Conrad Black gets a job on the Beast

Conrad Black (pictured), the disgraced former proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, or Prisoner Number No 18330-424 as he is known at the Coleman Correctional Center in Florida where has served six months of a six-and-a-half year sentence for fraud, has been given a job. Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and more recently the driving force behind an internet site called the Daily Beast, has recruited the peer to pontificate on US national affairs.

His first offering is on the American election. John McCain, the Republican candidate, will be disappointed to learn that the jailbird has, despite pledging his support before entering jail, now had a volte face. "Unless McCain stages the greatest comeback since Lazarus (and there were twitches of life in the last debate, so that should not be ruled out), this farrago of blunders will rank alongside... McGovern's demand that Nixon propose more humiliating terms for the US to withdraw from Vietnam than Hanoi was asking for (1972), Carter's encounter with the nasty swimming rabbit (1976), Dukakis's joy-ride in the battle tank (1988), and John Kerry's assertion that he had voted for the Iraq War but then voted not to fund the armed forces (2004)."

However, it appears that Conrad, who considers himself something of a historian – he wrote weighty books on Franklyn Roosevelt and Richard Nixon – might be in need of a very attentive editor. According to Jody Powell, Carter's press secretary at the time, the Carter/killer rabbit incident ocurred in the  spring of 1979 not 1976. ·