Since I'm writing about Conrad Black, it seems appropriate to disclose my own conflict of interest: I received sums well into the mid-three figures for writing op-ed pieces for the National Post when it was under his control. The total was enough to feed a starving boy for a year, or a couple of months, anyway. Depending on how hungry he got. And how picky he would be about what he was fed.

Nevertheless, I think I can put aside my gratitude long enough to regard my former master with magisterial objectivity.

I first met Mr. Conrad Black, as he then was, in Toronto in the mid-1970s, when he was still learning at the feet of John A. (Bud) McDougald, chairman and president of Argus Corp. and doyenne of Canadian corporate self-dealing. My first impression of him, apart from noting his excellent tailoring, was of someone who, as a sensitive child, had been locked in a closet with a thesaurus for several months.

The second was of a man who enjoyed obscure insider dealing for its own sake, more than for the money . Yes, Lord Black lives well, in truth better than I do, but it would be missing the point to see him as an ideal example of corporate greed. Think of him, rather, as a white-coated figure in a bleak castle, stepping back from a wired-up contraption of personal holding companies and compensation agreements, shouting: "It's alive! It's alive!"

I've had occasion to observe businessmen who are pure appetite, such as Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, partying like there's no tomorrow, indulging in one expensive mistress after another (or simultaneously). That's not Lord Black. He is devoted to his wife, for example, through difficult as well as glamorous times. He also spends most of his off-camera time working on his books. His choice of subjects for admiring biographies would seem at first to be inconsistent; Duplessis was a fierce reactionary, Roosevelt a left-liberal icon. There is a common element to both, also shared by Bud McDougald: an air that their sovereign authority was bestowed by Divine Providence itself.

Here we come to why Conrad Black is today a sort of play-plutocrat in a withering House of Lords, rather than a real plutocrat of the worldwide empire such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates are role models of how the people who actually run an empire are supposed to present themselves these days. Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett have real talents, respectively the management of legal rights to intellectual energy and the analysis of balance sheets and managerial staying power.

They also, though, have a grasp of how power-mojo is projected after the millennium in the anglosphere. The public doesn't seem to object to being screwed all the time, as long as you come across as nice and sensitive, buy it a cup of cappuccino or herbal tea at Starbucks first, and tell it that it's not really overweight. Mr. Gates, Mr. Buffett, and the lesser American billionaires and masters of the universe understand that. They wear khakis with upper-middle-class cotton shirts, and carry their own PDAs rather than snapping their fingers at secretaries. They fly around in private jets, of course, but they are at pains to tell the public that they're just like everyone else, only more so. They appear with either smiles or appropriately furrowed brows on talk shows to discuss their charity projects in Africa and deplore the excesses of political fund-raising.

You'll notice none of this stops Mr. Gates from making sure that if you own an older copy of Microsoft Office, you can't open documents created by the newer versions, and allowing his operating systems to be designed for ready access by every virus-writing hacker on the planet. Nor does it stop Mr. Buffett from charging effective interest rates of close to 30 per cent for bailing out a desperate pipeline company. The omnibus energy bill before the U.S. Congress contains a provision that serves Mr. Buffett so well it could have been written by his own lawyers. It repeals the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which has effectively kept Mr. Buffett from assembling a national web of electric companies. That's okay though, because he's a nice guy and it will all work out for the better, just you see.

Lord Black is a legislator himself, yet he couldn't get a law like that passed for his benefit. He just doesn't have the postmillennium power mojo. This is where his love of playing dressup ā l'anglais and parading around like a P.G. Wodehouse character does him no good. Rupert Murdoch, another power-hungry colonial boy, did better. He has an order of magnitude more money than Mr. Black, but is blessed with a common-sounding Australian accent, which to Americans proves he's a regular guy. So it's okay that younger members of the Murdoch family have a measurably better chance than members of the public of being appointed to executive positions in News Corp. They act like regular guys, too. If they want to spend corporate cash flow on money-losing properties such as the New York Post, that's fine.

Yet when Lord Black blows a wad on a personal project such as the National Post, the wrath of Wall Street descends on him.

Not being a forensic accountant with access to the underlying documents, the services of crack securities lawyers, and several free months, I don't have an opinion about what will ultimately transpire in the Hollinger/Black affair. I do know that banks and other lenders, along with equity investors who have fiduciary responsibilities to limited partners, will be repeating a saying to each other: "There's never just one cockroach."

I don't know if there is more than one cockroach, but potential rescue money has recent bitter experience with financial insects. In order to recapitalize Hollinger with new money, Lord Black may well be forced to give up control, no matter what the current shareholders agreements and board resolutions say.

That might be good for him. He does have writing ability, and the obsessive compulsive interest in historical research that's necessary for an extended writing career. He would be better off if he gave up his pretentiousness and anachronistic entitlements, real and imagined.

Then, with tell-all interviews about the open-collared, Gore-Tex jacketed, New Organic Conrad in People magazine and Hello!, we'd be ready to forgive him, whatever the courts decide.

John Dizard is a New York-based columnist for the Financial Times.