Jeffrey Archer death: The peer, the prisoner and the master storyteller who always came back

Jeffrey Archer death: The peer, the prisoner and the master storyteller who always came back Jeffrey Archer’s extraordinary life took him from politics and global literary success to scandal, disgrace and prison before an equally remarkable comeback that saw him remain one of Britain’s bestselling storytellers. There was always something absurd about Jeffrey Archer’s life. The boy from a small post-war flat who became a sprinter, MP, millionaire novelist, disgraced Tory grandee, peer, convicted perjurer and prisoner - then simply picked himself up and started selling millions of books again. Even his final hours had the neatness of one of his plots: still working, still talking about stories, still refusing to stop. Archer’s death at 86 yesterday closed one of the most extraordinary, scandal-strewn and commercially successful careers in modern British public life. The jailbird author of Kane and Abel and Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less sold more than 300 million books worldwide. Yet for millions of Britons, he was as famous for the disasters between the bestsellers: financial ruin, political resignations, sex worker Monica Coghlan, a sensational libel victory that later collapsed into disgrace, and prison for perjury. He survived all of it. Archer could be vain, charming, exasperating, generous, boastful and ferociously ambitious, sometimes in the same conversation. Lord Willie Whitelaw’s warning that he was “an accident waiting to happen” became one of the most quoted lines in British politics. But Archer’s answer to almost every accident was another comeback. His publisher, HarperCollins, said he died “suddenly and peacefully at his home between writing sessions”. No cause of death was immediately announced. His final novel, Adam & Eve, was published today, 50 years after his first novel. On the day before his death, he had appeared at London’s Leicester Square Theatre with Gyles Brandreth, talking about the remarkable turns of his life. Writing on X, Brandreth said: "Just yesterday I did a show with Jeffrey Archer to celebrate his new novel – he said it was to be his last. He was in the most wonderful, ebullient form and had such a great reception from a packed house. He was funny, engaging and self-deprecating - a great storyteller to the last." Jeffrey Howard Archer was born in London on April 15, 1940, but grew up in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. His mother, Lola, was a journalist on the Weston Mercury and later a councillor. She wrote about her son, nicknamed “Tuppence”, in her column. “I’m never sure of what my 10-year-old will be up to next,” she wrote in 1951. It followed him for the next 75 years. His father, William, was almost 40 years older than Lola and had convictions for fraud and a history of false identities. Archer later gave a more romantic account of his father’s past. The gap between the preferred version of events and the documented one became an uncomfortable theme in his own life. A scholarship took him to Wellington School in Somerset. He left with three O-levels, but sport gave him the stage he craved. After spells including teaching physical education, he arrived at Oxford in 1963 to study for a diploma in education and was attached to Brasenose College. He was not an Oxford graduate. He won a Blue in athletics, became president of the university athletics club and represented Britain as a sprinter. He also discovered another lifelong talent: fundraising. He persuaded The Beatles to support an Oxfam campaign and got them to Brasenose. The young Archer already understood publicity and the value of being in the middle of the picture. At Oxford, he met Mary Weeden, a chemistry student who became a distinguished scientist and later Dame Mary Archer. They married in July 1966 and remained married for 60 years. They had two sons, William and James, and five grandchildren. Their marriage endured financial collapse, political humiliation, widely reported infidelities, a criminal trial and prison. Mary often seemed the steady centre of his chaotic orbit. Archer once said: “Without her, I’m totally useless.” A master at self-promotion, politics came quickly. He was elected to the Greater London Council in 1967 and became Conservative MP for Louth in a 1969 by-election aged 29. But in 1974, his first political career collapsed after he invested heavily in Aquablast, a Canadian company that failed amid fraud. He was left hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt and stood down from the Commons. “I was so low I would have sold fake Gucci bags on street corners,” he said. “Once you’ve lost a million, you may as well have lost a hundred million.” The disaster created the novelist. Drawing on financial ruin, he wrote Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, published in 1976. Critics were rarely kind to Archer’s style, but readers did not care. He understood pace, rivalry, money and betrayal. Kane and Abel, published in 1979, became his defining bestseller, selling tens of millions of copies. The books restored his fortune. The Archers bought the 17th-century Old Vicarage at Grantchester, South Cambridge, and Archer became known for parties where shepherd’s pie came with Krug champagne. He collected art, kept a London penthouse overlooking Westminster and later wrote from Mallorca. Margaret Thatcher brought him back to the political front line as Conservative Party deputy chairman in 1985. He was a natural fundraiser and relentless campaigner, all while displaying a barely veiled thirst for the top job. But a year later came the scandal that would