Three clues to what MAKES JEFFREY TICK

CHARACTER

MY PATH has crossed Jeffrey Archer's three times.

The first time was when I was Literary Editor of this newspaper and he was coming to address one of our luncheons at the Dorchester. As always on these occasions, I was nervous about introducing a famous speaker to the assembled fans, and wondered how best to do it.

My colleague Peter McKay told me the form of words which on this occasion might be appropriate. Of course, I roared with laughter at his joke, but the suggested insult was not something which I could contemplate.

This was in spite of the fact that on that very morning Lord Archer had become embroiled in the row over the purchase of shares in Anglia Television.

The guests arrived, the champagne was poured, I took a little nip f vodka to steady my nerves, and I suppose the adrenaline of the moment made me think that McKay s words would sound very amusing. So when the time came I skipped up to the microphone and, rather than the usual flannel, I said: Lord Archer, you have come to address us. You d not of course have to say anything, though anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence.

The few journalists present howled with mirth. The assembled Conservative lunchers sat stony-faced.

They did not think this remark was funny. Nor did Lord Archer himself.

He rounded on me with a magnificent speech, consisting of a numericallyobsessed account of one of his author tours. The speech was entirely addressed to me by name: Last week I was in Birmingham. Mr Wilson!

I signed copies f my book in Hudson s bookshop. Do you think, Mr Wilson, that I sold 50 copies f my book? No! D you think I sold 100 copies?

No! I sold no less than 357 copies of my book in Birmingham, Mr Wilson Then we went to Nuneaton. At WH Smith The tour took us through Coventry, Nantwich, God knows where. By the time we d sped through Manchester and were hastening to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, his lordship had got carried away. He was selling thousands of books, Mr Wilson, and, Mr Wilson, he could confidently aver that he had sold 10 times more than Mr Wilson had ever sold of his books in his wildest dreams.

The audience loved him, loathed Mr Wilson, cheered Archer to the rafters. It was by any standards a rousing performance.

Last autumn, after he had appeared in court to answer charges of perjury and intending to pervert the course of justice, his extraordinary play, The Accused, transferred to the Haymarket Theatre. I went with my friend Beryl Bainbridge who as well as being a novelist is also a drama critic. The Hay-market Theatre is huge, and Lord Archer had put up a lot of money to insure that the play, a curiously wooden courtroom drama in which Archer plays himself, accused of a murder, did not fold.

The night that Beryl and I went, there were, I suppose 50 or 100 people in the audience. I quite enjoyed the play, and I bought a copy of it. Beryl said it was too embarrassing to go and wait for the author/actor at the stage door, but I insisted on doing so. We were the only stage-door Johnnies that night. He seemed a little startled to see us when he emerged into the street, but he signed my book.

A pity you came tonight, he said. There s been a train strike, and I think that s why the audience was down.

We ve been playing to packed houses. Beryl and I knew this to be false.

But and this is the mystery of Jeffrey Archer did he know it was false?

Then, with a rueful smile, he said: You know, Beryl, Beryl said she was not sure she had ever met him before when Mr Wilson and I last met And he recalled the McKay joke.

Now, in the circumstances it seems rather a good joke, he said. I replied, which I meant, that I thought he was being very brave.

We walked towards the Haymarket and he spread out his arms, a little like the Pope giving his blessing to the City and the world. I could have done so much for this city if I had been the Mayor! he exclaimed. He was smiling, but not at us; just smiling. And within a few seconds, he was gone. He had walked up the street and then disappeared down some alley or perhaps into the ether, for he seemed at that moment to have only a half-reality.

And then there came the third act in the drama, when I found myself sitting in court watching him on trial this time not on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre but in Court Number Eight at the Old Bailey.

It was transparent to everyone in that courtroom to the learned counsel, the jury, the press, the judge that Jeffrey Archer was going to be found guilty. The evidence was overwhelming against him. And when he failed to take the witness box and submit himself to cross-examination, he had more or less lost the case.

Instead, as in the successful libel action against the Star newspaper, he allowed Mary Archer to go into the box on his behalf. This was an even worse mistake than his failure to brave it out himself.

You might not have derived this impression from the accounts in the papers, some of which were written by journalists who had eaten Mary Archer s famous shepherd s pie and drunk her even more famous champagne. But she was an unmitigated disaster as a defence witness haughty, humourless and shifty.

She has her husband s habit of overusing someone else s name and when she had called Ted Francis s counsel Mr Amlot about 1,000 times, it became really, really annoying. Then it was the turn of the Crown to cross-examine her with her highly improbable story of remembering a diary in daily use which the jury had clearly decided was a forgery. She was handed the actual diary used by Archer s secretary Angela Peppiatt and exclaimed like a horrified schoolma am: What is this? Where does this come from, Mr Jones?

