Jeffrey Archer, pictured at home in London, turned adversity into activity, writes Harvey Proctor (Image: Phil Harris / Daily Mirror)
Jeffrey Archer was a remarkable storyteller. But one of the most remarkable tales he ever told was his own. His life contained almost everything one might expect to find in an Archer novel: ambition, politics, wealth, triumph, financial ruin, disgrace, prison, extraordinary literary success and, above all, reinvention. Jeffrey had his struggles, his controversies, and he made serious mistakes for which he paid heavily. His conviction for perjury and perverting the course of justice resulted in imprisonment and brought his political life to a definitive end.
Those facts form part of his story and should not be airbrushed from it. But neither should they be allowed to define the entirety of an extraordinary life well lived. I prefer to remember the whole man — including the man I knew personally. In the 1980s, Jeffrey spoke at a luncheon meeting of my Billericay Conservative Women’s Advisory Committee. He wowed the ladies with his oratory and splendid auctioneering. Jeffrey knew how to work a room: he could entertain it, charm it and, frequently, persuade it to part with its money for a good cause.
He deployed that talent throughout his life. Jeffrey raised millions for charity and possessed the rare ability to use his considerable influence and connections to bring wealthy and powerful people together in support of worthwhile causes. After that luncheon, Jeffrey drove me back to the House of Commons. We discussed my work as an MP and, in particular, my views on immigration from the New Commonwealth and Pakistan. I remember him agreeing that the numbers were too high and praising my steadfastness in speaking publicly on what was, and remains, a difficult and contentious subject.
Bookshop display for Archer’s final novel, Adam and Eve (Image: Getty)
But I remember what Jeffrey did for me later with the greatest gratitude. When scandal and disgrace besieged me in 1987, shortly before the general election, I resigned as the Conservative candidate for Billericay. My political life had been extinguished. At the time, I genuinely wondered whether the life I had known was over.
Jeffrey was one of the few who stood by me. When I attempted to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of my parliamentary career by establishing a shirtmaking business in Richmond, Jeffrey asked me to visit him at his apartment overlooking the Thames. He offered more than sympathetic words – he became a shareholder.
His support encouraged other Conservative MPs and former ministers to back me – including Lord Michael Heseltine. I opened shops in Richmond and Knightsbridge, which Jeffrey regularly visited to offer encouragement, take an interest and buy shirts and ties. That mattered enormously.
Perhaps Jeffrey understood better than most the depths of despair a politician can descend into when a career collapses suddenly and publicly. He had known financial catastrophe himself. In the 1970s, his parliamentary career ended amid financial ruin. He responded characteristically: he wrote. From adversity emerged Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less and an astonishing second career as one of the most successful novelists of his generation.
Then came his greatest controversy, conviction and prison. Once again, Jeffrey wrote. He also attempted to make something constructive of what he had experienced. Through his Prison Diaries and his public advocacy after his release, he drew attention to conditions within the penal system and argued for reform.
That instinct — to turn adversity into activity — was quintessentially Jeffrey. So too was his charitable work. His powers of persuasion were formidable, but perhaps his greater gift was his ability to assemble people of wealth, power and influence and persuade them to use some of it for the benefit of others.
Jeffrey’s life was not spotless. Whose is? What distinguished him was his extraordinary capacity to get up again. He knew spectacular success and spectacular failure. He experienced adulation and condemnation. He knew what it was to have doors opened to him and what it was to have them slammed shut.
And when my own door appeared to have been slammed shut for good, Jeffrey helped me open another. That is the Jeffrey Archer I shall remember: the whole man, not the caricature. When much of the world had turned away from me, he did the opposite. He backed me. His confidence helped me believe there could be a life after Parliament.
For his support, his confidence and his kindness at one of the lowest points of my life, I shall be eternally grateful. There is something especially poignant that this master storyteller died on the eve of the publication of Adam & Eve, the novel he had said would be his last. He had been due to discuss it at the Cheltenham Literature Festival only days later.
Jeffrey wrote countless tales of ambition, adversity, downfall and extraordinary reversals of fortune. But perhaps his most extraordinary story was his own. A complicated man? Certainly. A controversial one? Undoubtedly. But also a talented, resilient, generous and, to me, loyal man.
And before rushing to judgement on another human life, let us remember: let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Let us show the same generosity in death that we hope for in life. My thoughts are with Dame Mary and his family, who will feel this loss most deeply.
Harvey Proctor is a former MP and president of the non-profit organisation Facing Allegations in Contexts of Trust (FACT)
