Exasperating to his friends, infuriating to his foes, but entertaining to the end: Jeffrey Archer's outrageous life saw him survive prison with help from a murderer and amass a £200m fortune

In 1974, Jeffrey Archer lost everything. The then MP for Louth in Lincolnshire had taken out a second mortgage on the £100,000 family home in The Boltons, Kensington, and borrowed further cash from a friend to invest £350,000 in a Canadian industrial cleaning company called Aquablast. He had been assured it would make him a millionaire.

Except Aquablast was a scam. By the time the company went into liquidation, Archer was declared bankrupt, and his wife, Mary, was seven months pregnant with their second child. Archer was forced to give up his Parliamentary seat, and it seemed as though all was lost.

But Jeffrey Howard Archer was to make a lifelong habit of bouncing back from adversity. Aged 34, penniless and with a growing family, he picked up a pen and set about writing his first novel: ‘Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less.’ The book went on to become a best-seller and sparked a 50-year writing career comprising 31 novels, three stage plays and numerous short stories.

By the time of his death yesterday at the age of 86, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare had not only sold more than 320 million books across 115 countries, but lived a life more curious, colourful and at times outrageous than any he could have concocted on the page.

Not only a best-selling author, but an outstanding amateur athlete, a prolific art collector, Conservative MP – and later Deputy Party Chairman under Margaret Thatcher – Jeffrey Archer served two years and two days in prison for perjury in 2001, only to get out and return to his seat in the House of Lords and continue his literary career undiminished. Indeed, his death came just a day before the publication of his final novel Adam and Eve, out today, Tuesday, October 6.

By the time of his death at the age of 86, former MP and author Jeffrey Archer had lived a life more curious, colourful and outrageous than any he could have concocted on the page

Jeffrey Archer after he declared victory as Conservative MP in the Louth by-election in 1969

But Archer, born in north London in 1940, did not confine his fiction to the page. He was a prodigious fibber who turned the lie into an art form and so skewered the truth that in 2001 the journalist Kevin Maguire claimed even Archer ‘would not have dared to create a character so untruthful as himself'.

His first great untruth was that, having been elected to represent the Lincolnshire constituency of Louth at the tender age of 29 in 1969, he was the youngest ever MP. In fact, he wasn’t even the youngest MP elected that year, for in April 1969 Bernadette Devlin won in Mid-Ulster aged just 22. Just five weeks before his own by-election victory, Christopher Ward also joined the House at the age of 25. Archer also allegedly inflated his O Levels to get into Oxford, claimed a non-existent year at Sandhurst on his CV and painted his father as a war hero despite him being a bigamist and a fraud who absconded to the US to avoid arrest.

And yet, Jeffrey Archer always seemed to get away with it. His errant tongue only served to strengthen his image as an affable rogue of endless ambition and one of the greatest storytellers of his generation. As the blurb reads on the front of his 1996 novel The Fourth Estate: ‘If there were a Nobel Prize for storytelling, Archer would win.’

Prior to publishing his first book, Archer enjoyed a very short stint as an army recruit – one fellow soldier recalled he was ‘hugely insensitive and amazingly pleased with himself’ – and five months with the Metropolitan Police on the beat in Brixton, south London. He also claimed in his early twenties to have 'sailed to California via Scotland and the Panama Canal on a tramp steamer’, raised half a million dollars for a Canadian charity and obtained a degree from Berkeley in California. According to those who knew the young Archer – which included his good friend Princess Diana – recollections may vary.

Regardless, he made his first foray into politics serving as a Tory Councillor for Havering on the Greater London Council where he earned the nickname ‘Mr 10 per cent’ for helping councillors with their expenses in return for a cut of the remuneration. He later became an MP in December 1969, winning the Louth by-election.

After his five years in Parliament were cut short by bankruptcy, the man Margaret Thatcher once described as the ‘extrovert’s extrovert’ finally turned to novel writing. It was really his third novel, Kane and Abel, published in 1979, that catapulted Archer to fame and riches and it remains one of the best-selling books of all time, having shifted more than 30 million copies globally – more than The Great Gatsby and Gone With the Wind. It was later adapted for television starring Ed Begley Jr and François-Eric Gendron. Despite his prolific output, Archer claimed later in life not to know how to turn on a computer and that he wrote all his novels by hand in felt-tip pen on lined paper.

Archer met his wife Mary – made a Dame in 2012 for services to the NHS – when she was a 19-year-old chemistry student at Oxford. The pair married in 1966

Not only a Conservative MP and best-selling author, Archer was also an outstanding amateur athlete, serving as President of the Oxford University Athletic Club from 1965–1966 

The riches that inevitably came with his extraordinary literary success – estimated at over £200million by the time of his death – were put to good use, not least with the accumulation of an enviable art collection, something the writer termed his ‘real passion’. It is something of legend that at his frequent lunch parties and infamous Christmas parties – featuring Krug champagne and shepherd’s pie – Archer would tell guests enquiring after the whereabouts of the loo: ‘turn left at the Picasso and right at the Monet’. Archer’s collection, about 10 per cent of which he auctioned off for over £5million in 2011 at Christie’s in London, also included pieces by L S Lowry, Andy Warhol and Camille Pissarro.

