[8] He was two weeks old when his family moved to Somerset, eventually settling in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare,[9] where Archer spent most of his early life.
[7] 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.
There have been claims that Archer provided false evidence of his academic qualifications to Brasenose, the apparent citing of an American institution which was actually a bodybuilding club, for instance, in gaining admission to the course.
[25] 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.
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.
[7] 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".
[31] 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.
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.
[36] In 1988, author Kathleen Burnett accused Archer of plagiarizing a story she had written, and including it in his short-story collection, A Twist in the Tale.
[38] 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".
[16] During his tenure as deputy chairman, Archer was responsible for a number of embarrassing moments, including his statement, made during a live radio interview, that many young, unemployed people were simply unwilling to find work.
The judge then went on to say of Jeffrey Archer: "Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?
The editor of the Daily Star, Lloyd Turner, was sacked six weeks after the trial by the paper's owner Lord Stevens of Ludgate.
[50] Adam Raphael soon afterwards found proof that Archer had perjured himself at the trial, but his superiors were unwilling to take the risk of a potentially costly libel case.
[47] When Saddam Hussein suppressed Kurdish uprisings in 1991, Archer, with the Red Cross, set up the charity Simple Truth, a fundraising campaign on behalf of the Kurds.
[52] In May 1991, Archer organised a charity pop concert, starring Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Sting and Gloria Estefan, who all performed free of charge.
The following day, Jeffrey Archer bought 50,000 shares in Anglia Television, acting on behalf of a friend, Broosk Saib.
[34] In 1999, Archer had been selected by the Conservative Party as candidate for the London mayoral election of 2000, with the support of two former Prime Ministers, Baroness Thatcher and John Major.
[61] On 21 November 1999 the News of the World published allegations made by Ted Francis, a former friend, that Archer had committed perjury in his 1987 libel case.
[62] Simultaneously, Archer starred in a production of his own courtroom play The Accused, staged at London's Theatre Royal Haymarket.
The play concerned the court trial of an alleged murderer and assigned the role of jury to the audience, which would vote on the guilt of Archer's character at the end of each performance.
Despite automatically qualifying as a category "D" prisoner, given it was a first conviction and he did not pose a serious risk of harm to the public, his status as such was suspended pending a police investigation into allegations about his Kurdish charity.
[78] During his imprisonment, Archer was visited by a number of high-profile friends, including actor Donald Sinden[79] and entertainer Barry Humphries.
[87] In July 2001, shortly after Archer was jailed for perjury, Scotland Yard began investigating allegations that millions of pounds had disappeared from his Kurdish charity.
[89] In 2004, the government of Equatorial Guinea alleged that Archer was one of the financiers of the failed 2004 coup d'état attempt against it, citing bank details and telephone records as evidence.
In 2011, Mann, imprisoned in Equatorial Guinea for his role in leading the failed 2004 coup d'état but released on humanitarian grounds later, told The Daily Telegraph that his forthcoming book, Cry Havoc, would reveal "the financial involvement of a controversial and internationally famous member of the British House of Lords in the plot, backed up by banking records."
He claimed documents from the bank accounts in Guernsey of two companies Mann used as vehicles for organising the coup, showed a 'J H Archer' paying $135,000 into one of the firms.
[96] Following the near-bankruptcy of the Aquablast scandal, by the early 1980s, Archer was back in a comfortable financial position and began to hold shepherd's pie and Krug parties for prominent people at his London penthouse, which overlooks the River Thames and the Houses of Parliament.
"[98] Ian Hislop and Nick Newman's 1994 BBC Radio 4 satirical series Gush purported to be "written by master storyteller Archie Jeffries".
[99] In the Amazon series (originally a novel by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman) Good Omens, a reference is made by one of the angels in Aziraphale's bookshop: "Something smells evil."