The Fragrance And The Stink

The Observer carries one obituary per week, and this week’s was of the novelist and screenwriter Peter Prince. Thoroughly deserving, but not the vastly more famous poster girl for assisted suicide, Dame Esther Rantzen. Her death has been underreported compared to the saturation coverage that might have been expected, and which was accorded to that of Sir Jimmy Savile. I hope that the Sunday People will look into the present state of the man known variously as Mark Standish, Alex Standish and Alex Cavendish, and who was once prolific on Twitter as @PrisonUK. The media should also check in on Ben Fellows. When Rantzen supposedly discovered that at least one of her homes had been used at least once for the sexual abuse of at least one child, a girl of five, then her only concern was for her house. Either all is about to be revealed, or every sinew is being strained to ensure that nothing was. Similarly, A.N. Wilson writes:

A nice radio presenter, Kate McGann of Times Radio, said on the morning after Jeffrey Archer’s death that he had his sins and faults but he was not a man to deny this.

She is very young, and clearly was not aware of the fact that in 1986, a Sunday newspaper splashed a headline, “Tory boss Archer pays off vice girl”. (Archer was Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party). The “vice girl” was a woman called Monica Coghlan. Archer had been seen on a London railway station being given £2,000 hush money by one of Archer’s buddies. Archer denied the claims of the News of the World and The People. He sued for libel and got over half a million pounds in damages. The judge in the trial was so besotted by Mrs Archer, a pretty, rather snooty chemistry don, that he told the jury that it was unthinkable that a man with a “fragrant” wife like Mary could ever dally with the likes of poor Coghlan.

It was a deeply ugly episode not only in Archer’s life, but in that of the sleazy Conservative Party. Everyone knew that Archer was lying, and he was eventually had up for perjury. I was Literary Editor of the Standard at the time and he came to one of our Lit Lunches at the Dorchester to promote a book only days before his trial. I introduced him to the audience by saying he did not need to say anything but that anything he did say might be taken down and used in evidence. He was absolutely furious and began to denounce me from the podium, shouting, perfectly accurately, that his books sold in far greater numbers than my own! I am sure this was true, but at the same time, I remain very sceptical about the claims made by Archer that his books sold in tens of millions. 

I attended every day of his trial for perjury. The judge, Mr Justice Potts, said that it was the worst level of perjury he had ever encountered and he warned ‘Lady’ Archer that the things she had said in the witness box were themselves demonstrable falsehoods. While the trial was going on, Archer laid on a weird stage show at the Haymarket Theatre called The Accused. At the end of the play, in which he was standing trial, the audience had to vote whether he was guilty or not guilty. The night I went to the show, he was found guilty by the miserably small audience. I went back to his dressing room and he apologised for the small audience. ‘It’s this rail strike,’ he explained. ‘We had a full house booked but all the trains from the suburbs have been cancelled.’

There was no strike happening that week. Like many of the things he said, it was completely untrue. When we parted, in the Haymarket, I followed him up the street. He darted down a dark alley near Leicester Square. I felt I was in a spy novel, as I quickened my pace as he turned one dark corner, then another. It was clear that he knew all the dingy, sad, dark places where the likes of Coghlan stand in the shadows hoping for business. Next day, I was in court again, as was he, listening to the evidence.

This was a man who had trained as a gym instructor in Oxford and been permitted to use the gym at Brasenose College. This went down in Who’s Who as a man who had been to Brasenose College, Oxford. He also claimed to have attended Wellington College, but he had in fact lived in a village called Wellington which happened to have a school.

Almost everything about Archer was fraudulent. His editor at Hodder and Stoughton, Richard Cohen, told me that his ‘books’ would arrive in the form of a few exercise books full of semi-literate scrawls. Cohen employed a team of English graduates to write the books. Archer had a good idea for plots but was all but incapable of writing. When he died, his editor at HarperCollins spoke of the number of times he tolerated his books being ‘edited’. Evidently, he had learnt to write since leaving Cohen, but it sounds as if what others would call editing others would call rewriting.

Back to the libel and perjury trials. Archer was sent down for four years. The claims made by him and his wife that they had given away the half million of damages to charity was proven in court to be quite untrue. A few very modest donations had been made to the likes of Ely Cathedral restoration fund. No actual charity, ie money given to help people, rather than insure the Archers invitations to concerts, was ever demonstrated.

As for Coghlan, the story is much, much sadder. Archer and the Fragrant Chemist continued to live in the Old Vicarage at Grantchester and to be beloved by Tory Grandees. It had been clear that Coghlan was telling the truth at the libel trial. She told the jury that he had a spotty back, and a decent judge would at that moment have asked Archer to take his shirt off. Archer, and the Establishment, were determined to silence her and when a few thousand used notes in an envelope did not work, she mysteriously died in a car crash. I have no doubt in my mind that Archer was responsible for meddling with the brakes. He was a bad, bad man. Michael Crick asked, ‘The big puzzle is not how Archer gets away with it time and again, but why he is allowed to.’

Yet the Leader of the Conservative Party described herself as heartbroken that he had died. Does she spend even half a minute thinking of Coghlan, a woman whose life was absolutely wretched and which ended violently because of Archer’s criminality? Stig Abell on Times Radio said that Archer’s books had helped many people to love literature. But the books are rubbish. Trash. Archer’s whole life was an uninterrupted series of frauds, lies, deceptions and crimes, including murder. I was reminded of old Malcolm Muggeridge saying that the British so loved old men, that had Oscar Wilde lived to 86, they would have made him Chief Scout.