I’m early to meet author and former Tory politician Jeffrey Archer at his opulent riverside penthouse near central London. I kill time lurking around the green to the side of the building, no doubt attracting extreme suspicion.
It is the kind of location on the bank of the river Thames that might feature in one of Archer’s gripping crime novels. There’s even a bench facing the water: perfect for a spook to discreetly receive an envelope from a shady source.
Across the water is Millbank Tower, jutting up into the sky. Up the river to the right are the Houses of Parliament. To the left is Battersea Power Station. It is some view, and I find myself imagining how good it must be from Archer’s lofty perch.
There is a statue of Hindu philosopher, Basava behind the spooks’ bench. The inscription reads: “Work is worship.” I look up towards Archer’s £40 million (€46 million) abode and wonder how much worshipping is required to afford a trophy home like that.
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“I’m not interested in money,” he will later say to me, not entirely convincingly.
“I haven’t been in a long time. I had dinner the night before last with Bernie Ecclestone [the former Formula One mogul from whom Archer bought the penthouse]. I asked him what’s the difference between £100 million and £1 billion? I haven’t got a private jet. Don’t want one. I haven’t got a yacht. Don’t want one. Everything else: I’ve got.”
Archer says he told Ecclestone’s wife that he owned three houses and asked how many they own. He says she “groaned and said 15 and pointed at Bernie and said it was all his fault. I just looked at her and asked: what’s the point?”
Archer (85) last week marked the release of his new novel, End Game, the eighth and final instalment of his William Warwick detective series. A proper page-tuner, it is about a scheme by Russia and China to wreck the London Olympics of 2012, and our hero’s attempts to fend them off before a final plot twist that would give you whiplash.
Archer has sold an astounding 320 million books in his half-century writing career producing 30 novels. Before that, he was an MP and later Tory deputy chairman and close adviser to prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major. He is married to eminent scientist Mary Archer – “one of the cleverest women in England”.
Whatever else he might be – talented but flawed former politico, one-time prisoner for perjury, hilarious raconteur, kindly and mischievous older gentleman – Archer is also a wildly successful storyteller.
His book sales give the verdict of his devoted fans, but literary types sometime sniff at Archer’s work. But look at where he lives, and this is just his weekday flat. He has a stately weekend pile in Cambridgeshire and a getaway in Majorca. Sniffing is overrated.
The buttons in the lift confirm there are 12 floors in Archer’s building, in addition to the P that you press for the penthouse. So he lives on the 13th floor? Unlucky for some, but clearly not for him. I step out of the lift into his grand hallway. I walk past the Monet and the Rubens hanging in the corridor, and into the dramatic reception room where the view, now seen through floor-to-ceiling glass, hits like a blast of mountain air.
“Ah ha!” shouts Archer by way of a friendly greeting. He has a reputation for being a touch bombastic and theatrical. Yet, as I later discover, his grandiose veneer can also give way to endearing flashes of vulnerability, such as a typical writer’s aching need to know what you think of his work. Did you like this bit? Was this other bit any good?
He is genuinely grateful for feedback. For the record, I enjoyed End Game. It’s a ripping yarn, told with a veteran’s skill. The characters are typically vivid, the plot suspenseful. It is interwoven with tonnes of real-life detail. Archer knows exactly what his fans love.
“Gay Byrne used to say I underrated myself as a writer. I am not a ballet dancer. I don’t play violin. I tell stories.” His voice dips. “It is a God. Given. Gift.”
“Sit down, sit down,” he says, flopping into an armchair and apologising that he is wearing slippers because he has a sore toe. His assistant unwraps a KitKat and puts it on a plate beside his armchair, with a cup of milky coffee
Later, he spills the coffee down his trousers and, with mock drama, summons his assistant for help. She says she can’t exactly wipe him down while he is still wearing the trousers. He unbuttons them as he moves past me on his way to the bedroom, where he whips them off before returning in what look like an identical pair. Clearly, Archer is comfortable shuffling around his penthouse and all in it are comfortable with him.
“I want to ask you a few things about Irish politics when we’re done,” he says, as I practically disappear into a luxurious fluffy couch next to his armchair. All around us are pieces of art and books about art piled high on the coffee table.
Meanwhile, I want to ask him about the ups and down of his life: the two years he served in prison to 2003 for perjury in a libel trial, after he sued a tabloid that wrote he paid a woman for sex; the time he nearly went bankrupt in the 1970s; the many scrapes of his mercurial political career.
But the truth is I welch a little on the most prurient scrutiny because – God damn him anyway – I realise instantly that I seem to like Archer too much to risk making him grumpy. He is impish for 85 and as sharp as he ever was.
