Jeffrey Archer, one of the world’s bestselling novelists, remains an irrepressible flirt. When our photographer arrives with his attractive young assistant, Archer is immediately captivated.
Before long, we are all standing in his penthouse bedroom, taking in the breathtaking London skyline through vast floor-to-ceiling windows — as well as Jeffrey’s magnificent, intricately carved 17th-century four-poster bed.
Suspended above the bed is a huge Lichtenstein speech-balloon Pop Art cartoon bearing the words: ‘Oh Jeff… I love you too. But…’
Lord Archer’s long-serving public relations adviser looks slightly taken aback. ‘I’ve only been in this room a couple of times, and I’ve known Jeffrey for decades,’ she says.
The allure of youth and beauty is clearly undiminished. Jeffrey, 86, talks animatedly to the photographic assistant in her 20s, who also works as a stunt double. ‘You’re such a flirt,’ I tell him. ‘Oh yes! What man isn’t?’ he replies.
‘But you can’t act on it these days,’ I remind him.
After being diagnosed with cancer in 2015, Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare underwent surgery to remove his prostate. He later revealed that the operation had left him permanently impotent. ‘I’d rather have a life. “Fertile and dead.” It’s not much of a choice, is it?’ he told me when we last met.
‘Was losing your libido like being freed from a madman?’ I ask him now. ‘Don’t get cheeky,’ he admonishes, before explaining why the combination of intelligence and beauty can be so intoxicating.
Lord Jeffrey Archer with his wife Mary at their London home
Jeffrey and his wife Mary pictured on their wedding day
The author pictured with former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1986
Jeffrey has always admired women who are strong, attractive and intelligent, and he surrounds himself with them. Among them is his wife of 60 years, Dame Mary, 81, an eminent scientist.
His novels, which have sold more than 300 million copies in 115 countries and paid for three splendid homes and a priceless art collection, are equally packed with beautiful, independent and formidable female characters.
Now, his millions of readers around the world have a final blockbuster to enjoy, centred on another spirited and striking heroine.
It is true: Jeffrey Archer, the master of the page-turner and a consummate storyteller, has written his final novel. Exactly 50 years after the publication of his first, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, he has chosen to give his farewell interview exclusively to the Daily Mail.
Adam & Eve, set against the upheaval of the Second World War, will be published next month. In many respects, it serves as a companion piece to his first international bestseller, Kane and Abel, which sold one million copies in its opening week. Both books centre on two children born on the same day — Armistice Day, 1918 — but into families at opposite ends of the social scale.
Adam is the son of a shepherd, while Eve is the daughter of an Earl. Moving at a relentless pace and filled with Archer’s trademark twists and cliff-hangers, the novel explores a recurring theme in his fiction: the distance between where people’s lives begin and where they ultimately end.
So why has he decided that this novel should be his last?
‘It’s my most ambitious yet, and I genuinely think it’s the best I’ve ever written,’ he says.
‘I’m 86. I don’t think I could do it again. So why not go now?’
‘It’s hard work. I write every word in longhand with felt tip pen on a 32-line pad. I hand-wrote 18 drafts over two years. I don’t know how to turn on a computer.
‘Besides, some authors’ last books are embarrassing. They go on too long. Some even go on writing after their death ‘with help from’ co-authors. I’ve put in my will that that can’t happen. It’s swindling the public – but the public aren’t stupid.
‘I find old age tiresome,’ he adds. ‘I don’t think I’d like to live to 100. I have a hip problem. I can’t move as fast as I’d like to but thankfully Mary and I both seem to be firing on all cylinders mentally.
‘Alzheimer’s is my biggest dread, so I test my memory all the time; for names, places, events.’
Jeffrey loves a drama. He does not merely speak but harrumphs, squawks and guffaws; his voice ranging through the octaves from grumbling baritone to indignant falsetto. He is great company.
He parries probing questions with mock outrage. ‘How rich are you?’ I ask.
Estimates put his fortune at around £200million but today he declares: ‘You are a rude human being to ask! Genuinely I don’t know what I’m worth.
