Conrad Black: forgotten but not gone

Both the Globe and Mail and the CBC have the happy story this morning about Conrad Black getting a pardon from Donald Trump. What particularly caught my eye was the roll-call of character witnesses who interceded on Mr. Blacks’s behalf: Henry Kissinger, Rush Limbaugh, William F. Buckley, and…
Elton John!?

Huh? Which of those is not like the other ones? Do you suppose it was Elton John’s word that tipped the balance? Or was the pardon granted in spite of Elton John?

Aside from having been Palm Beach neighbours, Connie and Donnie have something else in common; they were both born to great wealth and worked assiduously to squander it. Conrad seems to have been more successful in that endeavour than has Donald, but continues to live the high life thanks mainly to the largesse of the few friends who stuck by him when the going got tough.

Conrad was somewhat ahead of his time in terms of his business career. He was a pioneer in the looting of employee pension plans back in the 1980s, a practice that has since become commonplace. That episode may have earned him the opprobrium of the general public, but didn’t derail his long-term campaign for a seat in the UK’s House of Lords, where he remains Baron Black of Crossharbour.

Baron Black redeemed himself somewhat, at least in my eyes, with how he handled his US prison term. If you look at the articles he wrote from prison, there’s not a lot of woe-is-me griping. Instead, we see an actual mensch developing a surprising (for a pension fiddler) empathy for his fellow inmates.

Maybe that’s what caught Elton John’s eye too.