So, Jeffrey, do you ever get fed up with being told you’re married to a saint?
Near-bankruptcy. Affairs. A jail spell. And yet throughout it all, Mary Archer refused to contemplate divorce (though she did consider murder!). As he prepares to turn 80, FRANCES HARDY dares to ask...
DAME Mary Archer, wife of the perennially mischievous Jeffrey, hobbles through the double doors of their palatial Thames-side penthouse wearing the teeniest pair of shorts.
The shorts are a surprise, particularly as they’re teamed with a T-shirt that only just covers them, so to begin with I think she’s only wearing the shirt. (I’d imagined Mary, famous for her glacial composure, to be more of a floral frock and pearls sort of person.)
And the legs! They are so coltish and slender you’d think they belonged to a 40-year- old. But Mary is pushing 75.
All this is so unexpected that I almost forget about her pronounced limp until Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, 79, bounds across the vast room — almost a 100-metre dash in itself — comforts his injured wife and suggests he drives her to the doctor’s.
‘No point,’ she says crisply. ‘I’ll go to A&E and get my toe X-rayed if it’s necessary.’
Off she totters to shower and change — it emerges she’s just been on a two-mile run (hence the shorts) despite twisting her toe when she slipped and fell on a patch of wet floor earlier that morning — and Jeffrey resumes our chat.
‘She’s so much braver than me,’ he says. ‘I’d be screaming for an ambulance, but Mary says she’ll know herself in a few hours if her toe’s broken because it will swell.
‘She shouldn’t have gone running after falling over — not sensible — but it would take a blooming earthquake to get her to sit down.
‘She’s probably in a lot of pain. I’ll have to keep an eye on her.’
His fond admiration is palpable. Then he adds gruffly: ‘She has got to die after me. Fatal otherwise. I’d last a week. And it would be a bad week at that.’
The enduring conundrum of the Archers’ 53- year-marriage — which has weathered his near bankruptcy, well-publicised infidelities and a spell in prison for perjury — is just one subject we cover in a frank interview ranging over subjects as diverse as mortality, marriage, prison, parenthood, politics and impotence. (Yes, Jeffrey is unsparingly frank about that.)
But, as he points out, we’re here too, to talk about his best- selling books (37 so far and counting) which have sold 275 million copies worldwide and made him so spectacularly rich that he has amassed three glorious homes and a gallery of dazzling art on the proceeds.
Jeffrey is the consummate story-teller and his latest novel, Nothing Ventured — fastpaced and thrilling, with his trademark plot twists and cliff-hangers — introduces a new character, detective constable William Warwick, on the trail of a missing Rembrandt.
JEFFREY,who is 80 next April, has (ambitiously) promised us eight novels in this new William Warwick series — he writes one a year — which will chart his hero’s elevation through the ranks of the Met to Commissioner.
I wonder if he fears he won’t live long enough for Warwick to attain his final promotion.
‘Oh yes,’ he agrees, ‘fear of death preys on you, especially when you’ve told the world you’re writing a new series.
‘I’ve got to be here in eight years’ time. I wrote my last series, The Clifton Chronicles, between the ages of 70 and 77.
‘Afterwards I said, “Thank you very much. I’m very grateful.” Now I’m thinking, “Oh God, I’ve got to get to 86!” But I wouldn’t have a foot to stand on if He said, “You’ve had long enough.”’
He is, he says, open-minded about an afterlife and I ask if he believes in a merciful Almighty a little more as his time gets closer. ‘Oh you are a wicked woman!’ he joshes. ‘I am agnostic. That’s it.’
I admit I was intrigued to meet Jeffrey Archer. Colourful does not adequately describe him.
He doesn’t merely say, he harrumphs, squawks and guffaws; his voice ranging from grumbling baritone to indignant falsetto.
He’s very funny. Today he is wearing grey City trousers, a striped shirt and navy blue velvet slippers embroidered with coronet logos.
The real showstopper is his home. The living room is vast and imperial with clusters of cream sofas in different zones, sculptures and paintings on every wall (his prized townscape by impressionist Claude Monet of the Houses of Parliament hangs in the hall) and
a stone staircase leads to a mezzanine floor on which his PA taps, unseen, at a computer.
And the view! A vista of London from Battersea Power Station to the Shard unfurls through giant windows overlooking the Thames. The scene is mesmerising: small wonder he goes to his home in Majorca, away from the visual distraction, to write.