His new book, Adam & Eve, set in the tumult of the Second World War, is published next month
‘Some people care passionately about money. I don’t. As long as I can watch cricket, go to the theatre, do my charity auctions (he has raised a reputed £54million through these sales) and indulge my real passion, which is art.’
So no private jet or yacht? ‘No. I have an electric Mini. Perfect for getting round London. Mary has one, too.’
He tells a story about Mary’s frugality: ‘She had an Audi for 22 years. I got fed up with telling her to get a new car, so I drove it into town and left the keys in it. But no one stole it! So we sold it for £100.’
Clearly he enjoys her disregard for material possessions. I later discover her oldest shoes are a 61-year-old pair of Hush Puppies.
‘I’ll tell her to get a new suit or some jewellery and she won’t. I’ve had friends whose wives weren’t like that,’ he says pointedly. ‘Mary’s parsimonious. She has such integrity and an amazing work ethic.’ His admiration for her is genuine and heartfelt.
It emerges that Jeffrey is selling off his vast and diverse art collection. Or at least Mary is.
‘The proceeds are all going to her charities. She’s building a children’s hospital in Cambridge. Before I die she’ll have fleeced me. She’s a common thief!’
Despite Mary’s gradual decimation of his art collection, their vast, L-shaped sitting room, with its mesmerising vista of the Thames from Battersea Power Station to The Shard, unfurling through those giant windows, is still stuffed with treasures.
On one wall alone are two Picassos. I spot a Pissarro and a prized townscape by Impressionist Claude Monet of the Houses of Parliament hangs in the hall.
Suddenly Jeffrey breaks off from our chat to cry: ‘Enter the Dame!’
‘The most long-suffering wife in Britain!’ I add. ‘That’s very naughty of you,’ he tuts.
Mary, awarded a DBE in 2012 for services to the NHS, click-clacks across the vast acreage of marbled floor in block heels – that she’s had for decades – looking dazzling in a bronze coat dress, decorated with black swirls.
Discreet gold jewellery glints at her throat and wrists. Her hair is black as a raven’s wing and her smile is warm, which surprises me as I had expected glacial aloofness. She carries a mug, bearing the periodic table, full of milky tea. ‘I can sing it! I did at our 60th wedding anniversary party,’ she beams.
Jeffrey and Dame Joan Collins attend the launch of book Divining The Human: The Art Of Alexander Newley at Ognisko Polskie – The Polish Hearth Club in June 2023
The Archers, who have two handsome, accomplished sons – William, 54 and James, 52 – and five young grandchildren, celebrated this marital milestone in July with a garden party for 321 friends at their second home, the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, Cambridge. They have a third, a villa in Mallorca, where Jeffrey writes his novels.
The enduring conundrum persists: why is the beautiful, academic Mary – famously lauded as ‘fragrant’ by the judge at her husband’s 1987 libel action over claims he had slept with a prostitute – still married to him?
Jeffrey’s infidelities were publicly documented during and after his subsequent trial for perjury and perverting the course of justice in 2001, for which he was found guilty and served two years in prison.
‘My dear late friend Barry Humphries said, ‘I have a word that encapsulates Mary… tolerant,’ hams Jeffrey. ‘I adore the woman. I’d be lost without her. I just hope I die first. I’d last a week without her and it would be a bad one, at that.’
Mary once said she’d never considered divorcing Jeffrey – she confirms this today – but had come close to murdering him.
But how did she get over his infidelities? Jeffrey had a three-year affair with the late actress Sally Farmiloe, another with his then secretary Andrina Colquhoun.
‘People think it’s strange when I say this but there are worse things in a marriage than infidelity. Illness for a start. Debt.’
The Archers faced near bankruptcy in 1974 when Jeffrey, then Tory MP for Louth, Lincolnshire, lost his life savings of nearly £500,000 in a bad investment.
‘It was the making of me – although I didn’t think so at the time,’ he says now.
He stepped down as an MP and the Archers, then parents of a baby and toddler, lost their family home. Mary saved them, securing a teaching job at Cambridge University which came with accommodation and they lived on her modest don’s salary – until in 1979 Kane And Abel earned him a £2million advance.
