Jeffrey Archer took to writing only when he was forced to quit politics for the first time. Now, 15 years after a scandal-ridden career ended in disgrace, exposing him as a liar and a cheat, he's turned again to fiction to rescue his reputation, says Ajachi Chakrabarti.

 

I

“Good evening, Mister Jeffrey Archer. I am Bipranshu Lasker from Kolkata—obviously. I want to ask you a question, because I have personally written an autobiography, but I haven’t allowed, or haven’t put any motion, to have it published, because I didn’t like it rather. It’s for my personal satisfaction, and for my personal storage—I did it. Still, now, I do that job sometimes. But I have tried, if and moreover to write this particular autobiography, I at least spent so many months. But I did it successfully. I mean, so thereafter, I also now…Sometimes I wish that if I could have written a novel—a story also—but so many times I have thought how a person develops the story plots, or events, in their minds. I thought to do that, but I never, I mean, found any clue. How a story—characters who are not known to me—how can I develop so many stories? Because I have one autobiography—my life and associations can have one or two stories. But so many stories, if I want to do, where from should I get all the plot and the characters?”

There’s a certain kind of audience member at every “meet and greet” session in India, especially when a foreigner is involved. The one—usually more than one—dude or dudette who must ask a question, no matter how intelligent, how relevant, how coherent said question is, even if the question isn’t actually a question. The question, you see, is not important. What is important is that the asker is seen asking the question. What is important is that His or Her Eminence doesn’t go home without having had the pleasure of making his or her acquaintance. What is important is that the story of how he or she met His or Her Excellency can be narrated at dinner parties for years afterwards. (The question, I presume, gets more erudite in each telling.)




One evening at the theatre in late February, I took a lot of perverse pleasure watching this whole dynamic collapse. I was, I admit, having one of my occasional spells of acute misanthropy; the couple sitting beside me—in what would have been the cheap seats at Kalamandir if Thomas Ostermeier’s marvellous production of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People hadn’t been free—had not only refused to turn their mobiles off, but had had three entire phone conversations. Even a couple of disgruntled “tchh”s from me and an indignant “Who are these uncultured people?” from a woman in the next row wouldn’t shame them into shutting up.

At a critical juncture in the play, a public assembly that Dr Stockmann, Ibsen’s righteous hero, calls in order to expose serious contamination in the town’s profitable spa waters, the good doctor broke into a diatribe against modern society, against the atomisation and the alienation and the hypocrisies and the disaffection that characterise our times, ending with the proclamation: “Truth’s worst enemy is the bloody liberal majority.” Even in translation—from German, through a rectangular subtitle box suspended over the stage—the depth of Stockmann’s passion moved the crowd to applause. Once it died down, though, the troupe broke the fourth wall; Stockmann’s opponents, led by the publisher Aslaksen, who’d been repeatedly heckling him during the speech, asked the audience how many of them agreed with the diatribe: a vast majority did. They then did something unorthodox. They asked why.

An uncomfortable silence descended on the room, as Kolkata’s finest struggled to find an adequate response. One man attempted an academic analysis of the original text, only for Aslaksen to cut him off with “Who’s Ibsen?” Another resorted to the default tactic of flattery, praising the players, but no dice: they wanted an answer, not compliments. One by one, hands went up and a “blustery debate [ensued] in which the Communist past of Kolkata [was] quite palpable,” as one review put it. The problem was that though the various speakers were passionate in their denouncements of crony capitalism and corny consumerism, none of them had anything concrete to say about the substance of Stockmann’s rant, which, after all, wasn’t targeted at the rapacious capitalists who pollute but at the silent majority that tolerates the pollution. After a few attempts to engage with the first few participants, the actors soon gave up trying to weave the diverse arguments into anything resembling a coherent debate.

As the audience’s interventions became more longwinded and irrelevant, a communal nervousness began to set in—what do we need to say to satisfy these crazy firangs? A large section of the audience, all too familiar with how long, dense and pointless many of these Q&A sessions can be, started making for the exits in the hope of beating the traffic, so large in number that a rattled Stockmann had to break character and speak English for the only time in the evening: “No! Don’t go! It’s not over yet!”

 

JEFFREY ARCHER, however, isn’t one to be rattled by the vagaries of an Indian audience. He’s been around the block a few times; this multi-city book tour—to promote the latest instalment of his ‘Clifton Chronicles’, Mightier Than The Sword—was his fifth in the last five years alone, testimony both to his prolific literary output and to how important the vast Indian market is to sustaining the multinational brand that Archer has become.

