In the summer of 2002, as scandals at Enron and WorldCom signalled the end of the age of the imperial chief executive, a British peer named Conrad Black could not understand why he should worry about corporate excess.

“There has not been an occasion for many months when I got on our plane without wondering whether it was affordable,” the chairman and chief executive of Hollinger International wrote in an e-mail to his colleague, Peter Atkinson. “But I’m not prepared to re-enact the French revolutionary renunciation of the rights of nobility. We are proprietors after all, beleaguered though we may be.”