Archer: If I were a Northerner, I’d vote for Corbyn
At 78, former Tory MP Lord Jeffrey Archer is still taken by a good story and generous helpings of political gossip, finds Peter Stanford
Lord Archer, the former Tory MP, has rejected the idea of a second referendum. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, he says: “I voted Remain, and I lost, so I thoroughly disapprove of the idea of being asked to vote again. The British people would vote the same again.” And, referring to the state of the party, he admitted he would vote for Jeremy Corbyn if he lived in the North.
We are meant to be discussing Heads You Win, his first standalone novel in nearly a decade, but as well as being one of the world’s bestselling authors, Jeffrey Archer remains a politician to his fingertips. And so conversation with this former MP, deputy chairman of the Tory party, candidate for London mayor and member of the upper chamber, inevitably keeps switching back to the big questions of our tumultuous times: like the demand for a second referendum on Brexit.
“I voted remain, and I lost,” he begins, “so I thoroughly disapprove of the idea of being asked to vote again.” He draws out every syllable of “thoroughly” in the manner of an old-fashioned schoolteacher.
“But, then, I was talking to John Major at the Test match the other day” – famous names populate Lord Archer’s conversation, just as they still people the Krug-and-shepherd’s-pie parties in his spectacular London penthouse where we sit – “and he said to me: ‘What if we were to vote on what deal we were being offered?’”
He pauses for effect. As well as being a peerless storyteller on the printed page (36 books, 275 million copies sold, 26 number ones, these past 42 years since Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less), he is also a master of spinning a tale face-to-face. “Not a bad argument, I thought – but the British people would vote the same again.”
By way of evidence, he quotes the 1997 Winchester by-election, ordered by the High Court, after Liberal Democrat Mark Oaten’s general election victory by just two votes. “The people had made their mind up and they wanted us to get on with it. We lost by 21,000 votes.”
So what of his beloved party today, with its splits over the Brexit talks? “We are tearing ourselves apart,” he admits, “and we don’t appear to know where we are going. We have five or six people who want to be leader.”
His donning of the mantle of wise party elder stops short of naming his preferred runner. Just. “[Jacob] Rees-Mogg is the best parliamentarian I’ve seen, but he’s the wrong man for leader. I think he’d make a brilliant Speaker of the House of Commons. He has a lovely feel for the House, but not leader.”
Boris Johnson, I suggest tentatively. “I don’t know him,” he replies before I’ve even got the “-son” off my lips, “but I had a minister on the phone last night speculating that Theresa May could have got a deal [with the EU], but she’s not willing to admit it.
“If it’s true and she pulls it off, Boris is dead. He has no raison d’être.”
At 78, Lord Archer is on tip-top