But those who have remained constant in the Blacks’ adversity say otherwise. “I don’t think anyone has raised their eyebrows except in the imagination of newspaper feature writers,” says the biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore. The verdict on Black was typified by the remarks of the Times executive Mary Ann Sieghart, who wrote in her column that she found him “insufferably arrogant and pompous each time I met him”.Reports have suggested that the Blacks’ reappearance has led to “raised eyebrows” and “utter horror” among the London social scene. The Spectator, which he also owned, and which is edited by Boris Johnson – a journalist to whom the Blacks showed special favour, even throwing a party in his honour – printed disobliging stories about the former proprietor. It is also because Black’s downfall was not greeted with the dismay he expected in his adopted home. Amiel was sacked as a columnist at The Daily Telegraph, and Black is thought to have regarded that newspaper’s reporting of his difficulties as a betrayal.

In the meantime the couple are making do with the Knightsbridge hotel suite, but they are said to be looking for an apartment to rent.It seems that Lord Black of Crossharbour is happy to spend more time again in the country that raised him to ermine and where he once had the ear of prime ministers and captains of industry.If there is surprise at his re-emergence in London, it is not only because of the pending criminal charges. Maurice Saatchi has had them to lunch at his Sussex residence. The publishing grandee Lord Weidenfeld has promised to hold a party for them.The Blacks’ palatial home in Kensington has gone, sold for £13m to a former Mexican beauty queen, as have the private jets and his place on the board of Hollinger, the company he is accused of treating like a private fiefdom Even the house in Florida is on the market. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent had drinks with them at Annabel’s, the nightclub named after Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who has also entertained them at her house in Richmond. On Tuesday night he was spotted in Harry’s Bar in Mayfair, chatting to Sir Rocco Forte.

In the past few weeks he and Amiel have been returning to the select haunts frequented by the moneyed and titled with which they were once so familiar.They were at the annual summer party thrown by Drew Heinz, the food magnate’s widow. If things look bad now for Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel, they could soon get a whole lot worse. A team of US lawyers, led by Patrick Fitzgerald, the ambitious US attorney for the Northern Dis- trict of Illinois, is preparing a criminal case against Black which lays allegations so serious that, if proven, he could spend the next 20 years in jail.He is scarcely acting the part of a doomed man. Only a year ago he promised “never to set foot in England again”. Yet now, holed up at the £500-a-night Berkeley Hotel, the disgraced peer seems to be attempting a comeback, one that could rescue his social standing if nothing else.
It could be that he will soon need all the friends he can get. His business empire in ruins, his reputation in tatters, he now finds himself shunned even by friends and colleagues in his native Canada. Perhaps this is why the former owner of The Daily Telegraph has swallowed his pride and returned to Britain for a most unlikely charm offensive.