When the death of Jeffrey Archer was announced on Monday night, most new organisations were careful to balance the best-selling author and former senior Tory’s achievements with his disgrace. The BBC News website’s headline was “Jeffrey Archer: successful novelist, disgraced politician and convicted liar”.
Yet The Daily Telegraph, house organ of the Conservative Party that Archer represented as an MP and as deputy chair before being forced out by separate scandals, seemed to regard a key part of the Archer story as not worthy of mention.
Its initial story, by India McTaggart, was 14 paragraphs long but did not mention the small matter of the peer’s four-year prison sentence for perjury, or the other allegations of lying and wrongdoing that swirled around him.
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The story has since been updated, and readers must now plough through 26 paragraphs of tributes (including some from Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel and a considerably more serious figure, Gyles Brandreth) before learning that “Margaret Thatcher appointed him deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in September 1985, but he resigned a year later after the News of the World reported that money had been paid on his behalf to Monica Coghlan, a sex worker. Lord Archer sued the Daily Star, which had alleged that he had slept with Coghlan, and in 1987, he was awarded £500,000 in libel damages.
“He was made a life peer in 1992. In 1999, information emerged showing that Lord Archer had lied during the trial and after an investigation and a further trial, he was jailed for four years in 2001, having been convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice.”
The Telegraph also brought in chief obituary writer Jake Kerridge to praise his literary works (“Jeffrey Archer deserved more respect” while briefly mentioning his “rackety life”). The paper’s official obit, meanwhile, carried the cheery headline: “Jeffrey Archer, best-selling writer and Tory MP with an incomparably colourful personal life”. His story, the copy foamed, was “a tale of ambition, power, money and sexual intrigue, with more unexpected twists and turns than one of his novels”.
You can almost imagine the conversation in his Belmarsh cell: “What are you in for, then?” “An incomparably colourful personal life, mate. What time is lights out?”
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