Jeffrey Howard Archer, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare (15 April 1940 – 5 October 2026), was an English novelist and politician. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Louth (Lincolnshire) from 1969 to 1974, but did not seek re-election after almost going bankrupt. Archer revived his fortunes as a novelist. His novel Kane and Abel (1979) remains one of the best-selling books in the world, with an estimated 34 million copies sold globally. Overall, his books have sold more than 320 million copies worldwide.
Archer returned to politics and was the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party from 1985 to 1986; he resigned after a newspaper accused him of paying money to a sex worker. In 1987, he won a libel suit against the paper and was awarded large damages because of this claim. He was made a life peer in 1992 and subsequently became the first Conservative candidate to be selected as a candidate for mayor of London. He ended his candidacy in 1999 after it emerged that he had lied in the case in 1987. In 2001, he was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice, ending his active political career. He was released early in 2003.
Archer retired from the House of Lords in 2024. He died in October 2026, aged 86.
Early life Jeffrey Howard Archer was born on 15 April 1940 at the City of London Maternity Hospital in Holloway, London. He was two weeks old when his family moved to Somerset, eventually settling in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, where Archer spent most of his early life. The previous occupant of his bedroom was John Cleese.
His father, William (died 1956), was 64 years old when Archer was born. Early in his career, Archer gave conflicting accounts to the press of his father's supposed, but non-existent, military career. William was a bigamist, fraudster and conman who impersonated another William Archer, a deceased war medal holder. He was at different times employed as a chewing gum salesman in New York and a mortgage broker in London. In the latter capacity, he was charged at the Old Bailey with a series of fraud offences. On being released on bail, he absconded to the U.S. under the name of William Grimwood.
In the US, William fathered a child, Rosemary Turner (21 June 1917 – 11 October 1986), Jeffrey's half-sister. In 1940, Rosemary married lawyer Brien McMahon, who went on to become a Democratic senator for Connecticut (1945–1952) and a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952. After McMahon's death that year, Rosemary married, in 1953, the Ambassador of Belgium to the United States, Baron Robert Silvercruys. The First Lady, Mamie Eisenhower, was the guest-of-honour at their wedding.Scandal! Private Stories of Public Shame, Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson, 2003, pg 30They F*** You Up, Oliver James, 2010, pg 254
Wellington School In 1951, Archer won a scholarship to Wellington School in Somerset (not Wellington College in Berkshire, as he was later inclined to claim) after passing the 11-plus. At this time his mother, Lola, was employed as a journalist on Weston's local newspaper, the Weston Mercury. She wrote a weekly column entitled "Over the Teacups", and frequently wrote about Jeffrey, calling him Tuppence. Although Archer enjoyed the local fame this brought him, it caused him to be the victim of bullying while at Wellington School.
Archer left school with O-levels in English literature, art and history. He then spent a few years in a variety of jobs, including training with the army and a short period with the Metropolitan Police. He later worked as a physical education teacher, first at Vicar's Hill, a preparatory school in Hampshire, and later at Dover College in Kent.
Oxford In 1963, Archer was offered a place at the University of Oxford Delegacy of Extra-Mural Studies to study for a Diploma of Education. The course was based in the department, and Archer became a member of Brasenose College. There have been claims that Archer provided false evidence of his academic qualifications to Brasenose, the apparent citing of an U.S. institution which was actually a bodybuilding club, for instance, in gaining admission to the course. It has also been alleged Archer provided false statements about three non-existent A-Level passes and a U.S. university degree. Although the diploma course only lasted a year, Archer spent a total of three years at Oxford. At Oxford, Archer was successful in athletics, competing in sprinting and hurdling, and became president of the Oxford University Athletic Club in 1965–1966. His opposite number at the University of Cambridge, Wendell Mottley, became a lifelong friend. Television coverage survives of him making false starts in a 1964 sprint race, but he was not disqualified. He gained a blue in athletics and went on to run for England, and once competed for Great Britain. His time of 10.6 seconds for 100 yards (91.44 metres) is the joint second fastest time by a University of Oxford student.
Archer raised money for the charity Oxfam, obtaining the support of The Beatles in a fundraising drive. The band accepted his invitation to visit the Principal's lodge at Brasenose College, where they were photographed with Archer and dons of the college, although they did not play there. The critic Sheridan Morley, then a student at Merton, was present and recalled the occasion:
Early career After leaving Oxford, Archer continued as a charity fundraiser, initially working for the National Birthday Trust, a medical charity that promoted safe childbirth, before joining the United Nations Association (UNA) as its chief fundraiser. The then chairman of the UNA, Humphry Berkeley, alleged that there were numerous discrepancies in Archer's expense claims while he worked at the UNA.
Around this time, Archer began a career in politics, serving as a Conservative councillor for Havering on the Greater London Council (1967–1970).
Archer set up his own fundraising and public relations company, Arrow Enterprises, in 1969. That same year he opened an art gallery, the Archer Gallery, in Mayfair. It specialised in modern art, including pieces by the sculptor and painter Leon Underwood. The gallery ultimately lost money, however, and Archer sold it two years later.
