Conrad Black, rape and the media arselicks

The journalist Mark Steyn deserves some kind of award for loyalty to his friends Conrad Black and his whorish wife Barbara Amiel – his dispatches from the 12th floor of the Dirksen courthouse over the last three or four months gave me huge pleasure: they were exercises in wish-unfulfilled dismantlement of all evidence against the Blacks (great villainous name) and the promotion of the idea that if you’re rich and successful you should be allowed a high degree of latitude in spending other people’s money on private jets and gilt-edged bogs, handbags, “corporate apartments” and other perquisites of the media magnate lifestyle.

Mr Steyn’s main preoccupation now as Black awaits sentence (whatever the sentence he’ll be out in three years, so worry not …) is the nightmarish prospect that (yes, let’s employ the newspaper vernacular) the “disgraced” Canadian tycoon may suffer the indignity of rape in jail, or as Steyn puts it in his satirically homophobic way, "taking it up the keister from Butch every night.” I’m sure your average lust-crazed psycho will be giving Conrad a wide berth if only because he’d have to be hung like an elephant just to effect entry beyond the metre or so of buttocks lard.

However, the Black case affords an opportunity to list the top 10 rich people’s arselick journalists in the media today (UK perspective) – hacks who excuse/justify/deny the excesses of their wealthy idols or who in some way worship huge amounts of money as a virtue in itself and probably derive sexual pleasure from totting up the cash noughts in their copy:

1. William Cash
2. Mark Steyn
3. Tina Brown
4. Nicholas Coleridge
5. Petronella Wyatt
6. Jasper Gerard
7. Dominick Dunne
8. Anthony Haden-Guest
9. Nicholas Foulkes
10. Peter York