‘After that,’ he says with a touch of bombast, ‘Mary’s achievements were not harmed by the fact that she didn’t have to worry that her work didn’t pay. She became chair of trustees of the Science Museum. They doubled her salary from nought to nought.’
I ask her why – even during the darkest times – she never thought about quitting the marriage. She answers with studied restraint.
‘Much of your life runs along on railway tracks. Then you come to a junction where you can choose the ‘I can cope’ route or the ‘I can’t cope.’ When you get into
the habit of coping you learn resilience. It’s harder if you say, ‘I crumbled last time but I’ll cope now.’ I’ve never suffered from depression, for which I’m very grateful. I’ve always taken the view that if today wasn’t great, tomorrow’s another day.’
They have, it seems, reached a period of comfortable equanimity. ‘I’m conscious that time is precious now,’ says Mary. ‘We must use it well and I’d rather spend our old age together than apart. We’ve both been through cancer.’ Mary overcame bladder cancer in 2011.
‘But I think we’re both fit for our age. I practise getting up from the floor without using my hands. It’s a brute but I can do it. We go swimming, jogging; to the gym.’
Jeffrey and Mary arrive at Westminster Cathedral for the Requiem Mass on the day of the funeral of Britain’s Katharine, Duchess of Kent, in London, on September 16 last year
She continues: ‘I rather like having Jeffrey around, cluttering up the place.
‘We’ve certainly had a very eventful life, although I can’t say I’ve enjoyed every minute.
‘There have been moments of irritation and anger but I don’t do tempests. I very, very seldom lose my temper.
‘Jeffrey’s fun. Very different from me. He has a wide circle of friends, energy and drive. Yes, I feel I’ve enjoyed rather than endured him.’
I ask if he has any regrets and he says: ‘Anyone who pretends they don’t is living in a dream world. You cannot expect to sail through life with everything going your way. If I had, I might have ended up as Secretary of State for Transport and never written a word.’
He reflects on ambitions he never realised: ‘I wish I’d won an Olympic gold and become Mayor of London.’ He became a life peer in 1992 and was poised to be elected the capital’s mayor when he had to resign his candidacy after it emerged he had lied in the libel case.
Did he ever covet a literary prize? Highbrow critics have derided him but his legions of fans applaud the genius of his deft plotting. ‘You’ll never win prizes for being a storyteller but once you sell you clearly don’t need them,’ he says.
Around him the sheer imperial opulence of the room testifies to this: clusters of cream sofas sit on densely woven carpets; glossy art books are stacked neatly on glass-topped coffee tables. A vast dining table is overhung by a giant chandelier.
A curved staircase leads to a mezzanine floor where Jeffrey’s PA works unseen – and the view wraps round it all, a peerless panorama of London unfolding on both sides of the great river.
It is hard to imagine him confined to a prison cell but he does not dwell on the contrast when
I ask about his two years of incarceration.
Even when he was locked up in Belmarsh high security prison in London, then Wayland in Norfolk and finally North Sea Camp in Lincolnshire, he used his time judiciously, to write diaries which later became bestsellers.
I wonder if he was ever frightened. ‘I was protected by a murderer called Big Al.
‘He’s no longer with us but I visited him for five years in prison. I visited three inmates in fact: two of them murderers.’
It is a measure of his character that he is a constant friend and also inspires loyalty in others.
He and Mary remained close friends with the late Margaret Thatcher, who appointed Jeffrey deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in 1985.
Baroness Thatcher was a regular attendee at their Krug and shepherd’s pie Christmas parties in the penthouse until her health failed in 2010.
The Archers held the last of these parties last year. Friends had died; others, aged, found it hard to stand for three hours.
There has been a final valediction for their garden parties this year, too. Now no more novels either.
Jeffrey Archer’s world is constricting as he ages but something tells me there will always be a glint in his eye when there’s a strong, capable – and attractive – woman in his orbit.
Adam & Eve by Jeffrey Archer is published by HarperCollins on October 6, priced £22 hardback.