By some distance the bestselling foreign author in India, every appearance Archer makes attracts massive crowds of adoring fans. “I can’t explain India,” he told BBC Radio Five’s Sarah Brett during an appearance on Afternoon Edition in late February. “They have 280 million people who read English. Fifty million of them have read Kane and Abel, which is absolutely staggering, and the last one was a bestseller for 16 weeks.” For this event, the publishers had taken over an entire foyer of the City Centre mall in Salt Lake, and despite the Indian cricket team being in action at the time, every seat was full half an hour before he got there. An exuberant emcee, almost hyperventilating at the prospect of His Lordship’s imminent arrival, began quizzing the audience on Archer trivia; not one question went unanswered. An overflow crowd stood on one side of the stage throughout the event, steadily increasing in number, armed with phones and books and elbows for the feeding frenzy for book signings and selfies that always breaks out at these things.

There was no feeding frenzy here, though. Calcuttans are possibly the most polite queuers in the country, a good habit instilled by the city’s working-class ethos. (They were so polite, Archer even relaxed his “No Selfies” rule.) In any case, from the moment he entered to enthusiastic but respectful applause, Archer had the audience eating out of his hands; they wouldn’t dare defy his direct orders to behave.

Watching Archer on the stump—the political terminology is apt; he is a former elected Member of Parliament, now a life peer—taking control of proceedings with no need for intermediaries, would be instructional for any aspiring public figure. He began by getting the photographers out of the way, letting them have their five minutes before shooing them off stage. He then established a connect with the audience by making a joke that also brought up their shared love of cricket: “I have a declaration to make. England are going to win the World Cup!” (One minion was assigned to stand next to him with a mobile phone, from which Archer intermittently read out the score from India’s nervous chase against the West Indies.)

He kissed babies, or at least asked them if they’d read Kane and Abel. He dispensed parables about perseverance that also reminded us how successful he is. “Only one in a thousand books ever written gets published. Only one in a thousand books that get published gets on the bestsellers’ list. Only one in a thousand bestsellers makes it to Number 1,” like Mightier Than The Sword had done, he told us, in India, the UK, Canada and Australia.

 “I can’t explain India,” Archer told BBC Radio. “They have 280 million people who read English. Fifty million of them have read Kane and Abel, which is absolutely staggering, and the last one was a bestseller for 16 weeks.”

He pandered to the women in the audience with this cringe-inducing platitude: “Thirty years ago, all the women in this country were in national dress and were subservient, with few exceptions. The new generation is the most exciting I have ever seen.” Offering the example of his wife, a distinguished scientist, he urged them to “get out and beat those men into the ground!”

He made the same joke about piracy he’s cracked at every public appearance in this country in the last decade: “Today, as I was coming from the airport, my car stopped at a traffic signal. A man came to my window and asked, ‘Would you like the latest Jeffrey Archer?’” A pause for laughter, then “I told him, ‘I am the latest Jeffrey Archer.’” The audience lapped it all up, providing raucous laughter and thunderous applause at all the appropriate times.

When I asked him the next day if the whole media and PR circus gets old, Archer said yes. “But in India, they treat me so well and are so generous, that it’s made more pleasant. And as I said last night, you get that crowd everywhere you go, what do you say—‘I’m not coming again’? People in England are just astonished by it. When they see the things on Facebook or on YouTube, they say, ‘I can’t believe it, Jeffrey!’”

 

 

ARCHER WAS equally at ease during the audience interaction. Much before Mr Lasker finished asking his byzantine question, he had nodded sagaciously and begun to prepare his answer. It was, after all, a familiar question, one he is asked no doubt at every public appearance in India. We are a country obsessed with bottling the secret of success; what’s the point of meeting the most successful author in the world if you don’t ask him how you could replicate his success?

Ah, but it’s not that simple, you see. “I’m afraid the truth is,” Archer told Lasker, “when you sit down to write, they either come or they don’t. No amount of reading the correct books, no amount of doing courses on inspirational writing will make any difference at all. The Irish have a marvellous expression—they say a storyteller is a seanchaí. And you can be a seanchaí and not even be able to spell your own name, if you have the gift of being able to tell a story. You can be the best educated person on Earth and not be able to tell a story. And I’m afraid that’s just a fact of life.”

Other familiar questions—about his writing routine (2,000 words over six hours a day, all written in longhand: “The finished book you hold in your hand is the 14th draft; a thousand hours of effort before I hand it in,” he said to a round of applause), whether he experiences writers’ block (“no”), what he thinks of Bollywood (“They steal my plots!”)—were dispatched with similar aplomb, followed by an authoritative “Next!”. As he did so, Archer’s modus operandi became clear: glean from a few keywords the general thrust of the question, provide a short reply padded with some interesting asides to prevent monotony. Sometimes, his guess at what the question was about was incorrect, such as one asking him whether he had concerns over the future of the book, considering the dwindling number of readers; because the question had mentioned e-books, he rattled off stats that compared sales of e-books to physical copies and presenting that as evidence that the book wasn’t dead. Most of the time, however, it worked, even came to his aid to bail him out of uncomfortable moments.