But there was trouble too. And indeed, one almighty lie that led to Archer’s dramatic fall from grace. In 1987, Archer successfully sued the Daily Star newspaper after it claimed the writer had paid £2,000 to sleep with prostitute Monica Coghlan. He was duly awarded a mouth-watering half a million in damages, the equivalent of £1.5million today.

However, in July 2001, Archer was found guilty on two counts of perjury and two of perverting the course of justice during the 1987 trial and was sentenced to four years in prison.

When the perjury allegations first surfaced in 1999, the Sunday Telegraph led with the headline: ‘Jeffrey Archer destroyed.’

Indeed, Archer endured a public evisceration around the turn of the Millennium and was forced to stand down from the London Mayoralty race despite having decisively won the Tory candidacy.

And yet, who would have been so foolish as to bet against a man who seemed to rise from every fall like a coiled target at a fairground shooting gallery?

Archer went down in 2001 and spent two years at Her Majesty’s pleasure where he claimed to have survived courtesy of protection from a fellow inmate and murderer known as Big Al, and by paying other inmates to source a steady supply of Cussons soap and soft pillows.

Archer then emerged in 2003, seemingly unscathed, returned to the House of Lords, to which he had been appointed in 1992 by Sir John Major and continued to write novels, even publishing three volumes of prison diaries.

After his five years in Parliament were cut short by bankruptcy, the man Margaret Thatcher once described as the ‘extrovert’s extrovert’ turned to novel writing

The infamous perjury conviction, however, wasn’t his only brush with the law. Years previously, Archer had been accused of stealing three suits from a store in Canada, walking out without paying. Although no charges were brought, the allegation did resurface in 1999 when Archer stood to be London Mayor. Undeterred, Archer gave in rebuttal the explanation that he had inadvertently walked over a footbridge connecting two separate stores without realising they were separate institutions. His ingenious explanation was only brought down when it emerged the footbridge in question hadn’t been built at the time.

Archer met his wife Mary – made a Dame in 2012 for services to the NHS – when she was a 19-year-old chemistry student at Oxford. Although it was love at first sight for him, he claimed she didn’t initially feel the same way. The pair married in 1966 and by the time Archer was on trial for perjury, Mary admitted in the witness box the two had ‘explored the further reaches of “for better or worse” far more than some other couples’.

Lady Mary, who – along with their two sons and five grandchildren – survives her husband, was a distinguished scientist and even made it onto the board of the now-defunct Anglia TV. The appointment coincided with her husband purchasing shares in the company, leading to allegations of insider dealing which were strongly denied and, though they came to nothing, Mary resigned four months later.

And yet for all her professional success, Mary is perhaps best known for being described as a vision of ‘elegance, fragrance and radiance’ by the overly sympathetic Mr Justice Caulfield while summing up the 1987 libel action that preceded the perjury allegation.

In Jeffrey Archer’s final interview, conducted with this newspaper, he revealed his love and admiration for Mary was unmoved by 60 years of marriage: ‘I adore the woman,’ he said. ‘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.’

Archer remained active into his later life, at 70 still going to the gym three times a week: ‘It's 20 minutes running, 20 minutes of weights and 20 minutes stretching,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2011. ‘And I’m writing a book a year. I'm not slowing down.’ Physical exercise had been a part of his life from his school days, when he started lifting weights after bullies cruelly nicknamed him ‘the Pune'.

He also continued to umpire cricket matches around London. Though not content with a merely watching brief, Archer allegedly used to give batters out ‘simply because he liked to be regularly involved,’ according to one friend.

Archer seen walking through the grounds of Hollesley Bay Prison in July 2003, ahead of his release later that month

Archer had various high-profile friendships throughout his career, including with Princess Diana, pictured at Harrods, London, in 1996. The pair are seen alongside actor Omar Sharif and doctor Magdi Yacoub

Upon news of his death yesterday, Kate Elton, UK CEO of publishing house HarperCollins, said: ‘It has been one of the great privileges of my publishing life to have been Jeffrey Archer's editor. He was the master storyteller and an editor's dream – phenomenally hard-working, utterly committed to completing draft after draft to get every word as perfect as possible, and a true champion of the team nature of great publishing.’

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch added to the tributes, writing on X: ‘I am incredibly saddened to hear this news. He had sent me a lovely message just this morning and was always a great source of encouragement to me personally’.

Archer’s death came just a day after he had appeared with lifelong friend Gyles Brandreth at a show in London promoting his new book Adam and Eve.

Upon the opening of Archer’s play Exclusive at The Strand in 1989, Brandreth – who seemed to love and loathe Archer in equal measure – wrote in his diaries: ‘To his face we tease him. Behind his back we mock him. But I notice we don't stay away.’

And there is the measure of the man: exasperating to his friends, infuriating to his foes, but entertaining to the end. He may have had a personalised number plate declaring: ANY 1, but Jeffrey Archer was never anything but himself.