An Ignoble Work of God: Jeffrey Archer and the Cult of the Conman

While Jeffrey Epstein’s memory and misdeeds continues haunting discussions, another confidence trickster so able to win a following deserves dishonourable mention. The feats of Lord Jeffrey Archer, best-selling author of inexecrable pulp (anywhere up to 14 or 15 drafts per book would do), top-tier liar and shameless fabulist, ought to be remembered in some fashion. On October 6, his publisher, HarperCollins, announced that the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and MP had died “suddenly and peacefully” at home. This had taken place a mere 24 hours after attending a book signing event at Leicester Square Theatre with fellow scribe and former Tory MP Giles Brandreth.

From the start, you took his word at your peril. Archer lied about his father’s background, celebrating him as a decorated First World War hero when he was, in fact, a convicted bigamist and fraudster who sojourned through the United States using his dead employer’s passport. Archer lied about his education, giving the impression he had gone to Wellington College in Berkshire, rather than Wellington School in Somerset. His university education was also a cooked-up stew: he never went to Brasenose College, Oxford University, instead slumming at the Oxford department of education. False academic qualifications were also submitted, among them a fictional two-year degree from the US and three A-levels he never received. For all that, he still won an Oxford Blue running for the university, despite questions about his eligibility. At least he could run.

When elected to the Lincolnshire seat of Louth in the December 1969 by-election, he repeatedly insisted he was the youngest Member of Parliament at the time. (He was the fourth.) In 1974, he resigned after losing $620,000 in investments made in Aquablast, a Canadian industrial cleaning company. During his stay in Toronto to give evidence relevant to the case, he was detained for shoplifting, though never formally charged. From there, he turned to writing, producing narratives not so much to exercise the mind as serve as escapist page turners and huge earners. Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less covers four men involved in an investment scam – no surprise there. Shall We Tell the President? turns to the terrain of political assassination, featuring a plot to kill President Edward Kennedy. Kane and Abel strains the theme of feuding men born on the same day of contrasting backgrounds. Eventually, they collide. As Conservative politician Julian Critchley wrote in July 1986 in the London Review of Books, Archer’s authoring exploits were based on escaping “the coils of bankruptcy and to pay his debts.” His triumph on that score showed a degree of courage and facility. “But courage in adversity is one thing, literary merit quite another. His books are bad.” They were even bad with the assistance of his wife Mary, who helped write the first book, and after editor Richard Cohen had gone through correcting the semiliterate scrawls he would receive with some dread. Horrendous as they were, the bilge had a receptive readership. Critchley wondered whether this had anything to do with “the intellectual poverty of readers brought up in the age of the telly.”

In September 1985, Archer signalled his return to politics by becoming deputy chairman of the Conservative party, an appointment praised by chairman Norman Tebbit as one that would add “a touch of dash and style to the party.” Labour’s deputy leader, Roy Hattersley, preferred to call Archer a “gimmick made flesh” while Lord Willie Whitelaw expressed his misgivings to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by calling him “an accident waiting to happen”. In October the following year, this gimmick of flesh resigned after The News of the World revealed that he had offered to pay a prostitute to leave the country, despite claiming to have never met her. This involved the sum of £2,000 in £50 notes to be delivered by a friend to Monica Coghlan in a meeting at Platform 3 of Victoria Station.

In July 1987, Archer reaped a tax-free windfall of £500,000 in a libel suit against The Daily Star, which had claimed that he had, in fact, slept with Coghlan during a 15-minute session at a Mayfair hotel. The three-week High Court trial had cost £700,000. In an emetic display of judicial ineptitude marked by non sequiturs and tumescence, Justice Caulfield showed how the wheels of justice can be moistened in so many ways. In instructions to the jury, he revealed a fixation with the plaintiff’s wife: “Remember Mary Archer in the witness-box? Your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? How would she appeal? Has she had a happy married life? Has she been able to enjoy, rather than endure, her husband Jeffrey?” With such an irresistible profile, could Archer really be “in need 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 answer to that, as it were, came in the next decade. Made a peer in 1992 by Prime Minister John Major for good deeds to Kurds (these were also exaggerated, particularly his fund raising exploits) and quoting Robert Burns’s words in his maiden speech (“Princes and Lords are but the breath of Kings. An honest man is the noblest work of God”), the now Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare was having a tilt at the London Mayoralty. It was during his time that a former friend Ted Francis told The News of the World (in November 1999) that he had lied during the libel trial. In the perjury trial that enveloped this far from honest man, Archer’s former personal assistant Angela Peppiatt also revealed she had been asked to falsify diary entries to aid the case. Archer’s former mistress, Andrina Colquhoun, also damaged matters by admitting their affair in the 1980s. The chronic mendacity and systematic injuriousness inflicted upon the British legal system had come back to bite. He was found guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to four years in July 2001.

The eulogising claptrap from Archer’s friends and apologists has been dispiritingly unremitting. There are just so many of them, and they are all swarming about seeking to cleanse the Lord of his sins and praise a colourful career. The roguish con artist will, it seems, always have a following. The apologias were caked and clothed in various forms: he was an up and down sort of fellow; he was one of a kind; he was like one of his novels. The murderous clichés linger like poison ivy on the edifice of explanation and truth.

Unsparingly, the drool came from the top. Queen Camilla, while describing him as “not without flaw”, went on to praise him as an “irrepressible life force through all the many differing chapters of his life”, having lived much like the characters of his books. Perhaps it was something she felt she had to say – Archer was a supporter of the Queen’s Room charity. She therefore wished, “wherever the next page turns to”, that “champagne and shepherd’s pie in abundance” would be found.

Major suggested that “we had lost a man who lived one of the most remarkable lives of our age”. Former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith thought the late fantasist “a remarkable man who did everything at full bore”. The Daily Star, which received £1.5 million in 2002 from Archer (the original amount of £500,000 in damages along with £1 million in legal and recovery costs) proved sparing in detail about its litigious history with the perjured author. The Daily Mail briefly mentioned the initial libel victory in 1987 and his subsequent trial for perjury and perverting the course of justice, preferring to praise his good use of time in prison “to write diaries which later became bestsellers.” The Telegraph even went so far as to mount a defence of his abysmal writing. “His readers genuinely responded to his deliciously melodramatic plots, the outlandish coincidences, the globetrotting intrigue, the climactic courtroom scenes, the hints of insider knowledge.” Taking issue with “the relentless vicious negativity” in various obituaries, Chris Beetles, avowed apologist and friend of four decades, preferred to focus on the “life-enhancing” qualities of the man.

While death rarely arrives conveniently, the confidence trickster can still capitalise on it. Archer’s death seemed timed to a publicist’s schedule. At least that particular exit had the unusual merit of verisimilitude.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: [email protected]