Oh Lord! Conrad Black has a new pop at the Queen

DISGRACED media mogul Conrad Black has form for criticising the Queen. And even now, as the nation prepares to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee, the former jailbird has targeted the 95-year-old by saying she ‘lacks charm’, is ‘not a spectacular monarch’ and ‘not a riveting public speaker’, nor a ‘great innovator’.

Lord Black, 77, even likened her legacy to a departing big top act. ‘Though she has not been a spectacular monarch, this Queen’s achievement will be like that of a great circus performer whose talents are best appreciated after departing the stage,’ says Black.

Despite praising the Queen’s seven-decade tenure as ‘one of selfless and unpretentious duty’, he says she has lacked charm. ‘The Queen is not a riveting public speaker and has not been a great innovator,’ he writes in an article for Canada’s National Post.

This is not the first time that Canadian-born Black, who was released from a U.S. jail in 2012 after serving three years for fraud, has turned his opprobrium on the Queen.

As disclosed in this column a few weeks ago, he vented his disapproval of her ‘abandonment’ of Prince Andrew after it was announced that her son would fight his sexual assault charges as a private citizen.

Black declared that he thought it was a ‘disgrace’ for the monarch ‘to have withdrawn from him all the dignities exercised ex-official for centuries by the second son of the reigning monarch’.

The former Telegraph owner, who was pardoned by President Trump in 2019, balanced his critique of Her Majesty with glowing praise.

He wrote: ‘She was never a swashbuckling, rabble-rousing or otherwise proselytising monarchist, but she has steadily surmounted all the ostensible demotions and trivialisations of the monarchy over the past 70 years.’

No doubt she’ll be flattered.