, and altogether virtuous person". Of his older brother George Montegu Black III (Monte), Black has written that he was "one of the greatest natural athletes I have known", and that though "generally more sociable than I was, he was never a cad or even inconstant, or ever an ungenerous friend or less than a gentleman". The Black family maintains a family plot at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto where Black's parents and brother are buried along with his good friend and his wife's former husband, journalist, poet and broadcaster, George Jonas.
Black was sent by his father to a prestigious preparatory school, Upper Canada College (UCC), where he was first educated. Black confided to his fellow student John Fraser, a future renowned foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail and later the editor of Saturday Night, that the place felt like a concentration camp, but most of the students were oblivious to the harsh reality. During this time, at the age of eight, he invested his life savings of $60 in one share of General Motors. Six years later, he was expelled from UCC for selling stolen exam papers. He then attended Trinity College School in Port Hope, where he lasted less than a year, being expelled for insubordinate behaviour. Successfully completing the year as an extramural student, Black transferred to Thornton Hall, a private school in Toronto.
Black continued his post-secondary education at Carleton University. He attended Toronto's Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, but his studies ended after he failed his first year exams. In 1970, he completed a law degree at Université Laval, and in 1973 completed a Master of Arts degree in history at McGill University.
Black's thesis at McGill would become the first half of his first book on Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis. Black had been granted access to Duplessis' papers, housed in Duplessis' former residence in Trois-Rivières, which included "figures from the famous Union Nationale caisse électorale (the party war chest), a copy of the Leader of the Opposition's tax returns, [and] gossip from bishops", as well as
historically significant letters from Cardinals Jean-Marie-Rodrigue Villeneuve and Paul-Émile Léger, Governor General Field Marshal Alexander, Lord Beaverbrook, Canadian and French Prime Ministers and Eminent Canadian and American finance ministers side-by-side with hand-written, ungrammatical requests for jobs with the Quebec Liquor Board, unpaid bills, the returns of his ministers who were cheating on their taxes, a number of scribbled notes for Assembly speeches, tidbits of political espionage, compromising photographs, [and] a ledger listing the political contributions of every tavern-keeper in the province.Black subsequently had the principal items from the papers copied and microfilmed, and he donated copies to McGill, York, and Windsor universities.
Black's first marriage was in 1978 to Joanna Hishon of Montreal, who worked as a secretary in his and his brother Montegu's brokerage office. The couple had two sons and a daughter. They separated in 1991. Their divorce was finalized in 1992; that same year Black married British-born Jewish-Canadian journalist Barbara Amiel. Black described Amiel, in the first volume of his autobiography as "beautiful, brilliant, ideologically a robust spirit" and "chic, humorous and preternaturally sexy". Courtroom evidence revealed that the couple exchanged over 11,000 emails.
"My family", Black wrote in 2009, "was divided between atheism and agnosticism, and I followed rather unthinkingly and inactively in those paths into my twenties." By his early thirties he "no longer had any confidence in the non-existence of God". Thereafter, he "approached Rome at a snail's pace", and began to study the writings of Roman Catholic thinkers such as St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Newman, and Jacques Maritain. Having accepted the possibility of miracles and thus of the Resurrection of Christ, Black was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 18 June 1986 by Gerald Emmett Cardinal Carter, Archbishop of Toronto, at the cardinal's official residence. He had a dispensation to receive the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, from Cardinals Léger and Carter, starting in 1974.
Black developed a close friendship with Cardinal Carter and relied on him as a spiritual advisor. On Carter's death, Black wrote:
In the 25 years I knew him, his judgment and personality were always sober but never solemn; and never, not at his most beleaguered and not on the verge of death, did he show a trace of despair. He was intellectual but practical, spiritual but not sanctimonious or utopian, proud but never arrogant. He must have had faults, but I never detected any. He was a great man, yet the salt of the earth.
In 2001, Black was invested as a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, a Papal order of chivalry awarded by Pope John Paul II and delivered by Cardinals Carter and Aloysius Ambrozic. He has written that his faith helped him endure his imprisonment in the United States. Black is also a major shareholder in The Catholic Herald, and was the vice-president of Léger's charity from 1972 to 1990.