What Jeffrey Archer told me about injustice while still in prison

Jeffrey Archer liked attention. So dying in the middle of the Conservative Party conference, on the eve of the publication of his final novel and just as he was about to begin his last promotional campaign, was exquisite Jeffrey Archer timing. It was the only topic of conversation on the day before Kemi Badenoch’s leader’s speech.

He liked surprises, and no one expected him to die so suddenly. He was in terrific form right up to the end. On Friday he texted me asking for Ed Balls’ number. He was in full campaign mode to promote Adam & Eve, his final novel, and wanted to get himself on the Osborne/Balls podcast. As always, he was ruthlessly focused and relentless, like a Napoleonic general in pursuit of attention – for himself, his book and, above all, his readers.

Few writers in history have pursued readers with such strategic intensity. The commercial hunger that powered his first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, never left him. Published in 1976, it began a career in which he would sell more than 300 million books worldwide.

He called me three times last week as we played phone tag. Once, I was talking to the Home Secretary in Liverpool.

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t take my call,” he joked.

He wanted to know every nuance of the Burnham Labour Party conference and was passionately enthusiastic and inquisitive about how Badenoch was doing. He quoted poll numbers and had a warm view of her, even if she did not quite match the status of his heroine, Margaret Thatcher, who had elevated him to the House of Lords.

Politics was seared into his blood. His famous parties in the penthouse suite overlooking the House of Commons were always flooded with Tories, past and present – increasingly an older, sometimes very old, guard. That was why, last year, he had declared that his party, with its Krug and shepherd’s pie, would be his final one. Too many of his friends, he felt, were too old or had died.

It now seems almost as if he was unconsciously preparing for his own departure: one final party, one final book.

I had known him since 1995, when I was literary editor of The Sunday Times, and I bought from him the serial rights to his latest book. We met at the Caprice, where he had his favourite corner table. He ordered his usual Diet Coke, having driven himself there in his Mini and parked nearby.

We shook hands on the price – one pound, as I remember – and he immediately emphasised it in that machine-gun-fast, slightly staccato delivery of his:

“Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less.”

He relished quoting the title of the book he had written after almost going bankrupt. He was the master of the unexpected twist and turn, in fiction and in his own life.

For more than thirty years he was part of my life. We went to the theatre, which he loved, and he became a relentless angel investor. He was good company, relentlessly boastful and yet entirely teasable. He hated looking back. He was not a dweller. He believed himself extraordinarily lucky and had little interest in revisiting the upsets and brickbats of his past. Self-contemplation was not his style.

Sometimes he was easily hoisted on his own petard. He hated anyone being even a minute late and chastised me relentlessly when traffic delayed me. When the same thing happened to him, and I turned the tables, he sheepishly simpered. Once, after boasting about several brilliant investments and the houses he owned in Mayfair, he said to me:

“I will always be richer than you but, annoyingly, you will always have a richer life.”

Well, that is debatable.

Just a few weeks ago I attended a lavish lunch at his home in Grantchester, the Old Rectory, once the home of the poet Rupert Brooke. In a vast marquee he entertained around 200 people to celebrate his and Mary’s 60th wedding anniversary.

He gave a witty and adoring speech to his wife, who sang. John Major gave a tribute of remarkable warmth and wit. Badenoch and her husband Hamish were there, as were some of the last vestiges of the Thatcher cabinet, alongside Jeffrey’s children and grandchildren, who gave touching speeches.

It was a party that felt like a vindication of his rehabilitation: after a life as a peer, perjurer, bestseller, jailbird, record-breaking charity auctioneer, collector of Tory leaders as friends and passionate supporter of athletes, he had somehow come through the extraordinary arc of his own life to this moment of public affection.

It was also almost a public renewal of his wedding vows – particularly remarkable for a man who had been jailed for perjury after lying about an affair.

Jeffrey had always relished the twists of life. He had experienced loyalty and disdain in equal measure.

At the nadir of his life, when he was jailed, I visited him at home when he was allowed out towards the end of his time in prison. He was quiet and utterly exhausted emotionally. He had been sentenced to four years for perjury and perverting the course of justice and was eventually released early in 2003.

His imprisonment was particularly bitter because, in his eyes, he had already suffered an extraordinary public humiliation. He was furious at the rules governing his release. On one occasion, after he had spent nine months in an open prison, he breached the conditions of his home leave by attending a social lunch and was transferred back to a more restrictive prison. He had been careful not even to drink alcohol; the offence was the visit itself.

He was hurt and furious. The press – and, he felt, the political establishment – had delighted in his downfall.

Yet even while stinging from what he regarded as unfairness and injustice, he understood that he simply had to suck it up.

“There are many more people in prison who are suffering injustices and unfairness far greater than mine,” he told me.

He then wrote a brilliant account of prison life in A Prison Diary, a work as sharply observed and dramatically constructed as any of his thrillers. It was so perceptive that one reviewer suggested it should be required reading for every Home Secretary.

In it, he referred to those who had stayed loyal and described me as a “foul-weather friend”. He was painfully aware of the damage he had caused himself.

His book tour for that volume was fought with the same ferocious determination to find readers that he brought to every book. He would sign copies with his prison number and sometimes add a cartoon sketch of a man in prison uniform.

That was Jeffrey: he could turn even disgrace into material, and material into a campaign.

Bumptious, irrepressible and, at times, utterly insensitive, the “extrovert’s extrovert”, as Margaret Thatcher called him, was also extraordinarily generous. He raised millions for charity, became a champion fundraiser and a darling of Conservative constituency associations. As a charity auctioneer, he could command a room, make people laugh and persuade them to bid again. Friends remember him as fiercely loyal and generous with his time. There were also others who felt his looseness with the truth was inexcusable.

His life was as theatrical and dramatic as it is possible to make a life in eight decades: poverty, bankruptcy, prison, peerage, fame, fortune, politics, disgrace, rehabilitation, family, and an adoring wife whom he betrayed but whose love and importance to him he never ceased to acknowledge.

And then there was the writing. For fifty years he was obsessed with the business of storytelling. He rewrote and rewrote, drove himself through draft after draft and treated the pursuit of readers almost as a competitive sport. His final novel, Adam & Eve, is set around the Second World War and grew from his fascination with the decisions that might have changed its course. He announced that it would be his last, after half a century of storytelling.

He was still promoting it on Sunday night, appearing with Gyles Brandreth before a packed Leicester Square Theatre audience. Brandreth said he was in “the most wonderful, ebullient form”. He was due to continue the tour this week.

Instead, he died suddenly and peacefully at home, between writing sessions, at the age of 86. He spent his life writing stories about reversals, surprises and the unexpected turn. His own life supplied more twists than any novelist could plausibly invent. He would, I suspect, have appreciated the timing. And, as ever, he made sure everyone was talking about Jeffrey Archer.