BARBARA AMIEL

If Barbara Amiel did call a journalist a slut the other day, it must be because she is under strain. She is appearing daily in court at the trial of her husband, Lord Black of Crossharbour, who faces many years in prison if found guilty. He is accused of using company money to fund an extravagant personal lifestyle to which his wife made heroic contributions.

We could indulge in a little list now, and maybe another at the end if we can fit it in: two private jets, a $295,000 (£150,000) holiday in French Polynesia, a $2,463 handbag, exercise equipment at $2,083, opera tickets for $2,785 and a “birthday party for Barbara” at La Grenouille restaurant in New York costing $42,870. “My extravagance knows no bounds,” she famously said.

Conrad Black is Amiel’s fourth husband, but the one she has stuck with. “Both shared a need to be respected, accepted and admired in the spotlight,” wrote Tom Bower in his biography of the couple. Amiel’s apparently insatiable need for possessions and conquest is put down to a shaky start in which her parents separated, her mother uprooted the family to Canada, her father committed suicide and she left home at 14 to lodge in a part-time brothel.

The romantic hero who has run out of plots

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She worked hard, attended Toronto University and thence to a glittering career in journalism, exceeded only by a parallel career as a kind of latterday courtesan in which she used sex appeal as a form of direct action. “If she sits next to someone at dinner and she decides she wants to please, there’s no one more brilliant than her,” an admirer observed. “She fixes those great green eyes on you and the rest is history. It is an amazing performance.”

After a period as the first female editor of the Toronto Sun , where she was once spotted striding through the office in an open trenchcoat revealing a black bustier, garter belt and fishnet stockings, Amiel moved to England as a columnist for The Times and The Sunday Times purveying her trenchantly pro-Israel, pro-American, Eurosceptic views and her belief that homosexuality was an abomination. She then moved to The Telegraph group, owned by her future husband.

They were married in 1992 and embarked on a lifestyle whose lavishness implied unlimited wealth. But there were those who suspected differently. “Only a few hundred women in the world can afford to dress like Mrs Black, and Mrs Black may not be among them,” a Canadian journalist observed. The couple employed 17 staff in various homes all of whom had to hide in cupboards or behind doors at Amiel’s approach because she hated seeing any of them.

Amiel, 67, has retained her youthful figure and looks with a regime of medicine, drugs and surgery, but fears time’s winged chariot. “He will leave me,” she told a friend once. “I’m making plans for when it all goes wrong.”

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