Jeffrey Archer great salesman, a good plotter, a ‘mediocre’ writer, a very bad witness died at 86

By Anjali Sharma
WASHINGTON – Jeffrey Archer, the novelist and former UK Conservative politician has died at 86 on Tuesday his publisher, Harper Collins, suddenly and peacefully at home between writing sessions on Monday. He was at his house in Cambridge.

Archer spent his life writing men who were wronged and then won.

He sat in a prison cell, a bestseller waiting in his head, and began to write that story too. It sold, as they all did, and the people who paid for it in earnest were never in the acknowledgements.

The timing was too neat for one of his own plots. His final novel, ‘Adam and Eve’, was due out the next day.

He was meant to talk about it at Cheltenham on Saturday. The broadcaster Gyles Brandreth said he had shared a stage with him shortly before, and that Archer had called it his last book.

He sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. He was also sent to prison for lying under oath. Very few public figures have managed both so loudly.

Archer was born in London on 15 April 1940. He was only a few weeks old when his family moved to Somerset. He grew up in Weston-super-Mare, the seaside town he later took as part of his title.

His father, William, was 64 when Jeffrey was born. He was not the war hero his son sometimes described. William Archer was a fraudster and a bigamist who had borrowed the identity of a dead man. Early in his career, Jeffrey gave journalists different stories about his father’s military record. None of them were true. William died in 1956.

Jeffrey left school with a handful of O-levels.

He was a gifted sprinter, and his best time for the hundred yards was 9.6 seconds. That speed helped him get a place at Oxford. He studied at Brasenose College on a one-year course in education. It was a diploma, not a degree. Archer was happy to be thought of as an Oxford man, and he rarely corrected the impression.

He was a charming and driven young man. And, he raised money for charity, and he was good at it. He learned early that confidence could open doors that qualifications could not.

In 1966 he married Mary Weeden, a scientist. She became a respected Cambridge chemist and later chaired the board of the city’s main hospital trust. They had two sons, William and James.

That same decade he won a seat on the Greater London Council. In 1969 he won a by-election for Louth in Lincolnshire. He was 29, and one of the youngest MPs in the House. People noticed him at once. He could work a room and he loved to be noticed.

He also had a head for business, or believed he did. In 1969 he started a fundraising and public relations firm called Arrow Enterprises. The same year he opened an art gallery in Mayfair. He was a busy man with a lot of ideas and not much money behind them.

His business luck ran out in 1974. Archer put his money into a Canadian firm called Aquablast. The deal went bad. He lost a great deal and was left close to bankruptcy. He did not stand again at the next election, and his Commons career ended after five years.

Most men would have gone quiet. Archer sat down and wrote a novel. ‘Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less’ told the story of four men who cheat a swindler out of the money he had taken from them. Archer knew the subject well. He had just been on the losing side of a swindle himself.

Publishers turned it down at first. Then it sold, and it kept selling. The BBC later adapted it for television. Archer had found a second career at 36, and it would make him far richer than politics ever did.

Archer wrote with a pen, in longhand. He said he often did a dozen or more drafts before showing a book to his publisher. That discipline is real, and it is one reason his books ran so smoothly.

His best known novel is ‘Kane and Abel’, published in 1979. It follows two men born on the same day in 1906. One is a rich Boston banker. The other is a Polish immigrant who rises from nothing. The book topped the American bestseller lists. CBS turned it into a miniseries in 1985, with Peter Strauss and Sam Neill.

Other hits followed. ‘First Among Equals’ followed four MPs racing to be prime minister. He wrote short story collections with twist endings, which he did very well. Later came the seven-book Clifton Chronicles, then the William Warwick detective series. ‘Adam and Eve’ was his 31st novel.

Reviewers complained about his work for decades, and they had a point. His prose was plain, and his characters were often thin. His plots leaned on coincidence, and many of his heroes were versions of the man he wished to be.

Self-made, wronged and always winning in the end. He did not win the major literary prizes, and he did not seem to want them.

Readers loved his pace and his tidy endings. In his own genre he was a craftsman, and he knew it. But a lot of the praise came from the sales figures, not the sentences.

