I’m very fond of her… Mary Archer on the judge’s widow in abuse trial
THE wife of disgraced Tory peer Jeffrey Archer yesterday told a court a defendant accused of sexually abusing a boy for nearly a decade was a ‘kind-hearted’ and ‘generous’ woman.
Dame Mary Archer appeared as a character witness for Lady Nourse, 77, who is accused of 17 offences dating from the 1980s.
She told how she and Lord Archer, who was jailed for perjury in 2001, spent Christmas Eves, New Year’s Eves and holidays with Nourse and her late husband, Court of Appeal judge Sir Martin Nourse.
Appearing on the third day of the trial, she said the couples got to know each other in 1980 when the Nourses moved to Grantchester, near Cambridge, where the Archers had been living since the previous year, and they regularly ‘wined and dined’ together.
‘Lavinia (Nourse) came to me early in 1980 to ask if I would be so kind as to open my garden to the public as she was county organiser for the National Garden Scheme,’ Lady Archer told the jury. Nourse was ‘cat mad’ like her, she said, and kept two ‘perfect’ houses.
‘She could cook and flower arrange and do the things I cannot do terribly well,’ she added. ‘She has a kind heart. She has a wide circle of friends. She is well read and I am very, very fond of her.’ She said she was one of her closest friends.
She described how the couples took two ‘wonderful holidays’ together on a yacht – in Turkey and the east coast of America. Sir Martin and his wife had also used the Archers’ holiday home in Majorca three times, she said.
Lady Archer recalled Nourse having a ‘bad’ patch in the early 1980s and concluded ‘ she must have had a miscarriage or something’, adding: ‘Clearly she was not herself at all.’
Lady Archer, 76, referred to her husband’s successful 1987 libel trial over a report he paid a prostitute. She told the court yesterday that in 2001 – when the former Tory party chairman was jailed for four years for perjuring himself during the earlier trial – she approached Sir Martin for advice on something the judge had said.
She added: ‘He said “I can’t advise you because the judge is a friend of mine and we will have to end this conversation”.’
Earlier yesterday, a witness claimed she approached Sir Martin after seeing Nourse abuse her alleged victim and he assured her he would ‘deal with it’.
Jonathan Caplan QC, defending Nourse, suggested the witness had ‘misconstrued’ what was happening.
The woman replied: ‘I am terribly sorry but I did see what I saw and no way can I say that I didn’t.’
The jury has heard a recording of a conversation in which the alleged victim tells how he had been abused as a boy and said Sir Martin, who died in 2017 aged 85, had ‘looked the other way’.
Nourse, who used to run a PR firm, described the allegations against her as ‘cloud cuckoo land’ when she was interviewed by police.
She denies five counts of indecent assault and 12 of indecency with a child between 1981 and 1990. The case, which is taking place in a temporary court in Peterborough, continues.
‘She has a kind heart’