Читать книгу The Great Cat Massacre - A History of Britain in 100 Mistakes - Gareth Rubin - Страница 22

In 1990 Jeffrey Archer, the Conservative MP and semi-literate novelist, hosted a party. One of the guests was his old friend Ted Francis. But Francis was more than a friend: he and Archer had once gone into business together. In 1987 Archer had given Francis, a TV producer, £20,000 to make a film about the children’s author Enid Blyton. But there had been a tragic failure of communication – Archer had considered the money a loan, whereas Francis believed it was an investment and had never repaid it. So, at that fateful dinner party, according to Francis, ‘I was chatting to an actress when Jeffrey sidled up to us and said to her in a very loud voice, “You want to watch this man, you know. I lent him £20,000 once and I’m still waiting to get the money back.” She was dreadfully embarrassed and I was deeply hurt. He humiliated me in front of my peers in the industry and I didn’t understand why.’

It was a mind-bogglingly foolish thing for Archer to do, given that Francis was actually in a position to have Archer sent to prison. And Francis exercised this power, but, being a man who could bear a grudge until the time is right, he waited until 1999 to do so.

It all began in 1986 when Archer, a liar and bankrupt who had been cleared of insider trading, was a rising star in the Tory Party. One day, the Daily Star splashed across its front page the fact that he also liked whores. They had caught him paying off a prostitute, Monica Coghlan, with £2,000 and were in no mood to sit on the story.

Archer resigned from the position of Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and released a statement in which he claimed he had never met Coghlan but that she had phoned him out of the blue to say a newspaper was alleging he had had sex with her. ‘Foolishly, I allowed myself to fall into what I can only call a trap in which a newspaper has played a reprehensible part. In the belief that this woman genuinely wanted to be out of the way of the press and realising that for my part any publicity of this kind would be extremely harmful to me and for which a libel action would be no adequate remedy, I offered to pay her money so that she could go abroad for a short period. For that lack of judgement, and that alone, I have tendered my resignation,’ he explained.

The Star, not a newspaper to back off, then went one step further and alleged Archer and Coghlan had enjoyed a bit of rumpy-pumpy in a dodgy hotel, the Albion, on 9 September 1986.

After this outrage, Archer could take no more and sued for libel. Just before the trial, the newspaper realised it had made an error and amended the date of the romance to 8 September. It also fleshed out Coghlan’s character, pointing out that she specialised in kinky stuff.

During her evidence at the trial, Coghlan described the scene in the Albion: ‘Nothing much was said because it was over so quickly. He commented on my nipples. I had no difficulty seeing his face. I was lying on top of him the whole time.’

But Archer had an alibi for that night. He had, he claimed, had dinner at a restaurant with the editor of his books and his film agent, Terence Baker. And he had gone home after the time that Monica Coghlan claimed they were together.

The trial was notable for the lunacy of the judge, who famously informed the jury that they should trust Archer’s wife, Mary, because she had ‘fragrance’, before summing up Archer: ‘You may think his history is worthy and healthy and sporting. What is always a great attribute of the British is their admiration, besides their enjoyment, of good sports like cricket and athletics. And Jeffrey Archer was president of the Oxford University Athletics Club [Archer always claimed to have gone to Oxford, which was untrue: he had attended a teacher training college affiliated to the university] and ran for his country. Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel, round about a quarter to one on a Tuesday morning?’

The answer, of course, was ‘yes’.

Archer received damages of £500,000 – the highest ever recorded at that time. Over the following years, he rebuilt his political career and, in 1999, became the Conservative candidate to be the first elected Mayor of London. Then Ted Francis, like a fat puma, pounced.

On 21 November 1999 Francis revealed to the press that, before the original libel trial, Archer had asked him to write a letter to his solicitor falsely stating, and offering to testify, that they had had dinner together on the night of 9 September 1986, the date that the Star had first claimed the tryst had happened in the Albion. Francis added that Archer had faked an entry in his diary to put them together that night. But when the Star changed the date, Francis was forgotten.

Francis’s revelations revealed Archer as a man fully prepared to commit perjury and to ask others to commit it in his libel case. Helpfully, Francis provided a tape of Archer asking him to lie.

Archer’s career – let alone his mayoral candidacy – duly sank faster than the Titanic. He did his best, claiming that he had only asked Francis to lie because he wanted to protect the identity of a young lady he was really dining with. People wondered who the mysterious female could have been (if she existed at all). Some speculated that it was his former assistant, Andrina Colquhoun. If so, it would make her possibly the most dangerous dinner companion in the world, given that Lord Lucan had been due to dine with her just before he mistakenly killed his nanny in 1974.

Francis opened the floodgates. It appeared that Terence Baker, who had since died, had told a friend he had given Archer a false alibi for the night of 8 September, the night actually argued over in court.

None of this would have happened if Archer had remembered that the tryst had taken place on 8 September, and therefore he had no need of a false alibi for the following night.

Archer’s fall from grace ended with his imprisonment for two years for perjury and perverting the course of justice, and was at least partially responsible for Ken Livingstone being elected Mayor of London. It also managed to remind the British public that even though the Tories were no longer in power, they were still the party of sleazy sex scandals. Surprisingly, Mary Archer, clearly a fan of Tammy Wynette, stood by her man.