All the world's a stage

When a catastrophe befalls you, when the whole world discovers you are a liar, what do you do? Change your name? Run away? Emigrate to Patagonia? If you are Jeffrey Archer – or as we must still call him, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare – you agree to be interviewed by Martin Bashir and make your debut on the West End stage. Whatever you say about Lord Archer, he does not lack chutzpah.

The choice of play, too, is wonderfully apposite: The Accused, in which Archer will star as a doctor charged with murder, and the audience will be invited to decide whether he is guilty or innocent. It is as if Archer is asking all of us to determine what kind of man he is, perhaps because he no longer knows himself.

Michael Crick subtitled his revelatory biography of Archer “Stranger than fiction”; as so often with clichés, it is spot on. Archer once asked his publisher whether, if he worked really hard, he might win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Er, no, Jeffrey, unless they take a leaf out of your book and treat your rollercoaster life as the most glorious piece of fiction.

Archer told Bashir, in last night’s interview on ITV’s Tonight programme, that he began writing the play as a cure for the depression he felt after the revelations of his concocted alibi led to his withdrawal from the London mayoral race and his suspension for five years from the Conservative Party. “I was desperately fed up, broken – and the catharsis was getting up in the morning, and trying to do something, trying to get one’s mind off everything and put something down on paper.”

That fed-up feeling sounds rather less serious than the near-suicidal despair the press was told that Archer was suffering in the immediate aftermath of last November’s scandal. Archer is a brilliant self-publicist and apparently indomitable; only he could believe that it was possible to turn back the tide of condemnation that followed the revelations that he paid one associate to lie on his behalf, and another to leave the country to avoid giving evidence.

The apologies he issued through his aide, Stephan Shakespeare, the posed photographs with fragrant wife Mary and tabby cat Stan in the Archers’ lovely kitchen in Grantchester, the confessional with the Rev Bashir (lots of Hail Marys, Jeffrey) and the you-the-jury play are all part of a strategy aimed at re-establishing Archer. As comeback kids go, Archer believes he is world champion.

Archer’s life has been a succession of extraordinary escapades and unlikely escapes. That cliffhanging capacity to survive the trickiest situations appeals to many who accept that he is a rogue but demur from following Crick and Paul Foot, who has exposed many of his fabrications, in declaring him a villain. What his supporters forget is that the crises are usually of his own making: like Houdini, he knowingly ties the knots and locks the chains that bind him.

Wily politicians like Lord Whitelaw, who warned Margaret Thatcher he was “an accident waiting to happen”, and Steven Norris, who believed from the beginning that he would have to withdraw from the mayoral race, recognised that he was a political liability. But friends always seemed to outnumber foes. It was ridiculous that, after the exposure of his deceptions and the Anglia share scandal in 1994, he became Tory candidate for mayor, but his sheer desire to do the job and the party’s post-meltdown lack of direction allowed him to win the nomination.

Archer is like a pint-sized Citizen Kane: he believes in himself so utterly and has mythologised his life so completely that he is able to get away with anything. Just as he is nailed, he wriggles free and begins again. His first great disaster saw him resign as a Conservative MP in 1974 after investing in a fraudu lent Canadian company: he fought back to become a bestselling novelist and, as he likes to boast, to repay all his debts within seven years. “I can’t expect people to have trust and respect for a man who has behaved so stupidly,” he said at the time of his resignation. “But that doesn’t mean I’m now going to crawl away and hide. I will be fighting back.”

He fought back again in 1986, when the News of the World exposed his willingness to pay £2,000 to Monica Coghlan, a prostitute he insisted he had never met. Archer had spent the early 80s restoring his fortunes in the Conservative Party and had risen to be its deputy chair man; now his “foolishness” forced him to resign. But again he came back, winning £500,000 in damages in his celebrated libel action against the Daily Star. The Daily Star is now promising a re-run.

He won, but it was a tainted victory and, although he continued to have Thatcher’s admiration, he did not return to party office immediately. Instead, he toured the constituencies relentlessly, enhanced his fortunes as a novelist (in 1990, he signed a $30m deal with HarperCollins for three books) and raised money to help the Kurds (he claimed to have raised £57m; others put the figure at £3.8m). His rehabilitation plan worked perfectly: the trial was forgotten (except by tormentors like Crick and Foot), the bogus CV was forgiven, he was given a peerage in 1992 and he was tipped for the Tory party chairmanship.

It was the high point of his career, but once again disaster struck: he was involved, with a friend, in the purchase of shares in Anglia TV, which rose in the midst of takeover fever. The problem was that Mary was a director of the TV company, leaving him open to accusations of insider trading. He strenuously denied them, apologised to his wife (a familiar refrain), and was investigated by the DTI. The latter found him innocent of insider dealing, but the damage was done.

“I’m never sure of what my 10-year-old will be up to next,” Jeffrey Archer’s mother, Lola, wrote in her weekly column in the Weston Mercury in 1951. It could still be said of Archer, who will be 60 next month. Mary, the eternally loyal wife, often talks of him as if he were a naughty boy, the fresh-faced sprinting champion she met and married at Oxford in the 60s. He has been running ever since, though nobody knows quite why. He never appears to have any interest in ideology or policy, only in the Trollopian great game of politics.

If he is Kane, we have yet to find his Rosebud. Like Kane he manages to be both attractive and deplorable: we admire his energy even though it is usually misdirected. He has perhaps now passed from condemnation to self-parody. The ad hominem attacks on his new book of short stories, To Cut a Long Story Short, seem unnecessary: he is too easy a target, a symptom of the cheapening of political life rather than its cause. That he should be attempting one last comeback – using all his famed public relations skills, drawing on the well of self-belief that has sustained him since his childhood – is surely more ludicrous than dangerous. The great actor finally finds his stage. You decide.

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