Archer came back to politics in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher made him deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in 1985.

He was a loud, popular figure at party events and a great fundraiser. Not everyone in the party trusted him, but many found him hard to resist.

In 1986 he resigned after a newspaper story about Monica Coghlan, a sex worker.

A friend of Archer’s was filmed handing her £2,000 in cash on a railway platform at Victoria Station, to persuade her to leave the country. Archer said he had paid her to protect himself from a blackmail attempt. He denied ever sleeping with her.

When the Daily Star claimed he had paid for sex, he sued. The trial in 1987 became famous.

The judge, Sir Bernard Caulfield, spent part of his summing up praising Mary Archer. He asked the jury to look at her and say whether she seemed a woman who had endured her husband rather than enjoyed him. The remark was widely mocked, then and since.

The jury sided with Archer. He won a then-record £500,000 in damages. He had won the case by lying, and for years nobody could prove it.

In 1992, John Major made him a life peer. He became Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare. The man who had once been ruined by a bad investment now sat in the House of Lords.

In 1999, the Conservatives chose him as their candidate for Mayor of London. It was the high point of his second political life. It lasted only a few weeks. A newspaper reported that an old friend, Ted Francis, had been asked to give a false alibi for Archer at the 1987 trial. Archer was forced out of the race and thrown out of the party.

Prosecutors later said he had asked a friend to lie for him and that evidence had been tampered with. Archer was charged with perjury and perverting the course of justice. On 19 July 2001, he was sentenced to four years in prison. His mother died on the last day of the trial. The press followed him to her funeral.

Monica Coghlan did not live to see the verdict. She died in April 2001, three months before he was convicted.

She had said in the past that Archer took everything away from her. The 1987 libel case had made her a figure of public scorn, and she never recovered from it.

Archer spent his first weeks at Belmarsh, one of the toughest prisons in Britain. He later served time at Wayland and North Sea Camp, a low-security prison on the Lincolnshire coast. He served two years of the four.

He turned the experience into three books, the Prison Diaries, which he titled ‘Hell’, ‘Purgatory’ and ‘Heaven’.

They sold well. Some readers thought they were funny and sharp. Others found it hard to feel much sympathy for a man writing about his own jail time as material for the next bestseller.

His novel ‘A Prisoner of Birth’ followed in 2008 and used prison as a setting. Once again, he had taken the worst thing that happened to him and sold it. That was always his gift. It was also, to critics, always his problem.

Nothing in the rules at the time allowed him to lose his peerage. A convicted perjurer stayed in the House of Lords for another two decades. He retired from the Lords in 2024. Many people found that hard to accept, and they said so often.

His fans did not seem to care. He kept writing, and he kept filling halls. He made regular trips to literary festivals, including a long-running visit to the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. In 2020, he signed a three-book deal with HarperCollins. He was in his eighties and still turning out a book a year.

Also, he was a famously good charity auctioneer. He raised large sums for good causes over many years, and that part of his legacy is not in doubt. As a boy he dreamed of captaining Bristol Rovers, and he stayed loyal to the club to the end.

It is easy to write about Archer as a rogue. It is also easy to write about him as a hard-working storyteller who had a rough time. Both views leave something out.

He wrote books millions of people wanted to read. He gave plain, tidy pleasure to readers who were not looking for anything more. Also, he worked hard, he rewrote his drafts, and he met his deadlines. Thousands of people who do not usually read novels read his.

The bad is just as clear. He lied. He lied about his father, he let people believe things about his education, and he lied to a jury to win half a million pounds. Also, he asked his friends to lie for him. A woman at the centre of the 1987 case was dragged through the press, and her life was worse for it. When the truth came out, he paid with two years of his life. The people he had pulled in with him paid too.

In his novels, the hero is usually wronged and then wins. In his own life, Archer often did the wronging. And yet he kept winning back an audience. That says something about him, and something about us.

He once said he wanted to be remembered as a storyteller. On that count, the sales figures speak for themselves. The courts spoke on the other count.