We are a country obsessed with bottling the secret of success; what’s the point of meeting the most successful author in the world if you don’t ask him how you could replicate his success?

Like when one journalist asked him about his 2008 novel A Prisoner of Birth. “I was very intrigued about the character Sir Nicholas Moncrieff, apart from Danny of course. What I would like to know is, by any chance, have you fashioned this character on one of your [fellow] inmates maybe when you were in prison?” It’s a sore point, prison; the two years he spent behind bars, for perjury and “perverting the course of justice”, are a memory he’d rather move on from. I’d been distracted when this question was asked, still trying to get over the most ridiculously self-delusional public statement I had ever witnessed, but Archer again had my undivided attention. Sure, the journalist had it wrong—Archer had said in an interview during that book’s publicity tour that it was Danny Cartwright, not Sir Nick, who was based on a Scottish fellow inmate, Billy Little—but would he succeed in his effort to get Archer to talk about prison? How would he respond?

With another digression, of course. “No,” Archer said, not skipping a beat. “A Prisoner of Birth is an attempt to rewrite The Count of Monte Cristo. Of course, The Count of Monte Cristo is 1,600 pages. In those days, of course, when there was no television, there was no Tweet [sic], there was no Facebook, there was no blog—everybody read books. And so books were regularly 1,500 pages. A Prisoner of Birth is only 400 pages. (While I remember, your Tweets and Facebooks—please Facebook and Tweet, everybody; we like that, please, please.) And so the answer to your question is no, it was based on the great Dumas. And when you think, you know: no film, no television, no Tweets, no phone, no nothing…Alexandre Dumas wrote The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers in the same year. That’s how much work they were putting out in those days. You can’t do that nowadays, because there are so many distractions. You couldn’t possibly write 5,000 pages in one year, but Alexandre Dumas did. Next!”

 

II

“I, Harry Clifton, a citizen of the United Kingdom, and President of PEN, have involuntarily and with coercion, signed this confusion. I have spent the last three years with Anatoly Babakov, who has made it clear to me that he did work in the Kremlin, and met Comrade Chairman Stalin on several occasions, including when he was awarded his degree. Babakov also admitted to me that the book he wrote about Comrade Stalin was fact, and not a figment of his imagination. I shall continue to demand Babakov’s release from prison, now that I am aware of the lengths this court went to, in order to deceive the public with this fraud. I am most grateful to the court for its lethargy on this occasion, and for allowing me to return to my own country.”

 

The previous afternoon, on the first of the two-day Holi break Kolkata enjoys because the government can’t decide which of the two to work on, I went to Ralli’s, an eatery in Golpark, for their annual bhang sale. It was an elaborate do, considering the illicit nature of the enterprise: they’d hung up a banner—last year’s—over the street advertising the sale, and laid out chairs and tables on the pavement. Cars full of revellers (a disproportionate number were marked either “Press” or “Police”) kept pulling up at regular intervals. The various PA systems played Holi songs; while the official one at the traffic signal played Rabindrasangeet, ‘Gutur Gutur’, a raunchy number about fornicating pigeons from the movie Dalaal, seemed to be on loop on Ralli’s own jukebox. (Or it could have played just the once; it’s seven minutes long, and I was experiencing time dilation.) Waiting for the effects of my “triple” to set in, I pulled out my afternoon’s reading from my jhola. I’d been handed the review copy of Mightier Than The Sword only a couple of hours ago, and wanted to finish it before I met Archer.




The full extent of the psychedelic damage this could cause soon became clear to me. Now, suspension of disbelief is not a problem on cannabis—it’s the only way I can get through old James Bond movies. The whole point of the trip is to go down mental rabbit holes without worrying about the precise steps or even the final destination. This particular rabbit hole, however, left me asking a question no junkie ever wants to confront in such a state: what is the point of all this?

Archer’s books have been derided by so many reviewers over so many years that it seems almost unfair to pile on. Though the particulars differ by the book, they are fairly consistent about his faults: his characters are ciphers; the drama is forced, a never-ending series of cliffhangers and tied elections; he couldn’t write dialogue to save his life. His wife, it is said, “translated his first novel into English.” His former editor, retired Olympic fencer Richard Cohen, reportedly felt it was his mission in life to “keep the full horror of unvarnished Archer prose from the English reading public.” It’s why Archer harps on about being a storyteller, not a writer.

His popularity in India can partially be accounted for by his writing—his style comes closest to that of most Indian writing in English: simple, uncluttered expository prose, with little by way of character development. He provides you every detail about his protagonists’ lives, but precious little that can be deemed insightful or analytical. More likely though, his books sell in India for the same reason they sold everywhere else during the Eighties: most of them are free market fairy tales, unlikely rags-to-riches stories, his heroes driven solely by ambition to get to the top in whatever field they enter. It’s a powerful story that connects with aspirational populations, especially those privileged enough to contemplate upward mobility. The Indian reader of English is that exact beast.