It is, perhaps, the paradoxes about Jeffrey that fascinate most. He has a reputation for bombast and braggadocio yet he is also charming and self-deprecating.
He tells me at one point, that there is a road named after Mary in Cambridge (where they own another home, the Old Vicarage at Gran chester) in recognition of her services to the city’s hospital. ‘And I’ve got a shed in Weston- superMare named after me.’
A self-confessed lover of women, he allegedly had affairs with his then PA Andrina Colquhoun in the 1980s and with actress Sally Farmiloe ( who died in 2014) between 1996 and 1999. But he is also among the most uxorious men I have met.
And the conundrum persists. Why has Mary, awarded a DBE in 2012 for services to the NHS, with her dazzling academic brain (she is chairman of the Science Museum Group) and ageless legs, stuck by him?
Do you get fed up with hearing that she’s a saint for putting up with you? I ask. ‘It has become a bit of a cliché,’ he admits.
‘We’ve all made mistakes in our lives, God knows. You included. We’re all human. I’ve said sorry to the people who matter. Family. And I’m very privileged and lucky to have been graced with a very loving, warm family.’
Rumours abounded that the Archers were leading separate lives as a result of his sexual shenanigans — Mary in Cambridge; he in London — but he refutes this, pretending, I suspect, to be testier than he really is.
‘Separate lives? Never! Banished? Drivel! The Press get hold of these stories and they stick. Don’t go down that road. You’re wasting your time. As Mary has often said, she’s never considered divorce — but she’s thought about murder several times.’ He chuckles.
Mary, who radiates good health, had a successful op for bladder cancer in 2011, but clearly the thought of her death unnerves him. ‘If she died before me,’ he reiterates, ‘I wouldn’t soldier on well at all.’
He adds conspiratorially: ‘ I’m surrounded by women. There’s Paula our housekeeper. (Paula has already furnished us with drinks and is making a cheese and tomato sandwich for Mary to take to the Science Museum). And there’s Alison, my PA up in the gallery. And Ruth.’
Ruth runs her own PR company and — also sitting out of sight in the gallery — is helping promote his latest book.
‘ Ruth isn’t mine,’ clarifies Jeffrey. ‘ But she’s remarkable. She’s a Lefty and we fight all the time and her friends say, “How can you work with Jeffrey Archer?”’
‘Is Jeffrey a prima donna?’ I shout to Ruth in the gallery.
‘No comment!’ she calls back from her perch in the gods. ‘But he
is the most straightforward person I work with.’ ‘ What do you mean by that?’ puts in Jeffrey. ‘He just gets on with it. There’s no hidden agenda,’ says Ruth. ‘ You mean I just do what I’m told,’ grumbles Jeffrey affably. Indeed, he also says he, ‘ just did what Mary told him to do,’ when he had a test for prostate cancer six years ago. When it proved positive he had — again on Mary’s advice — his prostate removed. ‘Mary was bright enough to know the intricacies of the operation and the possible consequences. She said, “Dig it out!” So they did and it saved my life. I’m clear now.’ As a result, however, he became impotent. ‘It’s fascinating,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know that could happen. Men don’t want to discuss it, do they? I was 72 when I had the operation. It was a shock to find I was impotent afterwards, yes. ‘But I’d rather have a life. “Fertile and dead.” It’s not much of a choice, is it?’ Lord Archer’s extraordinary life has been full of far more improbable twists than even his fiction. He was a Tory MP from 29 to 34 — ‘I was just a boy then. I thought I knew everything. I clearly didn’t,’ he says — and he admits he’d like to be back in Parliament now. ‘I’d say to any MP: “You’re in the middle of the most exciting period of British political history.” It’s bonkers! Yes I wish I was in the thick of it again.’ He voted Remain while Mary was Brexit. They didn’t quarrel, though. Never have — about anything: ‘That’s not Mary’s style.’ ‘And under no circumstance do I want no deal!’ he thunders. ‘ I’d like a sensible deal that reflects the fact that the leavers won by 1.2 million, so it must be slightly in their favour. ‘I certainly wouldn’t support a Government of National Unity under Corbyn — we’d be twinned with Venezuela if that happened — but I’d support any move that said under no circumstance should there be no deal.’ Jeffrey’s tenure in the Commons was short-lived. He did not seek re-election after a financial scandal brought him and Mary, then parents of two small sons, to the verge of bankruptcy.
