Barbara Amiel gains a bleeding heart

Barbara Amiel, the wife of the disgraced Canadian tycoon (Lord) Conrad Black, currently serving a six-and-a-half year sentence in the US for fraudseems to have developed a social conscience.

Writing in the latest edition of Canadian magazine Macleans, for which she is a columnist, she talks about her communions with other jailbird's wives, relating it to the credit crises in America.

"Donna Lee had colon cancer, now she's got liver cancer, and the chemo has given her bad osteoporosis and she can't serve 'no more'. She wants to work but if she earns more than an extra few hundred dollars a month, she loses her monthly $950 disability payment. You can see she was stunning once, back when she was working at the 'top' as a cocktail waitress in the Holiday Inn."

Amiel, who when her husband owned the Daily Telegraph once said her "extravagance knows no bounds",  now writes about Tricia, who "comes to the prison straight from night shift at a factory... Latasha teaches chemistry at a high school... There are millions of these women trying to survive while their man is 'inside'. They're ashamed and afraid of losing jobs.

"The government takes away most every little thing they had one way or another during the prosecution process, reduces them to rubble, and in a victim-oriented society they don't count because they're hitched to a victimiser -  though one-third of their men are probably innocent." ·