It's the retreat from Toronto: Conrad Black loses the battle for the soul of Canada

Thwarted one too many times, the newspaper baron has turned his back on his native land

It turned out to be Conrad Black's last Canadian campaign. The press baron, who is famously fascinated with Napoleon, stunned his compatriots in October 1998 by launching a national, conservative-minded newspaper, the National Post. Now, bitter from three years of battle not just with rival newspapers but also with Canada's left-leaning Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, he has abandoned the Post and fled the land.

Many in the press and the political establishments in Canada are still trying to come to terms with a future that does not feature the physically imposing figure of Black. Until very recently, he owned not only the Post but also the venerable Southam News chain that included leading titles in most of Canada's largest cities. Few in Canada had the clout of Conrad Black.

How astonishing then that now he has all but vanished from the landscape. Hollinger, the publishing company he heads, suddenly retains only scattered and unimportant interests in Canada. It still controls some prestigious titles elsewhere in the world. In Britain, notably, it has The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. There is the Jerusalem Post also, and the Chicago Sun-Times.

The boldly laid-out National Post was a journalistic triumph – at least for those that could stomach its editorialising – but a financial catastrophe. It quickly gained circulation, but mostly through a ruinous strategy of giveaways and bulk sales that similarly hobbled its rivals, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star, which were were forced to embark on similar tactics. It struggled to win advertising also and the losses mounted.

By some estimates, Hollinger lost £75m on the Post, maybe more. The first sign that Mr Black was weakening in his resolve to see these losses through came at the end of last year when he sold half the newspaper and nearly all of his Southam assets to another media conglomeration out of Alberta called CanWest. It was to CanWest that he sold the remaining 50 per cent of the Post a week ago.

This is not just a tale of financial profits and losses, however. It is also about the almost perversely personal vendetta that has been running for years between Mr Black, 57, and Mr Chrétien. The squabble took on a new ferocity two years ago when the Prime Minister and leader of Canada's almost unopposed Liberal Party stood in the way of an offer by Tony Blair to elevate Conrad to the House of Lords.

Mr Black – Lord Almost to some – at first tried to challenge Mr Chrétien in the court. But when his legal options finally ran out earlier this year he did what he had previously refused to consider. After years of being a dual-national, he renounced his Canadian citizenship to become solely British. Living mainly in London, he has, in effect, surrendered to Mr Chrétien and gone to his own Elba. Securing a peerage and a place in the highest levels of British society is important to Mr Black, who these days is married to the conservative columnist Barbara Amiel. But the point, Mr Black told disappointed staff at the Post, is that he no longer lives in Canada and therefore should no longer own a newspaper there.

Much better for the paper, he said, that it fall under the protective wings of CanWest and its owners Izzy Asper and his son Leonard. For one, they have fine relations with Mr Chrétien. Izzy Asper is a former leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party and a close pal of the Prime Minister. "There are factions in the Liberal Party, and since all of you are now inhabitants of a one-party federal state, we have to work with some of those factions. The Aspers are well qualified to do that and because of the extreme animosity between Chrétien and myself, I am not," he told the Post crew.

Herein, however, lies perhaps the most poignant of all the ironies about Mr Black's Canadian demise. He created the Post to give Canada a conservative paper with a voice spanning the country. Now he has surrendered it to a family that is famously not conservative in its thinking. Indeed, soon after last year's sale of Southam News and half the Post to CanWest, Leonard Asper wrote an open letter in the newly acquired titles criticising them for being too hard on Chrétien.

The Aspers have vowed to leave the editorial personality of the Post alone. But many observers take such promises lightly and wonder whether the paper will last much longer. Meanwhile, The Toronto Sun, which does not circulate nationally, is left as more or less the only conservative voice on the Canadian newspaper scene. "It is a sorry time," Peter Worthington, a Sun columnist, wrote, "with the bulk of the Canadian media now dominated, influenced or controlled by the big-L Liberalism of Jean Chrétien, which is hard to distinguish from dictatorial dogmatism, and is increasingly un-benign if not actually malignant. The Aspers seem Chrétien acolytes."

Mr Chrétien is now as unchallenged as any prime minister in Canadian history. But he will not be in power for ever and when he leaves, who knows, perhaps an ennobled Conrad Black will return to his native land. The National Post, his bravest creation, may or may not still be there to welcome him home.

Caught in the middle of the feuding 'Telegraphs'

By Colin Brown

Conrad Black's move to the UK will give him the chance to take up his peerage and participate in British politics in the Lords.

The tycoon, who converted to Catholicism a few years ago, is now renouncing his Canadian citizenship so that he can become a peer. He's been devoting more of his time to London, where, with his wife Barbara Amiel, he has developed a reputation for soirées for the political classes, as well as the rich and famous.

But engaging with British politics does not mean he is making the right calls. The two Telegraph titles have been engaged in their own internal rows over the Conservative party leadership. The Sunday Telegraph, edited by Dominic Lawson, provoked The Daily Telegraph, edited by Charles Moore, into rubbishing its own "scoop" when it declared early in the race that Lady Thatcher was backing Michael Portillo.

Mr Portillo was indeed Conrad Black's preferred choice. The Daily Telegraph under Mr Moore was vehemently opposed to Mr Portillo leading the party, consistently backing Ian Duncan-Smith. The Sunday Telegraph under Mr Lawson has reluctantly followed suit, unable to embrace the pro-euro Ken Clarke.

An internal inquiry by Dan Colson, the chief executive of the Telegraph, into the Portillo story ­ proved wrong within hours by Lady Thatcher ­ has come up with nothing. No heads have rolled, no one has been moved, although David Cracknell, whose by-line appeared on the story, has fled to The Sunday Times, where he has become political editor.

Meanwhile, Mr Clarke is furiously claiming a stitch-up at the Telegraph ­ noticeboard for the Tory party ­ to ruin his chances of winning. Still boiling at a poll of constituency members, who turned out to be hand-picked in Smithy-supporting constituencies, Mr Clarke's team say he is being treated like "public enemy number one" by the two Telegraph titles. Mr Black, as an ardent europhobe, will have no complaint about that.