Inside Eugenie’s Royal Wedding bash
joshing form. He looks tanned and fit – though he apologises to Telegraph readers for not wearing a tie. He is just back from a cruise with his wife, Dame Mary, the distinguished scientist, where he gave a lecture provocatively titled “What Britain Will Be Like When Jeremy Corbyn is Prime Minister”. It was, he confirms, a sell-out.
His verdict on the Labour leader comes as a surprise, delivered with a picture of his great friend Margaret Thatcher next to us. “I was travelling through the north-west of England recently, where I was giving a speech at a school, and as I looked out of the window it did make me think I’d vote for Corbyn if I lived up here.
“I felt I had too much, that I’m over-privileged. And with half of what Corbyn says, I find myself agreeing with him 100per cent. It’s the other half that’s the problem.”
For him, the negative half includes increases in inheritance tax and the potential of raised general taxation, sufficient, he warns, to cause a repeat
‘If Theresa May can pull off a deal, Boris is dead. He has no raison d’être’
of the “brain drain” of the Seventies. Enough, though, he insists, of political gossip, however much he likes it. He has a new book to talk about.
Heads You Win follows his hugely successful, seven-part Clifton Chronicles series, and Lord Archer confesses he is more nervous than usual about the reception it will receive: “In a series, you’ve got characters who are there already and you move them on. Heads You Win is completely new and that is harder.”
It is impossible to know if he is just pretending to be worried. He is a man with little time for false modesty, and, after such success over four decades as a writer, unbroken by a spell in prison from 2001 to 2003 for perjury, he surely has every right to be confident.
Yet, he quotes the order figures for the book from America, Germany and Britain, as if to reassure himself that he is winning. There is, it seems, still something in him of the schoolboy determined to come top of the class or the athlete who, in 1966, ran the 100 yards for Britain in 9.6 seconds.
“The trepidation only gets worse,” he says, deadly serious, “when people read it. The first person is always my agent, and it is a weekend of agony waiting for the verdict.”
And then his wife? “Mary reads it politician Sacha in Britain. Heads You Win is the story of an immigrant who makes it, not “taking” the jobs of those who were born in his country of refuge, but enhancing the society in which they all live. Was he perhaps making a political point for our times, when immigration is such a toxic issue?
“Not consciously,” he answers, not entirely convincingly, “but I can see it crossing your mind because that’s the way you are. What most people see is bad immigrants. That is their immigrant. Alexander is my immigrant – the man who conquers Britain and conquers America.”
Early readers in the States have already hailed Heads You Win as the new Kane and Abel, his first global success. Both books use a twin-track narrative and tell of making something from nothing – a repeated theme in Lord Archer’s work.
“Don’t we all know about that?” he says when I remark upon it. There is undeniably something of himself in the rags-to-riches-through-hardwork characters he creates.
That appetite for the sheer slog seems undiminished by the years, the accumulation of homes in London, Cambridge and Majorca, or the pleasures of an expanding family with two grandsons and a granddaughter. “When you reach 78,” he reflects, “you can see death. You can see it tomorrow morning.”
He recalls how, when he got to 70, he asked God to give him seven more years so he could finish the Clifton Chronicles (“I didn’t want some idiot finishing them off”). Not content, he then applied for another extension to complete Heads You Win.
And now? “I’ve asked for another, because I’ve started a new book and I’m loving it. The appetite is still there to work through 14 drafts.” How long this time?
“To 87, not least because my banker son tells me that will work very well with the life insurances. If I die at the age of 87, arrest him immediately.”