October 6 2026 - 2:00pm
What was the matter with Jeffrey Archer? He wasn’t built like the rest of us. The trick was always “to treat him as if he comes from another planet”, according to his old friend Sheridan Morley. “He thinks he’s Peter Pan,” Morley said, “that he’ll never die: everything he does he thinks is going to be all right in the end.” People often like to grumble that politicians are dishonest, but really it’s the small lies that upset them. Archer didn’t traffic in petty lies about expenses or second jobs; he didn’t underpay his stamp duty or get “ambushed with cake”. He didn’t fail to disclose receiving fancy suits from some wealthy patron; when Jeffrey Archer wanted new suits, he stole them himself.
Archer lied like his life depended on it, and often it did. When he was convicted of perjury in 2001, the judge said it was the worst such case he had ever dealt with. Throughout this ordeal Archer sought refuge, as he always did, in fiction. He put on a play, The Accused, starring as its main character: he was on trial for murder, and the audience was the jury. At the end of each performance they would vote on his guilt. His life was pure performance.
Archer started off as a PE teacher, then wound up as a student in Oxford’s Department for Education. It naturally calls to mind another PE teacher who ended up in Oxbridge and shared a penchant for tall tales, also sadly lost to us in 2026. For there was indeed something Ardayesque about Archer: that Peter Pan-ish self-belief, that inability to separate fact from fiction. This quality, undesirable in a politician or an academic, can make for an excellent storyteller, as both men undoubtedly were.
Perhaps dishonesty is hereditary: that suggestion is intriguingly made in Patrick Radden Keefe’s new bestseller, London Falling, which Archer recently labeled among his favorite reads. Archer’s father, who was born in 1875, was a fabulist and conman. The son always was a blusterer and a bullshitter, and already as a young man at Oxford people could smell a rat. The principal of Brasenose College joked that he was the only “principle” Archer ever had. “He strikes me as a nice enough fella”, said Ringo Starr, whom Archer had somehow wheedled into coming to Brasenose for a charity event. “But he’s the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it.”
Archer had the gift of the gab; when he got into his financial scrapes, he had the gift of the pen. He was a bit like a Tory Peter Mandelson — a ticking time-bomb for successive Tory leaders, exploding in their faces and marking them as “poor judges of character”. Archer was a larger-than-life scoundrel, whose trespasses we were quick to forgive because they brightened up the world. Were Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and William Hague such poor judges of character, anyway? They were right that Archer had a knack for connecting with the electorate. Perhaps he would have been elected mayor of London in 2000, had his past not come back to bite him. It’s not like any of his Tory colleagues could excite such passion and affection. If he had a successor in public life, and in the Conservative Party, it was Boris Johnson. The comparison was often made, but Seventy-Two Virgins never sold like Kane and Abel. Johnson lacked the will — and the talent.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, but one gets the sense that Archer would not have wanted the usual bromides that people utter for lesser men. He might have taken it as a compliment, in a perverse way, that Michael Crick, author of the aptly-titled Archer biography Stranger than Fiction, had to remind people today that he was a “pretty nasty fraudster” and a “crook”. Even less happy with the posthumous encomia is A.N. Wilson, who salaciously suggests — you can’t libel the dead — that Archer murdered Monica Coghlan, the prostitute at the center of the scandal from which his life unraveled. Archer did not tamper with her brakes: Coghlan’s car was hit by a drugged-up robber, who received a life sentence for manslaughter. A crook he might have been, but murder would have been a step too far — even for a nation that was as much entertained by the picaresque of Archer’s life as it was by his rollicking books.
