Exasperating to his friends, infuriating to his foes, but entertaining to the end: Jeffrey Archer’s outrageous life saw him survive prison with help from a murderer and amass a £200m fortune

In 1974 Jeffrey Archer, then MP for Louth in Lincolnshire, lost everything.

He had taken out a second mortgage on the £100,000 (about £1million today) family home in The Boltons, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and borrowed further cash from a friend to invest £350,000 (£3.5million) in a Canadian industrial cleaning company called Aquablast. He had been assured it would make him a multi-millionaire.

Except Aquablast was a scam. And by the time the company went into liquidation, Archer was declared bankrupt while his wife Mary was seven months pregnant with their second child. Parliament takes a dim view of such things and he was forced to give up his seat. It seemed as though all was lost.

But Jeffrey Howard Archer was to make a lifelong habit of bouncing back from adversity. Aged 34, penniless and with mouths to feed, he picked up a pen and set about writing his first novel: Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less. The book would go on to be a bestseller and spark a 50-year writing career comprising 31 novels, three stage plays and numerous short stories.

By the time of his death on Monday at the age of 86, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare had not only sold more than 320million books across 115 countries but lived a life more curious, colourful and at times outrageous than any he could have concocted on the page.

‘Jeffrey Archer was an exception to the end,’ read a tribute from Queen Camilla, who knew Archer through The Queen’s Reading Room, an initiative to promote the benefits of reading. ‘It was therefore with sadness that I learned of his death yesterday, on the eve of publication of his final work… while he was not without flaw, his friends will recall him as an irrepressible life force through all the many differing chapters of his life.’

Not only a best-selling author but an outstanding amateur athlete, a prolific art collector, politician – a Tory MP and later deputy party chairman under Margaret Thatcher – Archer served two years and two days in prison for perjury in 2001.

On release, he returned to the House of Lords and continued his literary career undiminished. Indeed, his death came just a day before the publication of what he insisted would be his final novel, Adam And Eve, released yesterday.

But Archer, born in north London in 1940, did not contain his fiction to the page. He was a prodigious fibber who turned the lie into an art form. In 2001, the journalist Kevin Maguire claimed even Archer ‘would not have dared to create a character so untruthful as himself’.

His first great untruth was that, having been elected to represent Louth at the tender age of 29 in 1969, he was the youngest ever MP. In fact, just five weeks before his own by-election victory Christopher Ward joined the House at the age of 26.

Not only a Conservative MP and best-selling author, Archer was also an outstanding amateur athlete, serving as President of the Oxford University Athletic Club from 1965–1966 

Despite attending the somewhat unremarkable Wellington School in Somerset, Archer did nothing to correct the record when it was frequently misunderstood he had instead attended the prestigious Wellington College in Berkshire, founded by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Archer allegedly inflated his O-levels (and claimed non-existent A-levels) to get into Oxford. Legend has it that when the university discovered his fib, it chose to keep him on due to his athletic abilities.

He would go on to win a prestigious Blue – Oxford’s highest sporting accolade. Although he later claimed to have been awarded a bachelor’s degree by the august institution, he had only enrolled in a one-year Diploma of Education.

He also claimed on his CV to have completed a year at Sandhurst Military Academy and painted his father as a war hero despite him being a bigamist and a fraud who absconded to the US to avoid arrest.

And yet Jeffrey Archer always seemed to get away with it. His errant tongue only served to strengthen his image as an affable rogue and one of the greatest storytellers of his generation.

As the blurb reads on the front of his 1996 novel The Fourth Estate: ‘If there were a Nobel Prize for storytelling, Archer would win.’

Prior to publishing his first book, Archer enjoyed a very short stint as an Army recruit in the summer of 1958. One fellow soldier recalled of Archer that he was ‘hugely insensitive and amazingly pleased with himself’.

In 1960, he joined the Metropolitan Police and was posted to L Division on the beat in Brixton, south London. He resigned after just four weeks.

The following year, he joined Dover College in Kent as a sports master and part-time geography teacher.

Archer certainly harboured an interest in physical education, having started working out as a schoolboy after taking objection to being labelled ‘The Pune’ by bullies for his puny frame.

However, the job seemed a bit of a stretch, as did an article in the school magazine celebrating Archer ‘qualifying to become a Fellow of the International Federation of Physical Culture’.

Archer spent five years in Parliament, and was described by Margaret Thatcher as the ‘extrovert’s extrovert’. He was later Deputy Party Chairman under her

What this seemingly prestigious fellowship entailed, no one at the college was quite sure – which is just as well, as it turned out to be a home exercise bodybuilding club.