When I mentioned this theory, he agreed. “I think that’s a point. I think you’re the most aspirational race on Earth, not that I know the Chinese well. My books are about aspiration; my books are about wanting to get to Number One. Now, you can’t all be it. I try to explain at lectures like last night that you can’t be the Number One opera singer, or the Number One violinist, the Number One ballerina. It’s a mountain, and if you’re at the top, you’re very privileged and very lucky. I’m very privileged and very lucky, but that doesn’t stop the fact that there are thousands out there trying to get there. My books, particularly Kane and Abel, I think, make them believe they can do it, which I think is important.”

BUT EVEN accounting for the mediocrity of his prose, this book was truly terrible, a distant shadow of his early books that I read while transitioning from children’s to adult literature. (The Guardian‘s Jane Housham once called his books “Enid Blyton tales for adults”.) It was quite easy to see why: in the old days, Archer would at least try to give his one-dimensional characters some moral failings, here the good guys were so unimpeachably good and the bad guys so irredeemably bad that it was impossible to get behind either. No, it wasn’t just that: not only were the good guys so annoyingly good, they were seemingly infallible despite all the perils that constantly followed them. (Housham’s review of the first Clifton Chronicle holds true throughout: “[The] path to great fortune is strewed with obstacles—obstacles overcome with as much tension as old knicker elastic.”)

Mightier Than The Sword is the fifth book of what was supposed to be a five-part chronicle of the entirety of a man’s life. Archer wrote the first book, Only Time Will Tell, in 2011 at the age of 70. “I was terrified of doing nothing,” he said during the BBC Radio interview. “I thought that if I wrote a series, I would have to get up in the morning every day and work on it.” Work he has, for despite writing every word by hand, he has released five books in the last five years, a total output of some 2,000 pages, the result of some 5,000 hours of effort. And he’s not done—the series was supposed to span 100 years, from 1920 to 2020, but Book Five’s end finds us only halfway there, in 1970. The alternatives were to either kill off Harry in this book or extend the series; Books Six and Seven are scheduled for the next two years.

The full extent of the psychedelic damage this could cause soon became clear to me. Now, suspension of disbelief is not a problem on cannabis. This particular rabbit hole, however, left me asking a question no junkie ever wants to confront in such a state: what is the point of all this?

Harry Clifton, Archer’s protagonist, is the epitome of virtue, character and moral righteousness. Through the generosity of an aristocratic family, the Barringtons, he rises above his humble origins to attend public school and Oxford, fights for his country, becomes a bestselling author, marries Emma Barrington, who inherits the family shipping business. Along the way, the couple and Emma’s brother Giles make their share of enemies.

It’s easy to make out who they are—unlike our virtuous, hardworking heroes, they’re all motivated only by greed, looking to get rich quick unlike our heroes, making dastardly plans that involve embezzlement or insider trading or false libel trials. As a result, he often finds himself wrongly persecuted either due to some terrible misunderstanding or somebody’s vendetta. It’s a consequence of what Archer calls “precipice writing”; he doesn’t want people to guess what happens next, so he doesn’t know himself. There’s no overall plan for his characters, just him winging it, putting them in peril and getting them out of it whenever he wants.

Dei ex machina are a dime a dozen, but they’re often unnecessary, thanks to the extraordinary ineptitude of the villains. The best example of this is the public confession Harry makes after being caught trying to escape the Soviet Union with a copy of Uncle Joe, an explosive, and therefore banned, biography of Stalin by his translator Anatoly Babakov. The Soviet dissident was a great prop throughout the Cold War to demonstrate the superiority of Western liberal democracy over the totalitarian socialist state, and Babakov is no different; he exists only to give Harry a cause to get self-righteous about, and a more formidable adversary to outwit in the book’s climax.

Facing a Kafkaesque trial and a long incarceration, he is offered the chance to leave the country if he makes a public confession. He agrees, but subverts the process by changing a few words while reading it aloud, even signing it William Warwick. The Russians, of course, are too dumb to even have an English speaker in the room for this high-profile hearing, or even to have checked the signature before sending it to the world’s press. And having memorised the entire book using his superpower, the first thing Harry does once he leaves Russian airspace is to write it afresh on whatever paper he finds. Clifton 2, Evil Commies 0.

 

THE POINT of all this became clear to me the next day. It was the moment I mentioned earlier, the most self-delusional statement I’d ever heard firsthand. The previous record was held by Anna Hazare, when he announced to a crowd at Jantar Mantar in 2012 that his anti-corruption agitation would give birth to a party that would win 400 seats at the next general election. It was no match for this whopper, though—after all, the party was launched, even if it won only a hundredth of Anna’s predicted tally. At the launch, without any trace of irony, Archer said that the series was autobiographical: “Basically, I’m Harry.”

