2000 Unlike politicians, art collectors or policemen, British novelists – even crime novelists – are a law-abiding lot. How many have gone down? Defoe, the father of the English novel, heads the list of fiction’s malefactors. He was fined, imprisoned and pilloried in 1703 for sedition (see 31 July). John Cleland served some easy time in debtors’ prison, and he rewarded posterity with Fanny Hill, the onanist’s bible. Has any work of fiction stimulated the expenditure of more honest English seed? Oscar Wilde got two years’ hard labour for ‘unnatural practices’ with his seed in 1895. Erskine Childers, the author of The Riddle of the Sands (one of the progenitors of Jeffrey Archer’s thrillers), was shot by an Irish Free State firing squad in 1922.
Among his other career achievements (as politician, art collector and policeman), Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare is the most famous British novelist – certainly the biggest bestselling British novelist – to have been convicted of a major felony.
The trail runs thus: on 8 or 9 September 1986, Archer was alleged to have slept with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan. A sting was set up by the News of the World in which a friend of Archer’s, Michael Stacpoole, was induced to offer Coghlan £2,000 to leave the country.
When the News of the World and the Star published their allegations that Archer had consorted with Coghlan (the Star added the detail of ‘perverted sex’), Archer issued libel suits. Crucial to his defence was the testimony of another of Archer’s friends, Ted Francis, that he had dined with Archer on the night he was alleged to have had his dealings, perverted or not, with Coghlan. A new diary was secretly procured, and entries made to cover the relevant dates.
In a sensational trial – in which Mary Archer gave key evidence, and was complimented in his summing-up by the judge on her ‘fragrance’ – Archer was awarded half a million pounds compensation by the jury for the gross libel on his character.
Thirteen years later, in October 1999, Ted Francis contacted the publicist, Max Clifford, to reveal that the alibi he had provided for Archer was false. The News of the World, still stinging, set up a telephone conversation between the men that seemed to confirm Francis’ revised version of events in September 1986.
At the time, Archer was a front-runner for the Mayor of London election (subsequently won by Ken Livingstone). On 20 November he withdrew from the mayoral race, and he was expelled (prejudicially) from the Conservative party in February 2000. After a second sensational trial, in which his wife’s fragrance was ineffective, Archer was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for perjury, on 19 July.
He wrote a Dantean trilogy, recounting his time inside: Hell: Belmarsh (2002), Purgatory: Wayland (2003), Heaven: North Sea Camp (2004). They are regarded by discerning critics as his finest work of fiction, along with the A4 diary that was his main defence evidence in 1986.