Conrad Black bullish on impending sentence

In a interview with London journalists conducted by video-link from his virtual home imprisonment in Florida, disgraced media baron Conrad Black was on fine form Wednesday night for a man about to go to jail. He said that he was rereading Kafka's The Trial. "When I first read it I thought it was a novel, now I realise it's just journalism."

Seated in front of a bookcase at his Palm Beach home - to which he is confined under the terms of his bail, until sentencing on December 10 - Lord Black maintained his "complete innocence" despite having been found guilty by a Chicago court on charges of fraud and obstruction of justice.

He felt he'd been "effectively assaulted" by the US government; although they couldn't sort out Iraq, he said, they were pretty efficient at terrorising their citizens (not that he is one, having claimed British citizenship in order to get his peerage in 2001).

He was not resigned to prison, and was not taking any special measures. But he then admitted: "I would have to be brain-dead not to realise there's a chance of jail."

The last thing journalists wanted to discuss was his new book The Invincible Quest: The Life of Richard Milhous Nixon - the purpose of the appearance at Waterstone's Piccadilly, for which an elaborate signing session was organised, involving the so-called LongPen gadget invented by fellow Candian novelist Margaret Atwood.

Black said the disgraced president (who resigned in 1974 after the Watergate scandal) was a political genius, who had taken the Republican party from their days as an isolationist flat-earth society into a political force.

The reason for Black's good humour was the emergence yesterday of details from a Chicago probation officer's report, which Judge Amy St Eve will take into account at sentencing. It is understood the report puts the losses at Hollinger due to Black and his co-defendants' fraud closer to $6m rather than the $32m claimed by prosecutors. As a result, his sentence could be considerably less than the 19-24 years being demanded by prosecutors, perhaps closer to five years. ·