The gaiety! The folly! Barbara Amiel: a case for the defence

The wife of shamed tycoon Conrad Black has been branded extravagant, demented and monstrous. Sarah Sands, who knew the 'rich bitch' well, says she is all of this and more

When City and media folk meet, they gloat. "So how long do you think Conrad Black will go to jail for?" After Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron, got 24 years last week, the excitement over the trial of Lord Black in Chicago next March increases. Lord Black faces eight counts of fraud, each of which carries a possible sentence of five years. Tom Bower's new biography portrays him as a cheat and his journalist wife, Barbara Amiel, as a demented chorus girl.

I worked for Black for nearly 10 years, as deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph, and was the editor in charge of Amiel's column. All I would say to their critics is: if only you had been there! The grandeur and the folly, the gaiety and the tragedy.

After the Telegraph was sold to the Barclay brothers, the mantra was that the paper had been run as a monarchy, with its own court, and was now, thank heavens, a business. The new owners cared about crime and tax and Sir Philip Green.

These are reasonable concerns, but it is not Proust. Conrad and Barbara in their monstrous, glamorous way, knew how to throw parties. The talk was of geo-politics and hemlines. Nowadays, we scorn their extravagance and doubt the source of their wealth with prune-faced hindsight. Meanwhile, everyone is sucking up to Russians.

Lord Black has a reputation in Canada as a ferocious cost-cutter, but by the time I knew him, he had come to love papers, wanting to live inside their pages - and write for them. If barred from the editorial columns, he would write letters. I have been sifting through some he wrote to me. They are about the craft of writing and ideas and they are funny.

The difference between real businessmen and the rest of us is that they are interested in the science of money, whereas we are interested in spending it. Conrad Black, perhaps criminally, came to regard the business as his bank account.

He was most proud of his genuinely admired biography of Franklin Roosevelt. His book tour was cancelled as his legal troubles began. To Black, journalism was Socratic debate, mixed with jokes and gossip. He begged to come to leader conference and asked to meet the stars of the paper. We produced an idealised version, robbing from the fashion desk's cupboards, subcontracting to academia. I am not sure he would have been familiar with the concept of sub-editors: to him, the paper was put together by descendants of Winston Churchill, beautiful debs, some hard-line neocons and a couple of columnists.

What made his interventions wearing was the hours that he and Barbara kept. They slept until midday and then worked at night. Plus, they flew between their homes in London, New York and Toronto on private jets that, it turned out, they couldn't afford . Barbara would disingenuously begin her midnight calls to me by saying in her low, breathy voice: "I hope I am not disturbing you." She would then offer little glimpses of her own home life. I remember her mentioning that Conrad Black was upstairs playing with his fleet of toy gun ships in the bath.

Charles Moore -the editor of the Telegraph at the time - and I were described by Black as "the bishop and the actress". It was, therefore, in a natural division of duties that I looked after Barbara. There was something about Charles that infuriated her and she was sometimes shockingly rude to him. I worked out that she sensed he did not find her attractive. Charles was very good with women but Barbara was too neurotic, too un-English for him.

She and I established a playful relationship based on a spectacular imbalance of power. "Little orphan Annie," she cooed, before disappearing on one of her lavish shopping trips. Her husband may not have been a footballer, but Barbara was the founding mother of the Wags.

Over time, she and Conrad found it difficult to distinguish between what was theirs and what was the company. Employees were all a form of domestic staff. I remember talking to her about trying to hire a new comment editor, and she said that she too had been having troubles with the butler. She did not think it odd, when she heard I was going to a business meeting in New York, to carry with me a collection of her dresses.

I remember her examining an exhibition of doll's houses at the Chelsea Flower Show and sighing how restful it would be to live in this cosy little home. How she envied people in small houses. The burden of wealth was one of her more dangerous fantasies. At one of her Gatsby-style parties in Kensington, she flinched at the elaborate canapés on offer: "Really, all I want is a sausage," she said, piteously. Then, she ran a hand down her inconceivably expensive dress and whispered: "I hate these parties, I am so shy." Later, I was invited to her boudoir, where she lay on cushion surrounded by her women friends. She was Kensington's Cleopatra, surrounded by maidens such as the designer and Forte daughter Olga Polizzi, the political thinker Tessa Keswick and the writer Miriam Gross.

