Conrad Black's jail sentence of six-and-a-half years will undoubtedly shock the people who wrote to the judge on his behalf. The great and the good do tend to believe they can achieve whatever they please, despite the rules. It is, of course, exactly what Black himself thought too.
Baron Black of [Double] Crossharbour has done nothing since he was convicted of fraud and the obstruction of justice to show the least remorse. He has castigated the main witness - his former partner, David Radler - the prosecutors, the jury, the American system of justice, the US corporate regulatory system, and the British press (for peddling "bourgeois myths that I've had a rise and fall").
If Conrad decides to spend his years in jail writing a book, I'd guess it would be called, How to lose friends and antagonise people. In continuing to plead his innocence, despite the overwhelming evidence against him, he has moved from a state of denial to a state of hysteria.
The truth, which Black's bluster cannot conceal, is that he used a public company, Hollinger International, as if it were his private fiefdom. That, in a nutshell, is the single reason he has been convicted. Yet it is the salient fact he refuses to accept.
Note what his lawyer, Jeffrey Steinbeck, said in court today when he took issue with the judge, Amy St Eve, about treating Black as if he were a bank robber: "As far as I know, no bank robbers have ever built the bank that they robbed."
But that's the mistake at the heart of Black's defence. He may have built up a media empire, and fair play to him for that, but he was financed by investors. And it is these investors that he tricked by ensuring that payments flowed into his pockets, and those of Radler, without the knowledge of the board and, therefore, the shareholders.
By refusing to admit that fact, Black has no credibility at all. However, it is fair to ask whether a jail sentence, whether relatively long or relatively short, is appropriate. Opinion is split. For example, a Toronto professor, Reginald Stackhouse, sees no point at all in putting Black behind bars.
But my answer is unhesitating. In the circumstances, it must be correct to imprison him - for at least three reasons. First, the amount of the money involved is large. Second, he refuses to admit to his obvious guilt and pours scorn on those who sought to give him a fair trial.
Third, and not least, only by jailing white collar criminals can society hope to deter anyone else charged with looking after huge public funds from taking a similar route to Black's in order to benefit from their ill-gotten gains. (Stackhouses argues the reverse).
On a personal level, of course, it is terrible to see a man one knows and liked going to prison. From the first moment I met Black - at a proprietors meeting in 1990 called to discuss the setting up of what became the Press Complaints Commission - I enjoyed being in his company.
In later years, at our various meetings on the steps of the Brompton Oratory after Sunday mass, he was always thoroughly entertaining, not least because he was so wonderfully rude about other media entrepreneurs. The irony was that his most often-expressed complaint about them was that they either lacked the money to beat him or that they used unfair means to undermine his business. (You can probably guess the names of those he criticised).
Once again, it shows just how arrogant he is. For instance, did he really think that calling the four Jewish prosecuting attorneys of being "Nazis" was anything other than a grotesque insult? He also said of their case that it was hanging "like a toilet seat around their necks".
He might ponder that when he's cleaning toilet seats in a federal prison.
