Posted on 10/06/2026 4:18:09 AM PDT by Cronos
Jeffrey Archer, a best-selling British author, politician, philanthropist, athlete and one-time jailbird whose résumé seesawed between achievement and disgrace, and who inspired abiding public fascination with headline-grabbing accounts, both fictional and personal, of ambition, self-promotion, misbehavior and scandal, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 86
...In his days as a politician — both as a member of Parliament in the elected House of Commons and as deputy head of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party — he displayed a barely veiled hunger for the top job. His friendships and alliances eventually won him a place in the unelected House of Lords with the title Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare — his childhood hometown in southwest England.
A political Houdini, he survived many vicissitudes, including a perjury conviction in 2001, when he was found guilty of creating false diaries and concocting a story to win a trial over whether he had slept with a prostitute to whom he paid hush money.
He once said that politics was his first choice of career, but it was from his 40-plus books that he amassed wealth, starting with a novel entitled “Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less,” published 1976 after he had been defrauded of his personal fortune and stepped down as a lawmaker. “I was so low I would have sold fake Gucci bags on street corners,” he told Chicago Tribune. “Once you’ve lost a million dollars, you may as well have lost a hundred million dollars.”
According to an unauthorized Archer biography, “Stranger Than Fiction” (1995), by the British journalist Michael Crick, he felt a greater affinity for the showbiz aspects of American public life and once said, “If I was born today and wanted to go into politics, I would want to be born in the United States.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I read and enjoyed his 7-book series “The Clifton Chronicles”, but that’s about it. Didn’t realize he was also a politician, among other things.
Wow. I hate to hear that. Hands down one of my favorite authors. Really hate to hear that.
Thank you for posting this.
Great author, quite a controversial human. Spent some time in prison after he was famous. That gave him a lot of writing material.
Meanwhile, today’s “Shoe” cartoon references another well-known writer, John Grisham.
Big name in the 70s and 80s. First Among Equals is a modern classic.
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