Autobiographical it damn well was, but not in the way Archer meant.

 

III

SIR HUMPHREY: Oh Minister, why must you always be so concerned with climbing the greasy pole?

HACKER: The greasy pole is important. I have to climb it.

SIR HUMPHREY: But why?

HACKER: Because it’s there.

 

Jeffrey Howard Archer was born on 15 April 1940 in London to William and Lola Archer. (The family soon relocated to the seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, Archer’s baronial seat, probably to escape German bombing raids during World War II, one of which destroyed Lola’s London house.) His parents had both been local Tory politicians, and as he once put it, “when I was three, I wanted to be four; when I was four, I wanted to be Prime Minister.”

His father, who died when he was 15, “was a very clever but physically depleted worn-out man”, Archer told the International Herald Tribune in 1980. He had reason to be worn out. Although his son would claim in interviews over the years that William had been a decorated military officer and diplomat who had served as consul to Singapore, subsequent investigations by journalists failed to find any evidence to support those claims. William Archer, it turned out, had been tried for fraud in London and fled to America, where he was gaoled for embezzling charity funds. That last charge would later be thrown at Jeffrey too.

Not much is known about his early years. Despite his political ambitions, he left school with only three O-Levels. After working in a few seaside hotels and cafés, a year in the army and some four months in the Metropolitan Police, he got himself a job as a PT teacher at a prep school in Kent called Dover College by lying in his CV—accessed by The Daily Mail‘s Geoffrey Levy in 1987—that he had finished three A- and eight O-Levels, attended a (non-existent) Army Physical Instructor’s Course at Sandhurst and been awarded an Honours diploma from the (also non-existent) International Federation of Physical Culture at Berkeley.

He would use these false qualifications to get into a postgraduate course at Oxford, where he made a name for himself as a sprinter. “At a later stage, questions were asked by the university registry,” Ian Jack wrote in The Independent in 1994, “but by then Archer had become an invaluable member of the athletics team”. He also displayed a talent for fundraising, helping the charity Oxfam raise half a million pounds by getting The Beatles to perform at Brasenose College. (Ringo Starr called him “the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it.”) Accusations of embezzlement would soon follow, when it was found that he had bought a house in Weston-Super-Mare for £5,000—close to £100,000 today. “Archer told a friend that it was from commission he’d been paid on the fundraising he’d done for Oxfam, but former Oxfam officials are adamant that the charity never paid people commission; it was against their principles,” reported Michael Crick during an explosive 2001 episode of the BBC’s investigative programme Panorama. (The veteran journalist later wrote a biography of Archer.) “Oxfam held an informal internal inquiry and at one point appealed for 2,000 collecting tins that had gone astray, but they found no evidence of wrongdoing against Archer.”

 

ONCE HE left college, Crick continued—with the help of testimony from Michael Stacpoole, a Conservative Party fixer who would be a long-time ally and “best friend”—Archer would make a profession out of fundraising, raising money for various charities and charging a percentage as commission. He was, Stacpoole said, the first person in the UK to come up with the scheme. It was only a side job, of course; he had begun to follow his true calling, and won a seat in Parliament during the 1967 Tory landslide, barely a year out of Oxford.

As he prepared for his second election in 1969, though, he had to battle another scandal when Humphrey Berkley, chairman of United Nations Association, a charity Archer was lead fundraiser for, went public with allegations that he had embezzled over £1,000 on 59 separate occasions, mainly lunches his guests had paid for that he had also claimed as expenses from the UNA. Berkley had tried to warn the Conservatives against offering Archer a ticket to the safe seat of Louth, but to no avail. (The fact that Archer had developed a reputation for helping colleagues make dodgy expense claims for a commission—for which he acquired the nickname Mr Ten Percent—might have had something to do with it. In any case, the fact that he shares a nickname with Asif Ali Zardari tells you all you need to know about the man.) Archer managed to ride out the election by suing for libel; he later backed down and even paid Berkley’s legal costs.

“When I was three, I wanted to be four; when I was four, I wanted to be Prime Minister.”

The next roadblock to his quest to become prime minister wasn’t that easy to shrug off. In 1974, he was convinced by an acquaintance that a new Canadian industrial cleaning company called Aquablast, which had developed a gadget that could cut carbon monoxide emissions, was the next big thing. He invested £350,000, nearly half of that borrowed, and when the stock turned out to be a scam, had to resign his seat, fearing bankruptcy. To the utter shock of his peers—some of whom felt “he couldn’t write a postcard”—he bounced back by writing a novel about a group of victims of a similar fraud exact, well, exact revenge. Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less featured a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, and a resonant theme of the wronged little guys getting even with a lying millionaire: it was a bestseller. He followed it up with the Kane and Abel series, and one of the most storied comebacks of the last century was sealed.