Member of Parliament At 29, Archer was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for the Lincolnshire constituency of Louth, holding the seat for the Conservative Party in a by-election on 4 December 1969. Archer beat Ian Gow to the selection after winning over a substantial proportion of younger members at the selection meeting. The national party had concerns about Archer's selection, specifically relating to the UNA expenses allegations made by Humphry Berkeley, himself a former Conservative MP. Berkeley tried to persuade the Conservative Central Office that Archer was unsuitable as a parliamentary candidate. Archer brought a defamation action against Berkeley and the story was kept out of the press, although a truncated version of the story did appear in The Times. The case was eventually settled out of court, with Archer agreeing to pay legal costs of around £30,000.
Louth constituency had three key areas: Louth, Cleethorpes, and Immingham. During his time as an MP, Archer was a regular at the Immingham Conservative Club in the most working-class part of the constituency. In 1970 he took part in the Kennedy Memorial Test, a running/walking race from Louth to Skegness and back.
In parliament, Archer was on the left of the Conservative Party, rebelling against some of his party's policies. He advocated free TV licences for elderly people and was against museum entrance charges."Museum and Galleries (Admission Charges)" , Hansard, HC Deb 21 June 1971, vol 819, cc993-1067, col.1031-4 In 1971, he employed David Mellor to deal with his correspondence. He tipped Mellor to reach the cabinet.
Financial crisis In 1974, Archer was a casualty of a fraudulent investment scheme involving a Canadian company called Aquablast. The debacle lost him his first fortune and left him almost £500,000 in debt. Warned by Daily Mirror reporter Revel Barker – whom he misidentified as a fellow Oxford student – that as a bankrupt he could not be an MP, he announced that he would not be standing in the October 1974 general election "because of financial difficulties".The Last Pub In Fleet Street, Palatino, 2015, p. 129.
While he was a witness in the Aquablast case in Toronto in 1975, Archer was accused of stealing three suits from a department store.Paul Foot, "Those suits" , London Review of Books, 7 September 1995. Archer denied the accusation for many years, but in the late 1990s he finally acknowledged that he had taken the suits, although he claimed that at the time he had not realised he had left the shop. No charges were ever brought.
Writing career Archer wrote his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, in the autumn of 1974, as a means of avoiding bankruptcy. The book was picked up by the literary agent Deborah Owen and published first in the U.S., then eventually in Britain in the autumn of 1976. A radio adaptation was aired on BBC Radio 4 in the early 1980s and a BBC Television adaptation of the book was broadcast in 1990.
Kane and Abel (1979) proved to be his best-selling work, reaching number one on The New York Times bestseller list. Like most of his early work, it was edited by Richard Cohen, also an Olympic fencing gold-medallist. It was made into a television mini-series by CBS in 1985, starring Peter Strauss and Sam Neill. The following year, Granada TV screened a 10-part adaptation of another Archer bestseller, First Among Equals, which told the story of four men and their quest to become Prime Minister of Great Britain. In the U.S. edition of the novel, the character of Andrew Fraser was eliminated, reducing the number of protagonists to three.
As well as novels and short stories, Archer also penned three stage plays. The first, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, opened in 1987 and ran at the Queen's Theatre in London's West End for over a year. Archer's next play, Exclusive, opened at the Strand Theatre, London, in September 1989. It was not well-received by critics, and closed after a few weeks. His final play, The Accused, opened at the Theatre Royal, Windsor on 26 September 2000, before transferring to the Theatre Royal Haymarket in the West End in December.
In 1988, author Kathleen Burnett accused Archer of plagiarising a story she had written, and including it in his short-story collection, A Twist in the Tale. Archer denied he had plagiarised the story, claiming he had simply been inspired by the idea.
While Archer's books are commercially successful, critics have been generally unfavourable towards his writing."Lord Archer: A twist to every chapter" , BBC News, 19 July 2001. Journalist Hugo Barnacle, writing for The Independent about The Fourth Estate (1996), thought the novel, while demonstrating that "the editors don't seem to have done any work", was "not wholly unsatisfactory".
Archer said that he spent considerable time writing and re-writing each book. He travelled abroad to write the first draft, working in blocks of two hours at a time, then wrote anything up to 17 drafts in total.John Darnton "At Lunch With: Jeffrey Archer; An Author's Sweet Revenge: Joining the House of Lords" , New York Times, 18 August 1993. From 2010 on, Archer wrote the first draft of each new book at his villa in Mallorca, called "Writer's Block".
In 2011, Archer published the first of seven books in The Clifton Chronicles series, which follow the life of Harry Clifton from his birth in 1920, through to his funeral in 1993. The first novel in the series, Only Time Will Tell, tells the story of Clifton from 1920 through to 1940, and was published in the UK on 12 May 2011. The seventh and final novel in the series, This Was a Man, was published on 3 November 2016.