eventually send him to prison. Archer admitted arranging for £2,000 to be given to Coghlan, a Manchester-born sex worker, after newspapers began investigating claims involving them. He said the money was to help her leave the country and escape press attention. He always denied having sex with her. When the Daily Star alleged that he had, Archer sued. In 1987, he won £500,000 in damages. During the trial, Mr Justice Caulfield famously contrasted Coghlan with Archer’s “fragrant” wife Mary. The verdict seemed to restore him. It did not last. In 1999, former friend Ted Francis revealed Archer had asked him to provide a false alibi before the libel case. Archer admitted to making the request, though the alibi was ultimately not used in court. The disclosure forced him to abandon his campaign to become Conservative candidate for London mayor. William Hague declared: “This is the end of politics for Jeffrey Archer.” There had been other controversies. His 1991 Simple Truth appeal for Iraqi Kurds won huge publicity, and the following year John Major made him a life peer as Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare. Questions later arose over Archer’s claim that the campaign had raised £57 million. The British Red Cross said the figure represented total worldwide aid for the Kurds at the time, while the Simple Truth concert itself raised about £1 million. In 1994, Archer was investigated over a profitable purchase of Anglia Television shares while Mary sat on its board. No insider-dealing charge followed. Then came the reckoning over Coghlan. In 2001, Archer went on trial at the Old Bailey. A jury found he had lied under oath and used fabricated evidence in the 1987 proceedings. He was convicted of two counts of perjury and two of perverting the course of justice. Mr Justice Potts described the offences as among the most serious examples of perjury he had encountered and sentenced him to four years. He once said of his punishment: "At the end of my trial, I was rather hoping the judge would send me to Australia for the rest of my life.” The criminal trial did not require the jury to decide whether Archer had slept with Coghlan. What it established was devastating enough: he had corrupted the legal process to win the libel case. Coghlan never saw the verdict. She died in April 2001 after her car was struck by a stolen vehicle driven by a fleeing armed robber. Archer later settled with the Daily Star for a reported sum of more than £1.5 million, returning the damages and paying further legal and recovery costs. For most politicians, prison would have been the final chapter. Archer made it material. He served around two years in Belmarsh, Wayland and open prison, turning the experience into three volumes of Prison Diaries. The books also described the grim routines and failures of rehabilitation he saw inside. After his release in 2003, he never returned to front-line politics. His political career was therefore far more limited than his literary comeback, although he remained a member of the House of Lords until retiring in July 2024. As a writer, however, he roared on. In his seventies, he launched the seven-volume Clifton Chronicles, followed by the William Warwick novels. The sales kept coming across Britain and much of the world. Behind them was a fierce routine. Archer wrote longhand in four two-hour shifts, beginning at 6am. A large hourglass from Mary sat on his desk. His novels typically went through at least 14 drafts. “There is no negotiation with the sand,” he said. That discipline helped explain why readers stayed with him when much of the literary establishment did not. He was never a fashionable novelist. He was a professional storyteller who knew exactly what his readers wanted. His private character was just as contradictory. He loved attention yet worked with near-monastic discipline. He enjoyed wealth but raised large sums for charity. He could mock himself, telling Tory members during his mayoral bid, “I’m no saint. If you want a saint, don’t pick me”, while possessing an extraordinary capacity to believe in his own version of events. In 2013, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer after a blood test and underwent surgery. He later spoke openly about the consequences and urged men to get checked, crediting Mary with pushing him to seek medical advice. By his eighties, the scandals were woven into the Archer folklore, but they had not stopped the books from selling. Earlier this year, he completed Adam & Eve, his final full-length novel. Kate Elton, his editor and HarperCollins UK chief executive, described him after his death as “phenomenally hard-working” and a “master storyteller”. Archer could bend the truth disastrously in life while building an enormous career from invented stories on the page. Politics repeatedly rejected him; readers repeatedly took him back. He will be remembered for the courtroom, prison gates and political wreckage. But also for Kane and Abel, hundreds of millions of books, a stubborn appetite for work, and a capacity to rise after humiliations that would have finished almost anyone else. The sprinter from Somerset spent his life racing towards the next prize, the next office, the next bestseller, the next chance to begin again. In the end, he died as he had spent so much of his life: between writing sessions, with one last story reaching the public. Reflecting on his life, he once said: “I feel I have had a very interesting life, but I am rather hoping there is still more to come. I still haven't captained the England cricket team or sung at Carnegie Hall.” But Archer summed it up best when he added: “We all make mistakes, but one has to move on.” The author never stopped.