From the off, he is a hoot and he skilfully charms the journalistic rigour right out of me. Besides, he is older than my parents. There seems little point of discomfiting an elderly man by probing stuff he hasn’t spoken about to anyone for a long time.
My book is going to show – and my publisher will really kill me for telling you this – that the world might have changed on September 15th, 1941
“The privilege of my ups and downs is that I got to meet lots of interesting people. And, yes, my undulations also made me a better writer.”
The pay-off of our breezy chat is a mini-scoop on the secret background to his 31st and final novel, which will be released next year. He won’t reveal its title but says he has finished its 17th draft. He still writes in longhand, which an assistant types up for him.
His final novel, he believes, is a better story than even his landmark Kane and Abel, published to acclaim in 1979 and which has since sold an estimated 34 million copies.
“I’ve known about the new story for six years. I’ll be told off by my publisher for having said anything to you, but I’ll tell you a little about it.”
It sounds like a kind of second World War sliding doors story based on the idea that the war could have ended in 1941. He got the idea reading one of Adolf Hitler’s speeches and Winston Churchill’s counter speech in parliament.
“My book is going to show – and my publisher will really kill me for telling you this – that the world might have changed on September 15th, 1941 if Hitler hadn’t changed his mind three times. There was an incident. The war could have ended on that day. Imagine that, I thought to myself. Then I realised – oh my God – what have I got ...”
Archer says he has always appreciated the respect he got as a writer in Dublin: “I love it when I go to the city. I never stop learning there. I once met a tramp on O’Connell Street who was reading the Financial Times. He told me I was a seanachaí.”
Whenever he travels to Dublin, he stays in the Merrion Hotel, which he believes is “one of the best in the world”. He particularly appreciates its collection of Irish art, which is owned by former AIB chairman Lochlann Quinn, a long-time co-owner of the hotel.
Archer says he once asked the Merrion’s manager if he could meet Quinn, the brother of former Labour leader Ruairí Quinn. The manager told him to ask the doorman, who, he said, was Lochlann Quinn’s friend.
“In what other country would the doorman be the friend of the hotel’s wealthy owner? Only in Ireland!” exclaims Archer. The doorman told him he would “fix it”. He says Quinn later invited him out to his home for lunch and to show him his private art collection.
Archer is full of stories about the best-known people in Ireland over the decades. The late broadcaster Byrne seems to have been a good friend. He says Byrne called in to him in London for advice when the government offered him a position, which sounds like it may have been the chairmanship of the Road Safety Authority.
He was impressed by former president Mary Robinson, whom he met years ago. At a dinner with her he was sat next to the poet Seamus Heaney. Archer says the Nobel-winning bard leaned in and whispered: “Storytelling is not as easy as they think, is it?”
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Archer was particularly close to the late business magnate Tony O’Reilly. He says he found the tussles between him and his rival Denis O’Brien “very unpleasant”.
“We were dear friends, Tony and I. We met when we were younger sports people – he was playing rugby and I was running for Britain. He was a brilliant speaker: I would steal his jokes and he would steal mine. He should have been president of Ireland. I thought the way things ended for him was so sad. He didn’t reply to my letters towards the end.”
Back in the present, Archer, who worked for 17 years for Thatcher and Major, is as engrossed as ever in UK politics. The Tory conference is this weekend. He says party leader Kemi Badenoch called recently to ask how Thatcher’s first year as leader went.
“It was disastrous but the difference was, back then, everybody remained loyal to the leader. They didn’t work behind her back. Now we’ve got three or four working behind Kemi’s back – I didn’t have the courage to tell her that. There is not much she can do.”
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He recently met Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for the first time and was struck by his absolute belief he would be prime minister. He is not impressed by Labour prime minister Keir Starmer: “To be prime minister, you’ve got to be good on the street, good on policy and good at speaking. Starmer cannot speak. [Former deputy prime minister] Angela Rayner has more charisma in her foot than there is in Starmer.”
He had lunch last week with Boris Johnson’s top adviser, Dame Shelley Williams-Walker, who, he says, suggested to him that Johnson could make a comeback if everything went disastrously wrong for the Tories.
He has never met US president Donald Trump: “He’s a strange man who says ridiculous things. He is not a clever man. He is not a well-read man. But he is a remarkable man.”
But every political leader is compared by Archer in the end to Thatcher, to whom he and his wife grew especially close after she left office. “Everybody had deserted her, but towards the end of her life they all wanted to come back.”
At one point, Archer appears to suggest that he still speaks to Thatcher, who died 12 years ago: “When she talked to me the other day, I said we’ve had five prime ministers in five years. She said five! She wouldn’t believe we’d had five.”
How can you still speak with her when she passed away?
“I try to think how she would have thought. The one I’d really love to talk to her about is Covid. What would she have done if she was prime minister for that?”
Now that sounds like a decent idea for a novel.