On another occasion, Barbara invited herself to meet a friend, the actor John Malkovich, at the Savoy. We waited 40 minutes or so for her, and I apologised for her rudeness. Then we noticed a raven-haired woman in a trench coat, in the shadows at the edge of the room. Barbara explained that she had been drying her hair when Conrad had phoned, and of course she had to listen. (This is the woman who won the heart of Black by quoting back at him, verbatim, his book on the Canadian politician Maurice Duplessis.) When she pulled at the brush after too long under the heat, a chunk of her hair came with it. She patted her bald patch beseechingly. "I had to apply shoe polish."

It was about this time that I conceived the professionally suicidal notion that I could write her biography. Barbara Amiel had written her own compelling autobiography, Confessions, but one could never be sure that hers was an objective truth. Here is a tiny example of a contradiction. She writes dramatically of being thrown into a Mozambique prison, during a journalistic exposé of the Marxist state for the Canadian magazine Macleans. In order to protect herself and her colleagues, she ate her business cards. A former colleague of hers protested to me: "But they were laminated."

When I mentioned to Barbara the biography idea she did not dismiss it. With considerable advance notice, she arranged for me to come to discuss it with her. The location she chose was not her home, or the office but a private room in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, where she was having a blood transfusion (Barbara suffered from an unspecified blood disorder which caused an immunity deficiency). Propped up on the pillows like the Lady of the Camellias, one arm attached to a drip, she looked at me as if I had come to challenge a will.

"So, now, Sarah, what can I do for you?" What she told me then has been the theme for her defence. She is a North London Jewish girl living on her wits - she has been extremely poor and knows the world to be a cruel place. She is determined, however, to master her own destiny. It is, of course, a theme familiar to all who have loved Becky Sharp, heroine of Vanity Fair.

Barbara Amiel once wrote: "My husband is very rich, but I am not. I don't regard my husband's money as my own ... I have been a bitch all my life and did not need the authority of money to be one. I am a North London Jew who has read a bit of history. This means I know this: in a century that has seen the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, British and Soviet empires, reversal of fortune is the rich bitch's reality. One might as well keep working and have the family's Vuitton suitcases packed."

This is vintage Barbara: show-stopping journalism, moving and disingenuous. Her parallel between the diaspora and her marital fortunes could be seen as bad taste. But she does believe that work is her life's insurance. My last telephone conversation with her was last year when I was editing The Sunday Telegraph. Conrad was being indicted by the truckload and both were low.

Barbara wanted to interview the Israeli premier, Ariel Sharon, on his ranch. Somehow, journalism was her way of dealing with her catastrophic circumstances. Pitifully, she needed a recommendation from me - once her status would not have required it. A week later, he was in a coma. Her luck was truly out.

Strangely, one feared the playful poison of Barbara Amiel while also wanting to protect her. She was - and is now, at the age of 65 - fragile, appalled by the way English society has turned against her and her husband. One of the Blacks' outstanding characteristics was their loyalty. When nobody would touch men such as Alfred Taubman, the disgraced former chairman of Sotheby's, the Blacks would make a point of public friendship. The Blacks loved power, but they were sympathetic to misfortune. According to Tom Bower, Taubman was the first to turn down Conrad Black's plea for financial help.

There was a corporate board - the one that got into trouble - and an all-star "advisory board". I remember attending meetings of the latter in New York and Washington. There were former presidents, foreign secretaries and economists. Donald Rumsfeld came along to shoot the breeze over lunch. Condoleezza Rice spoke at dinner. Nobody questioned the legitimacy of these epic, Davos-style summits. And there was Conrad Black, peacock proud - conducting foreign policy with world statesmen.

Those scenes have faded, the money is gone. His mighty friends are queuing up to denounce him. But Barbara, the "North London Jew", did not take flight, as many predicted. Becky Sharp had a heart after all. Her husband says he is optimistic about the trial - "I know the facts" - and is making speeches again. He describes himself as a "freedom fighter". And as for Barbara, this is a woman who wriggled through Lord Weidenfeld's serving hatch for his entertainment and who turned up for work in Canada with only a corset under her raincoat. If anyone is an escapologist, then it is her.