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Journalism of Courage
LONDON, NOV 21: Conservative politician and best-selling author Jeffrey Archer has exited politics ignominiously for the third and, what appears to be, the last time. Archer, was forced to withdraw as the Conservative Party’s candidate for the London mayoral election after revelations that he had plotted with a former friend to perjure in court during a libel action against a newspaper 13 years ago.
He had won the suit and the newspaper was forced to pay damages amounting to 500,000 pounds for publishing a story saying that he had paid a prostitute, Monica Coghlan, 2000 pounds to have sex with her. Monica Coghlan was confused about the date — September 8 or 9, 1986 — on which she was alleged to have been with Archer. Archer asked a friend, Ted Francis, to tell the court that they had dinner together on September 9. The reason for this was that Archer was actually with another woman — a former personal assistant and wanted to “protect her name”.
In the event the day under dispute was September 8 andFrancis did not give evidence. Francis, his publicist said, sold the story to The News of the World newspaper for under 20,000 pounds because he needed a new car.
Under British law, a conspiracy to perjure or mislead the court is an offence for which Archer can still be tried. Not even an Archer novel has rarely created a character as fantastic as himself. Nor in his tales of political mendacity, corruption and intrigue has a character been laid low twice by the same twist in the tale.
Archer is himself, some might say, wholly invented. His father, who was a Conservative Party councillor in east London, was a fraudster, a convicted felon and a womaniser who fathered children, who have from time to time tried to pop up in Archer’s life only to be rejected out of hand. Their appearance drew attention to Jeffrey Archer’s invented past that included a public school and Oxford education.
In 1974, Archer as an upwardly mobile Conservative MP faced financial ruin after he lost 500,000 pounds he had invested ina fraudulent venture. He resigned from Parliament and in 10 weeks produced his first best-selling novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less. The book saved him from bankruptcy. Over the next 10 years he produced a sting of bestsellers that sold well over 25 million copies and earned him an estimated 50 million pounds.
In 1986, one year after he had been made deputy chairman of the party, the prostitute story hit the headlines. Archer maintained that he had arranged to pay Monica Coghlan the 2000 pounds only to try and stop her from making up a story that newspapers were willing to pay for. The jury believed him. In 1992 he received a life peerage as a reward for his loyalty to Margaret Thatcher.
Archer’s ability to stay in the public eye remained. After the 1991 Gulf war, he made news as the organiser of a fund-raising concert for Kurdish refugees. The estimated 57 million pounds raised apparently did not all go to the Kurds. In 1994, Archer was back in the news with claims that he had been involved ininsider dealing over shares in Anglia Television company of which his wife was a non-executive director. He was cleared of wrong-doing. But just three weeks ago, the government’s department of trade and industry indicated that the insider dealing case my be reinvestigated.
In his statement yesterday Archer said that he had “errors, some serious, some trivial” but that he had “always hoped that my good points outweighed my bad”. But in a life that was no stranger to fiction, Archer must have known that sometimes stories have a life of their own.
