How quickly one forgets true lunacy. I was looking for something entirely different when I stumbled across a letter that Conrad Black wrote to the Telegraph, which he then still owned, in the summer of 2003. It is fashionable now to regard Black with a kind of affection: he was a megalomaniac crook but a better proprietor than Richard Desmond, say, or the Barclay Brothers, who bought the Telegraph from him. All this may be true as far as it went, but that’s not as far as one thinks, and his views onthe world were nearly as deranged as his wife’s. In the summer of 2003, what did he suppose was the most dangerous enemy facing Britain? Jihadis in Iraq? Terrorism? Global Warming? No. Jeremy Paxman:
“The BBC is pathologically hostile to the Government and official opposition, most British institutions, American policy in almost every field, Israel, moderation in Ireland, all Western religions, and most manifestations of the free market economy … sadly it has become the greatest menace facing the country it was founded to serve and inform.”