The judge spoke for us all when he leaned over and said: Dr Archer, may I remind you that you are here to answer not to ask the questions; and incidentally, you are being cross-examined not by a Mr Jones but by Mr Waters and I am sure he would not object if you don t use his name all the time. I certainly shan t object. She took no notice of the laughter in court and charged on, addressing the prosecuting counsel as Mr Waters every 10 words or so.

How weird truly, deeply weird she seemed as she went through her evidence with Mr Waters. Nobody believed a word she was saying. One found oneself asking the gossipy, intrusive questions which must occur to anyone contemplating the Archer marriage.

All marriages are a mystery perhaps, not least, to the man and woman themselves.

One understands why this apparently chilly science don fell for Archer all those years ago. He is a plausible liar, and to judge by the number of women who have fallen for him, he must be attractive.

As I saw in the faces of the audience at the Evening Standard lunch, many women find him a card, a charmer. There were some moments in the trial when one could see the same look of amused tolerance in the faces of female members of the jury.

So yes, one can see why Mary Archer might have fallen for Beany as she calls him. He s full of beans, pep, vigour. But you can t be an intelligent person married to a man like Archer without discovering that he is a liar, and not just a liar but a pathological liar; a man who can't distinguish between truth and falsehood.

She is surely an independent- minded, handsome clever woman. Why did she stay with him? Pride? An unwillingness to admit in the eyes of the world that she had made a mistake? Or a desire to keep the show, however odd the show might seem to the rest of us, on the road?

In a fascinating article about the Archers when Jeffrey failed to become Mayor, Stephan Shakespeare told the story f Archer sitting in his kitchen, his head in his hands as he quietly wept.

Bright and breezy, cold Mary came into the kitchen and said: Coffee, Beany? He surfaced and groaned that surely she knew he never drank coffee, only tea.

During the closing stages of the trial, when the devastating prosecution speech was concluded, the judge said it was time for a break. After we'd all risen and his lordship had retreated backstage, Mary turned to her sons and said: Shall we go to the cafeteria? They agreed to do so. Archer came down to join his wife and boys.

Coming for some coffee, Beany? she asked. Has she been asking this non-coffee drinker whether he wants a coffee every day for the last quarter century? Do they in fact both live on separate planes of non-communication and non-noticing?

When it was time for lunch she suggested, the Cambridge don, sensible and frugal, that they all go to the fairly awful cafeteria. No, said Archer. We all need a decent lunch. Let s go to a restaurant.

They only had about an hour and by the time they had walked to a decent restaurant and ordered the hors d oeuvre, it would have been time for returning to court. It was another little indication of the gulfs between them, I thought. The female don thought, let s g and have a baked potato. She thought that lunch meant refreshing yourself between bouts of work. For Archer, lunch was a ceremony, and it was for show.

The previous day I went to lunch at the Caprice, feeling a bit sad to be missing some of the trial. To my amazement there he was in the corner, eating with friends, happy to be in one of London s prestigious eating places with famous or royal lunchers at all the other tables.

It was walking away from that lunch, and back to the Old Bailey, that I felt I had some small glimmering into Archer s peculiar personality. What do they have in common these swish restaurants, and the Houses of Parliament, and the hotels where novelists give speeches to luncheons, and the theatres of the West End?

They are all places where an improbable ego can be paraded. Each one is a stage, where the egomaniac clamouring for attention can be sure of an audience of sorts.

But there is another platform in London where you can be guaranteed some attention, where photographers will snap you coming in and going out and where you are quite literally centre-stage all the time the Old Bailey.

During Mr Waters s devastating closing speech for the Crown, Mary Archer looked anxious and at times red-eyed. Archer smiled during much of it apart, of course, from the sad day his mother died and stagily shook his head at others. The more destructive of Archer's character Mr Waters was in his very quiet, delicate manner the more Archer looked pleased.

I am not suggesting that he will enjoy being punished. But if he goes to prison he will be surrounded by other psychopaths and bores who derived some pleasure from being caught. Crime is a way of drawing attention to oneself.

The other prisoners will recognise him as one of them a decent cove, a card, a character. They will like him, just as the Conservative Party and the literary lunchers liked him.

Afterwards, when he has served a part of his sentence, Archer will be back, irrepressible, bouncy Bean, making money out of his prison memoirs and probably still wondering about his chances of becoming the Mayor of London.

Copyright 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.