‘The meeting took place and terminated at around 9.45 so as to allow sufficient time for me to catch a train from Waterloo in order that I would reach my home to take a call from the United States at approximately 4pm Californian time. I told Mr Archer that I would advise him of the outcome of the call as it concerned the matters under discussion…. I arrived home at approximately 11.20pm, took the call from the United States and telephoned Mr Archer.’
Ted Francis, letter to lawyers of Jeffrey Archer, 22 January 1987
Jeffrey Archer: where to start?
All right, deep breath. By the time Jeffrey Archer committed perjury in a libel trial he had brought against the Daily Star in 1987, he had accomplished quite a few things. He had allowed people to think he had attended prestigious public school Wellington College in Berkshire rather than the less well-known Wellington School in Somerset. He had falsely claimed to have done a two-year degree course at the University of California. He had transmuted a twelve-month diploma course at the Oxford Department of Education into three years of full participation in the Union and Athletics Club of the university, as if he were an undergraduate, despite having a mere three O levels to his name. He had got himself elected to the Greater London Council for the Conservatives and persuaded colleagues to let him cream off 10 per cent of their expenses claims in return for his filling out their forms for them. He had worked as a fundraiser for the United Nations Association, been caught faking expense claims and left with a ringing reference from the chairman, ‘he should be in a remand home!’41 He had been elected in 1969, at twenty-nine, as MP for Louth and repeatedly claimed to be the youngest member of the House of Commons despite the very famous election of twenty-one-year-old Bernadette Devlin the very same year. He had edged up to the verge of bankruptcy due to a dodgy investment and been forced to resign his parliamentary seat. He had written an international bestseller. He had been appointed deputy chairman of the Conservative Party by Mrs Thatcher, and started claiming a close personal relationship with the prime minister which was not borne out by her appointments diary. He had installed a mistress, Andrina Colquhoun, in the London penthouse where he lived during the week while keeping his wife, Mary, in their Cambridge home. And all the while he was constantly adapting and renewing his life story and CV to fit whomever he happened to be trying to impress at the time.
Then, in October 1986, the News of the World splashed with the scrupulously phrased headline ‘TORY BOSS ARCHER PAYS VICE GIRL’. Beneath it the paper detailed several conversations Archer had had with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan, and how he had sent his friend Michael Stacpoole to Victoria station to try to give her an envelope stuffed with fifty-pound notes and told her to ‘go abroad as quickly as you can’.42 What the story carefully didn’t say, despite the fact that one of Coghlan’s other clients had come to the paper claiming it and Coghlan had subsequently confirmed it, was that Archer had had sex with her. He denied having done so in the pair’s recorded conversations, and when the paper put the allegation to him directly. (He did say, off the record, that ‘a lot of what you have got is true. I accept that totally…. I would beg you not to print it.’43) But that didn’t really matter, because his bizarre behaviour in trying to bribe the woman – rather than simply saying ‘publish and be damned’ – made for a very good story indeed.
Unfortunately the Daily Star was not nearly so clever, and followed up with a story headlined ‘VICE GIRL MONICA TALKS ABOUT ARCHER’, even though Coghlan had done nothing of the sort – at least not to them. They had only spoken to her nephew, and repeated his claims that she had definitely had sex with the politician and added that most of her clients ‘demand a specialized field of sexual perversion’.44 Archer, who was known for his regular threats to sue journalists and his attempts to frighten them off by appealing to their bosses (as he had tried and failed to do in this case with News of the World owner Rupert Murdoch), issued writs against both papers. He asked to have the case against the Star, which he knew had very little in the way of evidence against him, heard first.
