There are journalists in America who refuse to vote in primaries, lest registering with one party or another place their objectivity in doubt. Then there’s Conrad Black.
The Sun-Times has chosen to ignore the tempest, but the tale is told in the suit Black boldly filed last month in Toronto against Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien. It seems that last February the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party notified Black that the time had come for Black to enter the peerage. The Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, assured Black on May 28 that the Canadian government had said it would present no obstacle, provided Black became a British citizen and limited use of his new title to the Old World. Black accepted those terms, and by mid-June he’d nailed down dual citizenship–a considerably swifter naturalization process, no doubt, than enjoyed by a cabbie from Uganda.
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And as principle, as an assertion of Canadian egalitarianism, it’s been nullified by time and neglect. “Since 1920 hundreds of Honours have been bestowed upon Canadians and more than twenty-five of those Honours carried titular distinctions,” Black’s suit argues. “No objection, to the knowledge of the defendants, was taken to the conferring of any such Honours.”
“Prime Minister Chretien’s intervention constitutes a misfeasance of public office for which he is personally liable,” Black asserts in his suit. If by remote chance that intervention was legal, nevertheless “the Prime Minister is liable for negligence” for allowing Black to think he’d become a British lord once he became a British citizen. Since the honor Black expected was ballyhooed beforehand, “the plaintiff suffered considerable embarrassment and inconvenience.”
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For this gallantry in combat, the Conservative Party wished to reward him.
