Bush fails to pardon Conrad Black

As the world prepares itself for a new American president, spare a thought for Conrad Black, the former proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, or Prisoner No 18330-424 as he is known at the Coleman Correctional Center in Florida. As reported here, Black has appealed to the US Justice Office begging for a presidential pardon from George W Bush, but as tomorrow's inauguration looms closer it seems increasingly likely that his desperate bid for freedom has fallen on deaf ears.

Thus far, Dubya has not chosen to favour anyone in high-profile cases, unlike his predecessor, Bill Clinton, who controversially granted financier Marc Rich an 11th-hour pardon for multiple tax evasion before leaving office in January 2001.

No one can say Black, who has served just 10 months of his six-and-a-half year sentence for corporate fraud, hasn't had a good shot at catching the outgoing president's eye.

In December he went into full grovel mode by heaping praise on Bush's economic record and the outcome of the War in Iraq in an article for the National Post, the Canadian paper he founded in 1998 but had to sell after only two years.

And his wife, Barbara Amiel, who famously said her "extravagance knows no bounds", has also offered piteous laments about her life without Black. "What does it matter if one well-off elderly white woman with too many pairs of expensive shoes finds her social life largely visiting her dearly missed husband in a US correctional institution?" she asked in the Canadian news magazine, Macleans, last July.

Fearing the worst, Black, a life-long conservative, now appears to have turned his attention to Obama. Writing in the National Post last week he compared the President-elect's oratory gifts with those of Roosevelt, of whom he wrote a biography, before concluding: "It is in his hands whether his country enters a prolonged decline, or adds yet another cubit to its stature in the world." ·