But his fortunes were spectacularly revived when he started writing novels and his first, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, published in 1976, was sold to 17 countries within a year.
‘Mary always says — and I agree — that no hardship compares with being in debt,’ he says when I ask what he’d rate as the worst catastrophe of his life. ‘You get up each day wondering how you’ll survive. I have immense sympathy with people who are in financial trouble. How do you pay the milk bill? The rent?
‘I lived off Mary’s teaching salary for three or four years. Then along came Kane And Abel (his third novel) which sold a million in the first week and became a number one best seller and everything changed, literally overnight.
‘It brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “nouveau riche”.’
In 1985 he became deputy chairman of the Tory party, but within a year had resigned when a newspaper accused him of paying money to a prostitute, after which he won a court case and was awarded libel damages.
By 1992 he had become a life peer and was poised to be elected Mayor of London when he had to resign his candidacy after it emerged he had lied in the libel case. He served two years in prison (between 2001-2003) for perjury and perverting the course of justice, his political career ended.
LoYALfriends, however, stuck by him. Margaret Thatcher famously took him to dinner at the Ritz, insisting on a table in the centre of the restaurant, on his release. He, too, is a loyal friend and stayed in touch with both the inmates he was closest to at Hollesley Bay Prison in Suffolk, until their deaths.
‘Prison was a salutary experience in the sense that it made me realise how privileged and lucky I was. A fellow prisoner, a 24-yearold kid, sat on the end of my bed one day and said, “Shall we change places?”
‘He was a heroin addict and he told me he’d be dead in a couple of years. I was then 60 and he said, “You have friends, family; a life.” And he would have traded almost four decades of his life to swap places with me. Two years later he was found dead in a hedge.’
He is, he admits, often moved to tears — frequently during his charity work. An amateur auctioneer,
he has raised £54 million for good causes in the past 33 years.
‘And when I see films of kids who have terrible illnesses — children who have terminal cancer and want to go to Disney World — with the Make-A-Wish foundation, of course it makes me cry.’
He and Mary also support a charity run in Cambridge called Chariots of Fire. Mary runs every year with her team, called the Dames because everyone in it has a DBE. She was training for the race — on her gammy foot — that morning.
‘The Dames always come last — I’m their coach,’ says Jeffrey merrily. ‘And because of that they have to raise the most money.’
I ask if age has mellowed him. ‘Never!’ he shrieks, mock- outraged. ‘ But I don’t hate anyone. It’s a silly waste of time.
‘And I can’t be bothered to be cross any more.’
As we chat, I take in the scope and grandeur of the surroundings — gold is a theme: from a vast, burnished bowl on a circular table to the ornate lamps — but there are also homely touches.
PHoToSshow the two Archer boys, theatre producer William, 47, and businessman James, 45, as handsome, darkhaired youths.
‘At William’s christening, his godfather said: “We must pray this boy has the looks of Mary . . . and the brains of Mary,”’ beams Jeffrey. ‘Was I offended? Heavens no! I was flattered.’
Their sons have blessed Mary and Jeffrey with three grandchildren: Alexander, six, Harry, five, and a longed-for girl, two-year- old Vivien. When I ask Jeffrey if he has any regrets, he ripostes: ‘ Yes! I desperately wanted six daughters. That would have been wonderful.’
He clearly adores little Vivien and proffers photos of her in pink ballerina outfit on his phone.
‘I dread the day she can say: “Granddad, we’re going shopping.” I will be penniless in a week,’ he laughs. ‘I’m a far better granddad than I was a dad,’ he adds. ‘And I’m bound to say my children are better fathers than I was.
‘I ring James on a Sunday and he’s out in the park with his children and several others.
‘I wasn’t in the least bit remote as a father, but I wasn’t that involved, either. But I’m already reading stories to Harry, though, and I hope I live long enough to see Vivien as a young lady.’
It’s almost time to go and on cue Mary emerges, this time, indeed, resplendent in a floral frock. She is en route to the Science Museum and still limping, while leaning on a polished wooden walking stick.
‘You’re not going on the Tube are you?’ asks Jeffrey, solicitously.
‘No, I’ve ordered an Uber,’ Mary assures him. Economical, stoic, capable and fiercely intelligent, Mary is his ideal woman.
oh, and of course she has a cracking pair of pins.