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Barbara Amiel’s memoir is a reminder of the tenacity of Trump and his gilded gang

<span>Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy</span>
Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

When I was 20, the newspaper magnate Conrad Black offered me a job. We were at an event for young journalists, though I was the opposite of his usual social milieu, being shy, scruffy and riddled with self-doubt – the opposite of his wife, columnist Barbara Amiel. He grabbed my hand in his giant paw, barked, “I’ll get you a job at the Telegraph. Good salary, too” and named a figure I just about – at 42 – earn now. He smiled, less like a boss offering employment, more like a king bestowing a blessing. A few years later, he was convicted of fraud.

The 90s was a golden era for alpha power players, and back then they seemed golden, as if they themselves were plated, though that may have been the glint from the riches surrounding them. The Blacks, the Trumps, Robert Maxwell: the men were called “charismatic” by people who confuse charisma with bullshit; the women (Amiel, Ivana, Marla Maples) were styled by the papers as monstrous, and at times they were.

I still have a fascination with these figures, the way others feel nostalgia for old TV presenters, because they seemed such a part of my youth: hothouse flowers who thought they were gods. Did real people live like that? They did: for those who wonder if the 90s were just a weird fever dream involving relative international calm and conspicuous consumption, Amiel’s forthcoming memoir, Friends And Enemies, is the equivalent of a Chanel-clad zombie returning from the dead.

It’s been a while since I last thought about Amiel, and she had calcified in my mind into a mere checklist: rightwing columnist, fond of couture, once had a quarrel with my mother in a London store over a pashmina (my mother won). Pashminagate doesn’t make it into Amiel’s memoir and, given the amount of material she has to work with, fair enough.

The book reeks of 90s pretension: “How poisonous must one be when even the New York vendeuses wish to distance themselves?” she muses of the period after Black’s conviction, sounding like the first draft of a character from Clueless. When she sells her flat, ostensibly to pay Black’s legal bills, she “sighed with relief. Here I come, Chanel, I thought.” (Alas, for her and Chanel, the FBI seized the money soon after.) HBO’s Succession – which riffs on the Murdoch family – recently showed how the super-rich spend their money today: on yachts, sure, but on clothes and homes that whisper their wealth far more discreetly. Against this, Amiel’s style, all screaming ostentation, looks anachronistic.

She frames her memoir as a work of literary revenge on the friends who stopped talking to her at the opera. “Once there is an accusation that you have ‘looted’ millions from your company, you’re done,” Amiel writes, overlooking the pesky fact that, as well as the accusation, there was a trial and an imprisonment. “It would take years for the allegations against Conrad to be revealed as false,” she continues, assuming that famous kama sutra position, the reverse ferret. But the allegations were very much not revealed to be false. Rather, he was pardoned by Trump, and the fact that the year before Black had knocked out a book about the president with its nose so determinedly up his arse it might have doubled as a colonoscopy was, surely, just a coincidence.

Amiel’s book is too inadvertently self-parodic to be a revenge memoir. Instead, I’d put it in the category of upwardly mobile shagging memoir. From Becky Sharp to Eva Peron, upwardly mobile shaggers have made for fun books (and musicals), and Amiel, who worked her way up the social ladder via the medium of her sharp brain, sharper elbows, and four husbands, fits right in.

Of her affair with the then 68-year-old publisher George Weidenfeld, Amiel writes that embracing him was “like clutching death”, but that he conferred certain “social advantages”. So, she writes, as breezily as she once exaggerated the number of Muslim people living in France in her column, “the only way I could deal with it was to avoid body-to-body contact and pleasure him orally”. Well! That woke you up, didn’t it?

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Amiel has often been compared to Marie Antoinette, who she once dressed as for a party at Kensington Palace. But to me she is more Amber St Clare, the clever peasant in Kathleen Winsor’s 1947 novel Forever Amber, who sleeps her way into Charles II’s bed. There is also a touch of Scarlett O’Hara, who escapes wartime poverty by marrying first her sister’s fiance, KKK member Frank Kennedy, then rapey Rhett Butler.

In a moral universe, Amiel, Black and these relics from the 90s would have long since disappeared. Yet they rarely do. Maxwell drowned, but his daughter, Ghislaine, continued until recently to live the high life in New York; now charged in connection with former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, she may yet get the justice her father evaded. The Blacks, by all accounts, live a lovely life in Toronto, with Conrad spending his days stumping for Trump online. Then there’s Trump himself, always the most ludicrous member of the gilded gang – and look where he is now.

It’s tempting to see Amiel’s book as the dying gasp of a dinosaur era. But to those of us who increasingly fear another Trump term, it reads more like a reminder of its tenacity.