It was a cunning move. The two tabloids were forced, unprecedentedly, to pool their resources and work together. The Star lost their case, with the jury awarding damages of £500,000 – at that time, a record – to Archer.45 Now the News of the World felt obliged to settle too. Much of the credit for the victory has been attributed to the raging horn that judge Sir Bernard Caulfield had for Mrs Archer. When he summed up for the jury, Caulfield rhapsodized about her performance in the witness box:
Your vision of her will probably never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? What is she like in physical features, in presentation, in appearance? How would she appeal? Has she had a happy married life?… Is she right when she says to you – you may think with delicacy – ‘Jeffrey and I lead a full life’?… Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?46
Poor Monica Coghlan – who became a prostitute after being sexually assaulted as a teenager, who spent time in prison, who left her two-year-old son to be looked after by relatives in Rochdale while she earned money in London, who never tried to tout her story to the tabloids in the first place: she never stood a chance against this.
Archer could prove he visited Le Caprice, one of London’s flashiest restaurants, on the night of 8 September 1986. But what happened ‘after an evening at the Caprice’ was the real issue, and Archer had been far from honest about that. He said he had sat in the restaurant’s bar with a friend, Terence Baker, until around 1 a.m., and then given him a lift home. Baker testified that this was true, but he later admitted to friends that he had been lying about the lift, raising questions about the politician’s alibi for the relevant period.47 Conveniently, Baker had died in 1991, which left Archer’s alibi intact. But like the scrupulous plotter of fiction he was, Archer had taken care to cover all his bases. Because it wasn’t initially clear to him whether he needed an alibi for the early hours of the Tuesday or the Wednesday, he had phoned up another friend, TV producer Ted Francis, and told him, ‘I want you to have had dinner with me here on 9 September.’48
Archer explained this subterfuge by telling Francis that he had actually been seeing his mistress, Colquhoun, that night, and he didn’t want Mary (or indeed, everyone in the High Court) to find out. Francis thought that sounded reasonable, so he wrote a letter to his friend’s legal team giving the details he requested.49 In gratitude, Archer invested £12,000 in a project Francis was working on. (He promised £25,000, but he was never very good at keeping his word.) For good measure, he gave £24,000 to Michael Stacpoole, the intermediary who had taken the cash to Coghlan. The money was to be used to finance a jaunt out of the country so that Stacpoole couldn’t be called as a witness at the trial.50 (Years later Stacpoole would admit to the BBC that ‘I knew of two occasions when he went with prostitutes.’) Another prostitute, Dorrett Douglas, later told how she had been paid for sex by Archer in his London flat, and noticed that the bookshelves were almost entirely filled with Jeffrey Archer books. (Of course they were.) ‘I’m storing them for Jeffrey Archer who lives upstairs,’ he smugly told her.51
But, thorough storyteller that he was, Archer was determined to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. He set about faking evidence to back up his obliging friends’ stories. He gave his secretary, Angie Peppiatt, a new desk diary before the trial along with a list of engagements he wanted to pretend he had had on the relevant days, so she could write them in, in her own handwriting. This was presented as evidence in court. In deference to Archer’s privacy, all but the ‘relevant’ eight days’ worth of pages were carefully bound up; this was fortunate as the remainder were completely blank. He had not considered that Peppiatt, who thought ‘Jeffrey was as guilty as hell’, might keep hold of the original diary and the list he gave her. She did. But she would not share the real evidence for another twelve ye
ars.
Archer, meanwhile, had carried on in much the same way as before: he had launched a massive charity concert to raise funds for displaced Kurds in Iraq, through which he claimed to have raised more than Live Aid, then expressed himself bewildered by how little of the £57 million had made its way to the intended recipients. He received a life peerage from his friend John Major. And he purchased a large number of shares in Anglia Television shortly after Mary, a director of the company, learned a takeover was in the offing, making a tidy profit for a friend – without his wife’s knowledge. After the DTI launched an investigation into their possible insider trading, he admitted that he had made a ‘grave error’ while repeatedly changing his story about what exactly had happened.52 Despite this indiscretion, in 1999 he was adopted as Conservative candidate to be the first Mayor of London despite rampant evidence of his unsuitability for the position. When journalists brought up the many, many scandals in his past, he furiously threatened them: ‘you wait until I’m Mayor, that’s when I’ll show how tough I am… all the writs will go out on May 6th.’53
The prospect of his old pal having real political power was too much for Ted Francis, who spilled the beans to Archer’s old nemesis, the News of the World. As if to prove he had learned nothing in the ensuing decade, Archer fell for exactly the same trick of taped telephone calls as he had with Monica Coghlan. ‘We have got to be careful, Ted,’ the paper recorded him saying. ‘We don’t want to go to court of law with this.’54 Fronted up by the paper’s editor ahead of publication, Archer could only say, ‘oh well, thank God I never committed perjury.’55 Except, as it turned out, he had.
