Stephen Glover on The Press

In reporting the Conrad Black verdict on Saturday, The Daily Telegraph appended the following statement: "Black owned The Daily Telegraph from 1986 until 2004, when Hollinger Group sold the Telegraph Group to Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay. Since that time he has had no connection with the paper."

Wasn't this disavowal - The Sunday Telegraph yesterday carried a similar one - rather ignoble? Neither title can pretend to have no connection with Lord Black since they are, to quite a large extent, his creation. Moreover, most dispassionate observers would probably agree that the two newspapers are rather less good under their present ownership than they were under Lord Black's.

When he snatched the Telegraph Group from Lord Hartwell and the Berry family in 1986, it was in a pretty dire state. I can say this with some authority since I had worked on The Daily Telegraph for the previous seven years. I revered Lord Hartwell, but there is no denying that even by the standards of Fleet Street the management was weak and incompetent. It had spent money it did not have on a new printing plant, and was cowed by rapacious trade unions.

Lord Black was, of course, immensely lucky, since the very month he gained control of the Telegraph Group, Rupert Murdoch moved his printing operations to Wapping, which led to the humbling of the unions. Conrad Black, like other Press proprietors, was able to follow suit, and soon turned losses into substantial profits, ironically enriching the already wealthy Berry family, who had remained minority shareholders.

But Lord Black was not merely a passenger on a bandwagon set in motion by Mr Murdoch. He installed a professional management and a new senior editorial team. Some of the idiosyncrasies of the old Daily Telegraph were lost, but a better designed, equally professional and probably more confident newspaper emerged. Doesn't he deserve considerable credit for that?

These are my thoughts as Conrad Black faces, according to some predictions, up to 35 years in jail. He is a crook, and it is no use his small band of myopic defenders claiming otherwise. But there are crooks and crooks. We can write off Lord Black as vain, delusional, greedy, pompous, what you will, but this man revived the fortunes of The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and of The Spectator too.

In the past few days comparisons have been made with that other disgraced media tycoon, Robert Maxwell. They are misplaced. No one can plausibly argue that Maxwell strengthened any of the Mirror Group titles he owned. It may be invidious to compare frauds, but Maxwell's victims were the members of the Mirror pension fund, while Lord Black's were Hollinger shareholders, though I suppose some of these included pension funds which were short-changed on profits.

Conrad Black was a good proprietor. Nor was he a gross human being. Plenty of decent people worked for him and liked him. There are a few, perhaps less decent, who banked the cheques and now rubbish him.

One man who has come out of all this well is the author Tom Bower, who never worked for Conrad. His searing book on the media tycoon and hisextravagant wife Barbara Amiel has been vindicated. On BBC2's Newsnight last Friday, Mr Bower said he hoped Lord Black will not face too long a sentence in November.

In this country, though not in America, murderers can walk free after 12 years. Some commentators are talking about locking up a 62-year-old man for 20 years. Make him pay back the money he took from shareholders, but it would be crazy to incarcerate him for years. Rather than disowning Conrad Black, and forgetting that it owes its survival to him, The Daily Telegraph should be at the head of those clamouring for mercy.

'Observer' to become Seventh-Day 'Guardian'?

A senior Guardian journalist tells me that there is a plan afoot, or at least an idea in circulation, to turn The Observer into a seven-day version of its sister paper, The Guardian. Alan Rusbridger is said to believe that The Observer no longer has a distinctive brand that works, and that it might make better sense to lump it in with The Guardian.

I very much hope that my source is wrong, but I fear he isn't. The Observer is admittedly losing money, probably about £10 million a year, hence the argument for reducing losses by depriving it of its own separate staff. Stand-alone Sunday newspapers are undoubtedly expensive operations to run.

The trouble is that every previous attempt to convert a Sunday paper into the seventh-day edition of its daily sister has been judged to have failed, and has had to be reversed. The Guardian acquired The Observer in 1993, snatching it from under the nose of Newspaper Publishing plc, which then owned The Independent. Even after 14 years in the same stable, and despite sharing the same Berliner format, The Guardian and Observer remain very different papers.

The Observer only became a liberal paper after the war, under the editorship of David Astor, and was previously regarded as Tory, being edited from 1908 until 1942 by the Conservative autodidact and intellectual, JL Garvin. The Guardian has always been liberal, and in the 1960s acquired a Dave Spart wing, while The Observer never really did. Under Roger Alton's editorship The Observer has become more right-wing and populist than its primmer daily sister.

Does The Observer have its own brand? I would say so, even though it is not quite what it was under David Astor. Don't subsume it into The Guardian. Remember: in Britain seven-day operations have never worked.

Dempster, the original 'celeb'

Nigel Dempster, who died last Thursday, was once the most famous journalist in Britain. I remember him arriving in the Saraceno restaurant (now sadly defunct) in Oxford in 1973 or 1974, where a group of students, including Tina Brown and Simon Carr, awaited him.

If Ernest Hemingway had walked in, he could have hardly made more of an impression. Mr Dempster seemed an impossibly glamorous and raffish figure. He had only been writing his eponymous Daily Mail column for two or three years, yet he was already famous.

In the end, Mr Dempster's cast of aristocratic characters dwindled into insignificance. He started by attacking the upper classes but came to identify with them. By that time they had been supplanted by 'celebs', not only in the gossip columns but also in the news pages. The Sun now runs a picture of Victoria Beckham on its front page, clutching her bottom in sexual ecstasy. Nigel's world has gone.