Archer was soon back in favour in the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher. This was the most successful period of his life—his Horatio Alger tales were the flavour of the times, selling by the hundreds of thousands, while he rose in the party all the way to Deputy Chair, even nursing hopes of challenging Thatcher for the leadership once she eventually lost a general election. He’d also acquired something of a reputation as a womaniser, however, with rumours of various affairs and liaisons with prostitutes beginning to surface in the tabloid press. Thatcher had allowed him the deputy chairmanship on the condition that he end his very public affair with Andrina Colquhan, a former professional photographer whom he had hired as his personal assistant.

 

IN 1986, The News of the World published allegations that Archer had paid to have sex with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan. It had even recorded a conversation between Coghlan and Archer, in which the latter offered her cash to flee overseas, and photographed Stacpoole handing over the money. The Daily Star, another tabloid, went further, with details of how much Archer paid her and allegations that he liked “kinky sex”. Archer’s response was ruthless. He filed suit against The Star‘s publishers, his counsel demanding the cost of “all the tea in China” as damages for “the gravest, most ruthless libel of modern times”.

To help his case, Archer convinced two friends, Terence Baker and Ted Francis, to lie if called upon that they had been having dinner with him on the nights concerned—he wasn’t sure whether the alleged date was 8 September or the 9th, so got alibis for both nights. He paid Stacpoole a total of some £40,000 to be in Paris during the trial, the latter alleged. He got his secretary Angela Peppiat to create a fake appointments diary that mentioned the fake dinners, and claimed that he had been an “honourable fool”, who gave Coghlan the money out of compassion.

It helped that the judge, Mr Justice Caulfield, was so taken in by Archer’s wife during her testimony that he waxed eloquent about her to the jury: “Remember Mary Archer in the witness-box; your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance?” What need, when he had such a wife, would Archer have, Caulfield asked, “of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?” The jury agreed, awarding Archer £500,000 in damages, a record amount for a libel trial.

“It wasn’t until I had been through that trial with Jeffrey that I understood how you could manipulate justice to a degree that’s almost incredible,” Panorama recorded Peppiat as saying. “Jeffrey was guilty as **** hell. As far as I’m concerned, justice doesn’t exist any more because you can buy it, you can buy it.”

The manipulation would come back to haunt him at the worst possible time. Archer had survived Thatcher’s downfall thanks to his friendship with fellow cricket fan John Major, who had elevated him to a life peerage for his work in raising funds for the Kurdish people. (He would years later be the subject of investigations when the £57 million he claimed to have raised never reached the Kurds, but the media consensus is that he didn’t steal the money but that he exaggerated the claim.) He had avoided another resignation when news came out of him indulging in insider trading to help a Kurdish friend buy shares in Anglia TV, of which Mary was a director and which was facing a buyout when the Trade department decided not to pursue an investigation. (“I suppose my overall conclusion was that Jeffrey was a chump but not a crook,” said then Trade Minister Neil Hamilton.)

“It wasn’t until I had been through that trial with Jeffrey that I understood how you could manipulate justice to a degree that’s almost incredible,” Panorama recorded Peppiat as saying. “Jeffrey was guilty as **** hell. As far as I’m concerned, justice doesn’t exist any more because you can buy it, you can buy it.”

But just as he was on the verge of the political triumph to crown his 30-year political career, running to be the first ever elected Mayor of London, an appalled Francis went to the News of the World, admitting to have been asked to lie for Archer. Again, Archer was caught on tape by the tabloid, this time confirming Francis’ story. He was forced to quit the race, and the police soon filed criminal charges. During the trial, Peppiat came clean about faking the diary, even producing the original. There was no sympathetic judge this time, however, as he was sentenced to four years in jail. Jeffrey Archer’s lies had finally caught up with him.

 

IV

“The novelist with whom Archer most likes to align himself is ‘literary’, not ‘genre’—F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s mystifying until you realise that Archer is thinking not of the writer but of Fitzgerald’s most famous creation. Jay Gatsby (born James Gatz) drags himself up from midwest nowhere to pose (with dubious credentials) as an Oxford graduate. The Great Gatsby gives great parties and subscribes to the ‘Platonic idea’ of himself. He worships the ‘fragrant’ (but unattainable) Daisy. He is disgraced and destroyed for an offence he did not commit. None of those who freeloaded at his parties stand by Gatsby at his time of trial. ‘They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch of them put together,’ Nick Carraway shouts. Archer, too, is worthier than all those Conservative rats who were only too glad to guzzle his Krug and shepherd’s pie before his ship began to sink.”