Archer was sacked as mayoral candidate before the News of the World even hit the streets. Soon afterwards he was stripped of the Conservative whip in the Lords and informed by party leader William Hague, ‘This is the end of politics for Jeffrey Archer.’56 Two years later, in 2001, a jury at the Old Bailey found him guilty of perjury and perverting the course of justice over his fake alibi, fake diary, fake affidavits and fake evidence during the libel trial. Francis, whose evidence had never actually been used in the 1987 trial, was cleared of perverting the course of justice.
Archer was sentenced to four years in prison. Obviously he managed to get a series of bestselling books out of his time inside, because, well, he’s Jeffrey Archer. But by this time even his former friends had recognized the real man behind the carefully contrived image. As Michael Stacpoole, who had carried the cash to Coghlan all those years before, told the BBC after his trial: ‘Archer does what the hell he wants to do…. How long has he lied for? How many times have people helped this man out with lies – I mean he has lied and lied and lied.’57
‘The article alleges that the Prime Minister had an adulterous relationship…. These charges are wholly untrue and damaging and distressing to the Prime Minister and his family for reasons that are self-evident. The Prime Minister is not prepared to leave these serious libels unchallenged.’
Biddle & Co., letter sent on instructions of John Major, 17 August 1993
If there was one thing everyone could agree on, it was that John Major was not a very interesting man. Spitting Image thought he was so dull that his puppet was entirely grey. So it was something of a surprise when, in October 1992, a magazine called Scallywag claimed that before becoming prime minister, he had had a torrid affair behind his wife Norma’s back.
The story might have been surprising, but it turning up in Scallywag was less so: the magazine was notorious for printing any political rumour that came its way, regarding juiciness as a mark of authenticity rather than a reason for caution. The rag was edited by a former News of the World hack, Simon Regan, who rarely let the minor matter of checking facts or searching for evidence get in the way of what he regarded as the real journalistic business: heavy drinking. His managing editor, Angus James (who also went by the name Angus Wilson), defined the magazine’s editorial approach thus: ‘We’re confident enough that the stories are true, but part of the reason we’re publishing is to flush out more information.’58
This Major tale was, however, taken seriously enough to be picked up the following January as a three-thousand-word cover story in the New Statesman, although the left-wing weekly took care to point out that there wasn’t a ‘shred of evidence’ that it was true. Editor Steve Platt maintained that the story was ‘not about whether the Prime Minister has had an affair’, but rather about ‘the anatomy and persistence of the rumours and the role of gossip and innuendo’.59 That didn’t cut much ice with Major. As soon as the New Statesman appeared on newsstands he interrupted a diplomatic trip to India to announce that both he and the woman in question – one Clare Latimer, a caterer who had served up main courses, but definitely not bits on the side, for Major at Number 11 Downing Street when he was chancellor – were suing both magazines.
