Jeffrey Archer Dies Aged 86
The novelist, former Conservative MP and former deputy chairman of the party has died at 86. He resigned his Commons seat in 1974 facing bankruptcy, rebuilt a fortune through bestselling fiction, returned to the top of his party, and was jailed in 2001 for perjury and perverting the course of justice. His last novel is due out this month.
His career is the clearest case in modern British politics of a man who twice built and twice destroyed a public reputation. He left Parliament close to ruin, wrote his way out of it, became deputy chairman under Margaret Thatcher, and was the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London before a former friend disclosed that he had asked him to provide a false alibi in the 1987 libel action he had won against a newspaper. He served two years. Kemi Badenoch said on Tuesday morning that he had texted her the previous morning, hours before he died, with the line “Great outfit, great speech, no need to reply”, and called him “a great communicator” and “a great storyteller”. That is a fair summary of what his party valued in him and of why the rest of it never quite settled: he was an exceptional salesman for a cause, and the thing he most reliably oversold was himself. Watch the tributes for how the conference handles a figure most of its leadership privately found useful and publicly found difficult.