 

Preparing to interview Jeffrey Archer presented its own set of difficulties. How much, after all, can you get someone to open up during a 15-minute conversation? And it wasn’t like I could ask him about the fun stuff—his various scandals, prison, his rehabilitation in polite society. Sarah Brett had made a tentative attempt to do so in the BBC Radio interview, which hadn’t ended well.

Brett’s interview was on the day that two senior MPs, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, old friends of Archer, had had to resign after being caught in a sting operation offering to sell influence and ask favourable questions in Parliament. The solution to these frequent scandals, Archer said, was to raise MPs’ salaries. “There are 114 people at the BBC who earn more than the prime minister. £67,000 a year is not enough if you live in London.” Of course, many Londoners soon began writing in to the radio station over social media that they lived perfectly well on much lower salaries.

The hapless victim is a role Archer has made his own over the last decade; besides the Prison Diary, he also released a play called The Accused, about a man who faces trial for a crime he didn’t commit. And, after sufficient time had passed, came these “autobiographical” Clifton Chronicles, recasting himself as a self-righteous defender of truth, justice and liberty.

At the end of the interview, having exhausted the usual questions about the book and his popularity, Brett tried a delicate question. “Can I ask you—and I understand if you don’t want to talk about it—but I wanted to ask you…You wrote when you left prison about ways in which we could reform our penal system, and I’m wondering if you think that since you’ve left prison, what 12 years ago now—”

“Nearly 15.” It’s actually been a little less than 12 years. He was released on 21 June 2003, having served half his sentence.

“…nearly 15 years ago now, that things had changed much. Have you kept an eye on it?”

“I kept an interest for about five years. I’ve been getting on with life.” He kept an interest then largely because he was selling his three-volume Prison Diary. Dedicated to “foul-weather friends”, it is a self-serving memoir that seeks to present him as the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice, repeatedly mentioning how Mr Justice Potts, the judge in his perjury trial, was out to get him, how Peppiat stole money from him and is therefore an unreliable witness.

It’s hard to feel any sympathy for him, however, no matter how many Test matches and World Athlketic Championships he ends up missing. After all, however unfair Potts might have been—and he really wasn’t—it seems like karmic payback for the blatantly biased Justice Caulfield. And Archer seems to have had a perfectly bucolic time in prison—despite all his talk of Belmarsh being Hellmarsh, his taste of authority seems to be two scoldings by uptight guards, and even the only real hardship he faces, having to eat prison food, can be gotten around by paying helpful inmates. (Judge a country by its prisons, they say; the UK must be Paradise if you can guzzle Evian by the bottle behind bars.)

Probably conscious of the lack of sympathy he generates, Archer harps on about the conditions his fellow inmates suffer through, about a criminal justice system that creates criminals and is rarely just. (Of course, he doesn’t mention his speech at the 1993 Tory conference, where he asked the Home Secretary for tougher prison conditions to discourage criminals from repeating their offences.)

There is no introspection, however, about his own crimes. There can’t be, not when he’s playing the hapless victim. It’s a role he has made his own over the last decade; besides the Prison Diary, he also released a play called The Accused, about a man who faces trial for a crime he didn’t commit. And, after sufficient time had passed, came these “autobiographical” Clifton Chronicles, recasting himself—for a new generation that doesn’t know any better—as a self-righteous defender of truth, justice and liberty.

Brett soldiered on, nevertheless. “Do you still think about being in prison?”

“Only when people like you bring it up.”

“But you never think about it…”

“Fifteen years ago! The BBC are always fascinated by it, but I find people don’t mention it one year to the next. The BBC do.”

“Well, I just would find it incredible to have spent a couple of years…”

“I couldn’t write any books! I wouldn’t be doing anything else! I wouldn’t be doing my charity auctions, wouldn’t be doing everything else. I’ve raised…Here we are at the end of the programme, Sarah. ‘Oh Jeffrey, I wanted to ask you about the £42 million you’ve raised for charity as an auctioneer.’ You haven’t mentioned it. ‘I wanted to ask you, Jeffrey, what it must feel like to have 18 Number Ones in a row.’ No, the BBC are only fascinated by failure.”

“Well, we knew you’d mention it.”

 

 

THE INTERVIEW was delayed; the previous one was running long. Weird high-pitched yelps sporadically emanated out of the room, rising at one point to a crescendo that had us fearing for Archer’s safety. As we waited in a corridor of the Taj Bengal, the two PR guys deputed to get Archer through the media circus got more and more anxious—they had to get him out soon, for lunch and his flight out. After some furious signalling between the two, one of them mustered up the courage to knock discreetly. “Yes?” Archer answered, but the flunkies realised they couldn’t go in; they didn’t have the key. A manager had to be summoned, and one of the room service staff lent us his master key.

Archer was gushing as we began his last interview on Indian soil. He couldn’t get over how ambitious and self-assured the woman interviewing him before me had been, how ambitious and self-assured all Indian women seemed to be. “You lot better watch out,” he said.