The prime minister demanded not only an apology for ‘a serious and unpleasant libel’, but ‘payment of a substantial sum as compensation and to vindicate his reputation’, something that was more problematic for both publications.60 The New Statesman sold about 25,000 copies and had only just returned to profit after years of losses. As for Scallywag, it was edited from a pub, and had been dumped as an investment by the publishers of the Sunday Sport because they thought it was too dodgy; Regan was bankrupt and had been living in a caravan until it burned down the previous year. When the action finally made it to court, Latimer took pity on the scandal sheet and pulled out. ‘When I saw the state of them I realised I couldn’t take any money from them. If you saw how they looked you’d see they don’t have two pennies to rub together.’61 Major’s case against Scallywag petered out when it became clear that they had no cash and were not taking it seriously anyway. But both Major and Latimer extracted substantial amounts of cash from the New Statesman: £1,000 in damages, but substantial legal costs which the magazine said were enough to take it ‘very close to bankruptcy’.62
And they got a further £60,000 from the printers, distributors and even the newsagent chains that sold both magazines.
One of the many parliamentary colleagues offering the prime minister support in the libel battle was Edwina Currie, briefly and notoriously a junior health minister under Mrs Thatcher. ‘I hope he takes them to the cleaners,’ she told the Daily Mirror on 29 January 1993.63 She knew what she was talking about. Two years earlier she had successfully sued the Observer for libel over a 1989 interview in which the actress Charlotte Rampling described a politician she played in the film Paris by Night as ‘an Edwina Currie figure’.64 It wasn’t so much that the character ends up murdering someone that Currie had objected to, but rather the fact that she neglects her husband and children to have an affair. She wrote to the paper to complain primly that she had been married to the same man for seventeen years and did not have a lover. When they printed a clarification that the article ‘was not intended to imply that a character in the film was based on’ her, her avaricious lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck announced this was ‘quite insufficient’ and issued a writ.65 ‘I thought it was outrageous,’ Currie told the High Court, claiming that the Rampling character’s behaviour was ‘directly antagonistic and opposite’ to her own. ‘It upset me very much.’66 Her husband Ray followed her into the witness box to testify that ‘the security and privacy of her home life is very, very important to her.’67 The jury awarded Currie £5,000: once again the legal costs were much higher, pushing the Observer’s total bill up to around £150,000.
‘Newspapers must be careful about what they say about public figures and their personal lives,’ Currie crowed after the verdict. ‘I have shrugged off most of the junk written about me over the years. This was different because it referred to my marriage and family life.’68
And that was the end of it. Both Major and Currie faded into the past with their political careers. Then one Saturday morning in September 2002, the nation woke to the horrendous image of them at it like rabbits. ‘He may have been grey to the world, but he was a very exciting lov
er,’ she wrote in her soon-to-be-published diaries, serialized exclusively in The Times, ‘on good form, both talking and everything else – I am very lucky’. At the end of one marathon session, she told him, ‘That was some going.’ On another occasion, it was ‘unexpectedly spectacularly good, for such a long time’.69 Their affair, which had begun with her seducing him in her office, had lasted from 1984 to 1988, a period which saw him rise from backbencher to chief secretary to the Treasury, including his tenure as a government whip. Currie told The Times: ‘Part of the fun was the thought that there John was sitting in the whip’s office, sometimes discussing other people’s affairs and keeping very quiet about his own.’70
It does, of course, take two to tango, but it has to be said that Currie didn’t come out of the whole thing very well. She referred to Major as ‘Mr B’ throughout the diaries, not for any cutesy, pet-name reasons but because he was the alternative ‘Man B’ in her life. Ray, who she had dumped in 1997, was derided throughout as being dull and useless. All that Major would say when asked about the affair, then and forever after, was that his wife knew all about it and it was ‘the one event in my life of which I am most ashamed’.71 In response, Currie crassly declared: ‘he was not very ashamed of it at the time, I can tell you.’72
However, on one subject – Major’s campaign, announced at the 1993 Conservative conference, as a ‘return to those old core values’ – she did have something interesting to say. Recalling how it had led to the fall of so many of his ministers, his ex-mistress told The Times:
Back to Basics was absolute humbug, wasn’t it?… It was very cruel to people who were otherwise excellent ministers, who didn’t deserve to have the magnifying glass turned on their lives at that time by their own leader…. It was pompous and facetious and stupid. What should have been triggered in his mind was, ‘We’re all human, and, boy, don’t I know it?’73
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