Archer also claimed in his early 20s to have ‘sailed to California via Scotland and the Panama Canal on a tramp steamer,’ raised half a million dollars for a Canadian charity and obtained a degree from Berkeley in California. According to those who knew the young Archer – which included good friend the late Diana, Princess of Wales – recollections may vary.

Indeed, Archer had a walk-on part in some of Diana’s key moments. He was hosting the charity event in 1993 where she shocked guests by announcing she was withdrawing from public life – temporarily, as it turned out. Archer later claimed he tried to talk her out of making her famous ‘time and space’ speech. If he did, Diana wasn’t listening.

Then, before her death in 1997 when 79 of her dresses were auctioned for charity, Archer cannily bought up many of the limited-edition brochures produced for the New York sale. He later flogged them at other charity auctions, magnanimously donating the proceeds to the Princess’s favourite causes.

In 1967, Archer – while running a short-lived Mayfair art gallery – made his first foray into politics serving as a Tory councillor for Havering on the Greater London Council where he earned the nickname Mr 10 Per Cent for helping councillors with their expenses in return for a cut of the remuneration. In December 1969, he became an MP, winning the Louth by-election.

After his five years in Parliament were cut short by bankruptcy, which forbade him from standing in the 1974 general election, the man Margaret Thatcher once described as the ‘extrovert’s extrovert’ turned to novel writing.

It was his third novel, Kane And Abel, published in 1979, that really catapulted Archer to fame and riches and remains one of the best-selling books of all time, having shifted more than 30million copies globally.

Despite his prolific output, Archer said later in life he did not know how to turn on a computer and that he wrote all his novels by hand in felt tip pen on lined paper. The riches that inevitably came with his extraordinary literary success – estimated at more than £200million by the time of his death – were put to good use, not least with the accumulation of an enviable art collection, which the writer termed his ‘real passion’.

It is something of legend that at his frequent lunch parties and famous Christmas parties – featuring Krug champagne and shepherd’s pie, and hosted in his Thames penthouse overlooking the Palace of Westminster – Archer would tell guests inquiring after the loo: ‘Turn left at the Picasso and right at the Monet.’

Archer’s collection, about 10 per cent of which he auctioned off for more than £5million in 2011, also included works by L S Lowry, Andy Warhol and Camille Pissarro.

Archer met his wife Mary – made a Dame in 2012 for services to the NHS – when she was a 19-year-old chemistry student at Oxford. The pair married in 1966

Archer had various high-profile friendships throughout his career, including with Princess Diana, pictured at Harrods, London, in 1996. The pair are seen alongside actor Omar Sharif (top left) and doctor Magdi Yacoub

Aside from his impressive London pied-a-terre, Archer built a seafront villa in Mallorca, which he humorously named Writer’s Block and where he penned many first drafts of his novels.

He also bought The Old Vicarage in Grantchester outside Cambridge in 1979, a 17th-century Grade II-listed country house which inspired First World War poet Rupert Brooke’s eponymous poem celebrating the area’s ‘peace and holy quiet’.

Archer continued to live predominantly at the Old Vicarage late into his life and was spotted this summer cycling sedately through the village in a Panama hat.

In December 2024, thieves broke into the garden stealing four bronze sculptures thought to be worth up to £80,000. Though the pieces were recovered it marked the second theft in 17 years, after two sculptures were stolen in 2007 – including a life-sized nude of a male shepherd.

The idyllic setting of his declining years was a far cry from the chaos and disgrace that blighted his career. In 1987, Archer successfully sued the Daily Star newspaper after it claimed he had paid £2,000 to sleep with Monica Coghlan, a prostitute who, by this point, had already been to prison twice for shoplifting, drug possession and prostitution.

The 4ft 11in troubled young woman had begun her life on the streets aged 17 after a difficult childhood in Greater Manchester. Archer was duly awarded half a million pounds in damages, around £1.5million today.

However, in July 2001 – three months after Coghlan died in a car crash – the decision was overturned after Archer was found guilty on two counts of perjury and two of perverting the course of justice and was sentenced to four years in prison.

Archer had, it emerged, used a fake diary during the initial trial – which he’d made his PA Angela Peppiatt forge – and also asked former friend and retired TV producer Ted Francis to provide him with a fake alibi, exploiting the latter’s desperate need for cash.

Archer endured a public evisceration and was forced to stand down from the first London mayoralty race despite having decisively won the Tory candidacy.

He went down in 2001 and spent two years at Her Majesty’s pleasure – first at Belmarsh, though he spent almost half of his sentence at HMP North Sea Camp, an open Category D prison in Lincolnshire – during which time he claimed to have survived courtesy of protection from a fellow inmate and murderer known as Big Al and by paying other inmates to source a steady supply of Cussons soap and soft pillows.

