As a piece of bizarre, self-serving crap, the piece from Conrad Black's grieving wide Barbara Amiel in The Times is hard to beat.

Like her husband, she shows absolutely no remorse about the fraud perpetrated on shareholders but instead attacks old friends who let them down and the "corporate governance racketeers" who she claims "could teach Al Capone a lesson or two".

In the end, she claims they were just victims of a gross envious attack. Nothing to do with fraud.

"My husband's exuberant displays of intellectual prowess, plus his confidence that he was somehow exempt from the normal rules of petty mankind - to wit, he could call many journalists lazy without being buried by them when the first real opportunity came - irritated enemies and even some admirers. My own political incorrectness and penchant for peacock display was a burr under the saddle of many. Add worldly achievement and the evident happiness of our marriage and you have a perfect Petri dish for animus.

"Conrad, too, is a man out of joint with his times, whose notion of loyalty, superglue-strong, prevented him from taking the steps he should have with, among others, David Radler, when his capacity for business deceit first surfaced a few years earlier. Nor did Conrad's entrepreneurial flair and style sit well in the constipated corporate world of the 21st century. My husband may simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Similar sort of stuff is coming from Black from his prison cell. Writing to columnist Ruth dudley Edwards and published here, Black says jail is "better than I expected and is more of a sociological laboratory than I had foreseen".

And true to form, he gets stuck into Obama in an extraordinary attack.

"Large parts of the media are finally clicking on to the Obama scam, the vacuity of his comments and his galloping narcissism. I don't see how he survives his claim that the surge hasn't worked and yet that he has modified his troops-out posture. The demise of Billary is very heartening. Obviously, after McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis, the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, had to go for a winner, but they were holding their noses at the antics of the Clintons until they got another winner. Obama isn't so much a winner as someone who relieves the whites of their guilt complex vis-a-vis the blacks, as long as they elect him as the ticket out of their guilt problem. This is the core of Jesse Jackson's objections, as he could never get beyond the guilt trip and no one has been listening anyway. If McCain keeps his wits about him, stays on message, and appears to be alive, he should win."

This couple is completely deluded.