The tangled web of claims and counterclaims surrounding Lord Archer has kept journalists busy for years.
Archer himself has done little to dispel some of these myths and reporters have tried to get at the truth throughout his career.
After his 1987 libel victory in the Monica Coghlan case, he attained "teflon" status, with editors wary of risking a writ.
However, dedicated investigative journalists such as Michael Crick, author of the unauthorised Archer biography Stranger Than Fiction, kept plugging away.
The Archer myths are many. One is that his grandfather was lord mayor of Bristol - which he was not. Then there is the politician's "war hero" father, William Archer, who was in fact a bigamist, convicted of fraud in Canada and of taking money under false pretences in the US.
Archer (snr) was said to have served in the first World War and won the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM), but no record of his having won the award has ever been found.
When he ran for mayor of London, Archer dismissed the stories, saying he did not recall making any of the claims himself. But he said he had believed his father, who died when he was 15, had won the DCM.
He said he was approached by the DCM League, which had found a William Archer from the Somerset Light Infantry and thought this man was his father, but that this later turned out to be a mistake.
The young Jeffrey Archer did go to Wellington School, a minor public school six miles outside Taunton, Somerset. Television chef Keith Floyd is another old boy.
It has often been assumed, though not claimed by Archer, that he went to the more famous Wellington College, Berkshire.
According to Mr Crick's research, Archer went to the school on a scholarship from Somerset Council, which paid for a number of boys who lived a long distance from the school.
He excelled in athletics but, according to exam reports in the local newspaper, left with only three O-levels. Archer, by his own admission, never got any A-levels.
At 21 he became a PE master at Dover College, where he was photographed wearing a graduate's gown. The school magazine said he was a fellow of the International Federation of Physical Culture (IFPC). But according to Mr Crick, the IFPC was a body-building club that sold a method of home physical training.
At the age of 23, Archer went to Oxford for a one-year Diploma in Education (DipED) at the Oxford Department of Education. The department was attached to the university and Archer became a full member of Oxford University, something he retains for life. He also became a member of Brasenose College, for which he played sport, although he did not study for a degree.
Archer's one-year course stretched to three as he made a name for himself at the university in charity fund-raising and sport, becoming president of the athletics club.
As contentious as the issue of whether Archer actually "went to Oxford" is the question of how he got in with no A-levels.
According to Mr Crick, a letter of recommendation from Dover College said Archer had studied for a two-year anatomy course at the University of California which qualified him as a fellow of the IFPC. It said he had six O-levels and three A-levels. All of this was inaccurate. The letter, however, was not submitted by Archer himself, but by Dover College. As Archer later pointed out, he had not misled Oxford University.
He was a full blue in athletics at Oxford but there is contention over how good he was. In Who's Who, Archer claims the Oxford 100 yards record at 9.6 seconds. But Mr Crick claims this time was wind assisted.
One definite myth surrounding Archer's running is that he represented Great Britain in the Olympics. He had represented England against Ireland and was on the fringes of the England team for the Empire Games (now the Commonwealth Games) in Jamaica in 1966. Later the same year he represented Great Britain once in a match against Sweden in Stockholm. In his Who's Who entry, next to "ran for Great Britain", Archer puts "never fast enough".
Archer was elected to the GLC in 1967 and would later claim to have been, at 27, the youngest ever GLC councillor. However, Anthony Bradbury, a Conservative from Wandsworth, was 25. Many years later Archer said he had believed at the time he was the youngest and it was news to him that he was not.
He would later claim that his election to the House of Commons in a by-election at Louth, Lincolnshire, in December 1969, made him the youngest MP. But in April the same year Ms Bernadette Devlin had won Mid-Ulster at the age of just 22. Archer later admitted he had made a mistake in forgetting about Ms Devlin. But two other Labour MPs who were also elected to that parliament were younger than he was, while Mr Christopher Ward, a Conservative, who won a by-election in Swindon five weeks before Archer's victory, was just 25.
The year 1975 saw the genesis of another Archer scandal. He had been a victim in the Aquablast case, which had all but ruined him, and was giving evidence in the court case in Toronto. He was stopped by store detectives at Simpsons, one of the city's leading department stores, on suspicion of stealing three suits worth $540, and was taken to a local police station.
A record of the incident from the store later found its way to Fleet Street - but Archer denied it had ever taken place. In December 1987, he wrote to the Daily Mirror investigative journalist Paul Foot saying: "I can confirm that I was not involved in any such incident".
In the wake of the Monica Coghlan case no sane editor was going to run a story suggesting Archer was a shoplifter if he had given a flat denial. But in 1998, as he was attempting to become London's mayor, Archer admitted in the London Evening Standard that he had been stopped in the Toronto store. He said he was never arrested or charged and had never admitted stealing anything. He said it was a misunderstanding and because of the unfamiliar lay-out of the shop he had not realised he was leaving it when he went in search of some shirts. Archer justified his earlier denial to Mr Foot on the basis that he did not want to help a "left-wing journalist with a campaign against me".
Another of Archer's claims that attracted media speculation was that he raised £57 million for the Kurds in the 1990s. Archer was chairman of the Simple Truth Campaign, an appeal with the British Red Cross that claimed to have raised more money than Live Aid. The breakdown of the fund-raising showed that £31.5 million was raised from 11 foreign governments Archer had canvassed, but details of which countries, or how much they gave, were never released. Archer said he had guaranteed all the governments confidentiality.