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last. She’s very, very good on correcting fine, fine detail, the odd ‘who’ to ‘whom’.” But doesn’t he rely on her after 52 years of marriage, not all necessarily smooth, to say good or excellent? He shakes his head. “In the end,” he says, “Mary is a chemist.”

This gentle sending up of his wife is definitely part of his act. Those who know them well say they are devoted, in their own private way.

Heads You Win features two spectacular plot twists. Giving away the second would spoil everything, but the first sees main character Alexander Karpenko escape the Soviet Union as a child in 1968 after his father’s murder and flip a coin to choose life in Britain or America. The book gives you both scenarios.

“I got the idea when reading Colin Powell’s memoirs,” says Lord Archer. “When his mother left Jamaica, she had to make the decision of Britain or America, and I found myself wondering, would he have made head of the armed services if she had chosen Britain, or foreign secretary? No, because we are behind America in such things. So I thought in the book I’d send Alexander to both places to have different careers. The excitement is that it is the same guy and circumstances lead him on different routes.”

But in both, he is a roaring success, as financier Alex in the States and

‘Rees-Mogg is the best parliamentarian I’ve seen, but the wrong man for leader’