And yet who would have been so foolish as to bet against a man who seemed to rise from every fall like a target at a fairground shooting gallery? He emerged in 2003 seemingly unscathed, took up his seat in the Lords to which he had been appointed in 1992 by John Major, and continued to write novels, even publishing three volumes of prison diaries.

The infamous perjury conviction, however, wasn’t his only run-in with the law. In November 1975, Archer had been accused of stealing three suits from the department store Robert Simpsons in Canada, walking out without paying. Although no charges were brought, the allegation had resurfaced in 1998 when Archer was standing to be London mayor.

Undeterred, he gave in rebuttal the explanation that he had inadvertently walked over a footbridge connecting two separate stores without realising they were different institutions. His ingenious explanation was only brought down when it emerged the footbridge in question hadn’t been built at the time.

Archer met his wife Mary – made a dame in 2012 for services to the NHS – when she was a 19-year-old chemistry student at Oxford.

Archer seen walking through the grounds of Hollesley Bay Prison in July 2003, ahead of his release later that month

Jeffrey kisses Mary as he celebrates winning the Louth by-election in 1969

Although it was love at first sight for him, he claimed she didn’t initially feel the same way. The pair married in 1966 and by the time Archer was on trial for perjury, Mary admitted in the witness box the two had ‘explored the further reaches of “for better or worse” far more than some other couples’.

Mary, who along with their two sons and five grandchildren survives her husband, was a distinguished scientist and on the board of now-defunct Anglia TV. The appointment coincided with her husband purchasing shares in the company, leading to allegations of insider dealing and, though they came to nothing, Mary resigned four months later.

And yet for all her professional and academic success, Mary is perhaps best known for being described as a vision of ‘elegance, fragrance and radiance’ by Mr Justice Caulfield while summing up the 1987 libel action that preceded the perjury allegation.

In Archer’s final interview, with this newspaper two weeks ago, he revealed his love and admiration for Mary was undimmed by 60 years of marriage: ‘I adore the woman,’ he said. ‘I’d be lost without her. I just hope I die first. I’d last a week without her and it would be a bad one, at that.’

Despite this devotion, Archer’s infidelity was undeniable, though Mary famously said in 2011: ‘There are worse things in life than adultery.’ Aside from his dalliance with Coghlan, Archer entertained an affair with his PA Andrina Colquhoun between 1979 and 1984, followed by a three-year fling with actress Sally Farmiloe beginning in 1996. In 2001, Archer was photographed walking hand in hand with another woman, Nikki Kingdon, on a beach in South Africa.

Archer remained physically active into his later life, at 70 still going to the gym three times a week. In 2011, he told the Daily Mail: ‘And I’m writing a book a year. I’m not slowing down.’

He also continued to umpire cricket matches around London. Though not content with merely officiating, Archer allegedly used to give batsmen out ‘simply because he liked to be regularly involved’, according to one friend.

On the news of his death yesterday, Kate Elton, UK CEO of publishing house HarperCollins said: ‘It has been one of the great privileges of my publishing life to have been Jeffrey Archer’s editor. He was the master storyteller and an editor’s dream – phenomenally hard-working, utterly committed to completing draft after draft to get every word as perfect as possible, and a true champion of the team nature of great publishing.’

By the time of his death at 86, Archer had lived a life more curious, colourful and outrageous than any he could have concocted on the page. He is pictured with The Beatles in 1963

Jeffrey after he declared victory as Conservative MP in the Louth by-election

And Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, writing on X, said: ‘I am incredibly saddened to hear this news. He had sent me a lovely message just this morning and was always a great source of encouragement to me personally.’

On Sunday, Archer gave what turned out to be his final BBC interview to Paddy O’Connell on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House during which he said: ‘I’m certainly not giving up, it’s not my style.’

And just hours before his death, Archer appeared with lifelong friend Gyles Brandreth at a show in London promoting his new book Adam And Eve.

‘He was in the most wonderful, ebullient form and had such a great reception from a packed house,’ Brandreth said later. ‘He was funny, engaging and self-deprecating – a great storyteller to the last.’

Upon the opening of Archer’s play Exclusive at The Strand in 1989, Brandreth wrote in his diaries: ‘To his face we tease him. Behind his back we mock him. But I notice we don’t stay away.’

And there is the measure of the man: sometimes exasperating to his friends, infuriating to his foes, but entertaining to the end.

He may have had the number plate ANY 1 – but Jeffrey Archer was never anything but himself.