I’d figured everyone had asked him about cricket, so asked him about the other sport that has a World Cup this year. An amateur rugby union referee, Archer had made the organisers of the Mumbai leg of this tour set up a screen for him to watch England lose to Ireland in the Six Nations, he said. (Here, we both had an eye on Pakistan’s bowlers running through South Africa’s batting.) But he’s convinced his team can win, if they get over the nine injuries in their squad and beat the mighty All Blacks. “We can’t win unless we’re at our best. The New Zealanders can win even when they’re not at their best.”

We moved on to politics. Britain and its politics had changed drastically from the early Seventies, when Mightier than the Sword is set, a two-and-a-half party system replaced by seven contenders for next month’s general election. He’s concerned about what the rise of UKIP would do to Tory prospects. “When I ran the marginal seat campaign, I could have gone to Margaret Thatcher or John Major at this stage with two months to go, and said ‘Prime Minister, you’re going to win by 120’ or ‘Prime Minister, you’re going to lose by 40.’ If you said to me ‘What’s going to happen, Jeffrey?’, I haven’t got a clue. It’s going to be 400 by-elections. They could go anywhere!”

 “Indira Gandhi was running a very different India. She’d be different today; she’d be more like Angela Merkel, who’s very practical and down to earth. Tough woman, that one. We like her.”

He expressed his admiration for Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher, two prime ministers who are featured in the Clifton Chronicles—he glosses over Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan because they were too boring—and were friendly with him during his rise to prominence. I also asked him about his admiration for Indira Gandhi, who he has said in interviews was ahead of her time. I was curious, I told him, what Harry Clifton, who constantly moralises about freedom and stands up to the totalitarian USSR, would have made of the rampant censorship and wrongful imprisonment during the Emergency.

He explained it away as an aberration, a momentary lapse of reason. “How would the British public have reacted to Churchill’s Gallipoli campaign? Nobody gets it right all the time. Gallipoli was a disaster for Churchill; it nearly ruined his entire career. Indira Gandhi made this terrible mistake. I have never met anyone who had an entire career that long, who didn’t have ups and downs.” On balance, he felt, she had been good for the country. I asked him why. “Well, you have to remember, you’re a modern Indian. You chat away about England, but that didn’t exist in those days. She was running a very different India. She’d be different today; she’d be more like Angela Merkel, who’s very practical and down to earth. Tough woman, that one. We like her.”

Changing tracks, we talked about the future. The series is being pitched to a number of top American television executives, he said, expressing his disappointment that the BBC and ITV weren’t interested. But what happens when Harry dies, I asked. Was he beginning to dread what comes after? (A return to politics has been ruled out, both by Archer and the current Tory leader, Prime Minister David Cameron.) Of course not. He plans to write another set of short stories—by far his strong suit—and then “I have an idea for a novel bigger than Kane and Abel. I’ve only told the agent and the owner of the McMillan company, and they’re astonished by it. That would be a nice way to end…The idea is the cleverest idea I’ve ever had.”

I asked him about his charity auctioneering, a hobby of his. (“I raised £4.1 million last year, and it’s such a contrast from my writing, and I enjoy it so much. It’s a break from the writing, and I’ll go on doing that until I fall over.”) The question, of course, was a set-up for my next one. “Lord Archer,” I said, “I’ve asked you about the £42 million you’ve raised in charity auctions, and I’ve asked you about your 18 Number Ones—”

“Nineteen!” he roared. “Nineteen this Sunday!” He was tensing up; his brow was furrowed and he was looking straight at me with steely intensity. He could see where this was going.

“Nineteen. But unlike the BBC,” I went on, “I’m fascinated both by your successes and failures. Your life has seen a number of ups and downs. You’re a bestselling author, a life peer and a respected name the world over. You’ve also had to resign from political office twice as a result of scandals, and served time in prison. Looking back, how do you see your life on balance?”

“Ah, I see. Very privileged. Very lucky. I don’t mean this rudely, but you’re too young to look back and say ‘I’ve made bad mistakes.’ You will when you’re 70. Everyone has. You mentioned Mrs Gandhi, a classic. So I’ve made my big mistakes, but if I’m sitting here saying ‘I’ve had ups and downs’, to be honest, they’re mainly ups.”

“Well, considering that all the downs came whenever you stood for political office, and that your Phoenix acts came through your books, do you regret ever entering politics?”

“Would I have been a better writer? Yes. It certainly would have been an easier life. Of course, I wouldn’t have done 11 years with Margaret Thatcher; I wouldn’t have done seven years with John Major. I wouldn’t have gone to the House of Lords. I wouldn’t have met so many interesting people who get into my books. So I think, on balance, the answer to your question is no regrets.”