CONRAD Black, who finally pulled out of Australia last month after selling his stake in the Fairfax newspaper group to Kerry Packer, is a man with a long memory.
Recently the Margin came across a long piece by "Connie" - as he is known north of the 49th parallel - in the Toronto Globe and Mail, where he reminisced about his experiences in Australia.
Connie has few good words to say about anybody he came across during the nasty takeover battle for Fairfax, where his Tourang consortium beat off a rival bid from a consortium headed by Tony O'Reilly.
Former Aussie prime minister Bob Hawke "was even more resistless than usual to any political pressure", said Connie. Kerry Packer is "self-indulgent" and would never be satisfied with anything but "the grovelling subordinacy he requires of all about him".
But Connie reserves some of his sharpest barbs for Tony O'Reilly, "the florid and talented Irish chairman of the H.J. Heinz company". O'Reilly, according to Connie "has appeared to exercise the saturnine influence of a Mephistophelean (this was where the Margin looked for his dictionary) leprechaun on Mr Hawke."
Ireland's draconian libel laws prevent the Margin from carrying Connie's comments in full. But as he departed from Oz with his tail between his legs after selling off his Fairfax stake to the "self-indulgent" Kerry Packer, the Globe and Mail diatribe suggests there is only on& loser from the Fairfax affair - Connie himself.
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