July 19, 2001

6:57 AM

Archer sentenced to 4 years...This may not mean much to those from outside the UK but there will be celebrations in much of England tonight as the 'Teflon Tory' finally takes fall. Sometimes justice is done, even to politicians with immense arrogance, money and no apparent morals. The scale of the web of deceit is fascinating and the ending quite poetic.
posted by Mr Ed (19 comments total)

He couldn't have written it. Not with his dearth of literary talent, as opposed to that for self-fabrication.

I do hope he goes to the Scrubs.
posted by holgate at 7:05 AM on July 19, 2001

Wow...

The disintegration of the Tory party continues.

As a consolation for eighteen years of Tory rule it's small but not unvalued.
posted by Grangousier at 7:20 AM on July 19, 2001

Try www.popbitch.com for some real archer-based vitriol.
There's also an online petition ;)
(not suitable for minors)

Portillo and Archer what a week!
posted by fullerine at 7:22 AM on July 19, 2001

And sending a theatre critic along to review the trial was cruel but...

But nothing. Cruelty can be fun.
posted by Grangousier at 7:31 AM on July 19, 2001

Wait a minute...the crap novelist is a British lord? Did you give him that for his books, I hope not?

To the end, Archer's resilience, self-absorption and absence of humility shone through. Those qualities will be sorely tested in the months to come. Somehow, I really like that. He may have been a jerk, it seems (I know his books are for shit, imho) but at least he was honest about it.
posted by Ezrael at 7:39 AM on July 19, 2001

Jeffrey Archer has never been honest about anything, ever.

He was made a Lord back in the days of Thatcher (wasn't it her leaving-office honours list thing?), because he gave a lot of money to The Party, treated The Empress Thatch with the obsequiousness that she craved and...

Why? How did they get away with making him a Peer?

It can't have been the Kurd Aid thing (didn't a lot of that money go, er, astray anyway?) so what was their excuse?
posted by Grangousier at 7:44 AM on July 19, 2001

Sorry, ignorant american here. What's a peer?
posted by jnthnjng at 8:10 AM on July 19, 2001

A "peer" is a lord or whatever - a toff.
posted by Mocata at 8:38 AM on July 19, 2001

I'd just like to say... Yes!!!!!

The scrubs would be good, but you just know that's not going to happen. Is Aitken out of pris yet? Maybe they could hook up - that would be nice :-)
posted by pascal at 9:08 AM on July 19, 2001

I'm afraid I don't see what the fuss is about. So he had some affairs, so he lied about them - big deal. That's his business and none of anybody else's. Maybe it makes him someone I wouldn't particularly want to be friends with, but why is he being put in prison for it?

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:46 AM on July 19, 2001

Maybe it makes him someone I wouldn't particularly want to be friends with, but why is he being put in prison for it?

Well, his perjury helped him get a record libel award out of a UK court, which makes it other people's business. And even without the half-million quid, perjury on that scale is usually an offense worthy of inprisonment.

But, to give the case a wider perspective, it marks the denoument of a life of fiction built upon fiction. And now, the chickens have come home to roost.
posted by holgate at 11:57 AM on July 19, 2001

Mars - He didn't just lie about having affairs. He has lied about his education (claiming that he has degrees from Brasenose College, Oxford and Berkeley in California, whereas in fact he left school at fifteen or sixteen with the bare minimum of qualifications), he has claimed that his father was the Consul of Singapore whereas he was in fact a journalist in Weston Super Mare (some reports have his father as a conman). Also:

Archer is an associate member of the DCM League, which you can only join if you or a close relative have won the Distinguished Conduct Medal. When asked by a League spokesman if his father William Archer had won the medal, Archer replied: "I rarely talk about my father and his DCM". No doubt because his father didn't win the Distinguished Conduct Medal at all, it was in fact a completely different William Arche (quote from Have I Got News For You, a satirical quiz show).

[S]ome years ago he had to return money to the UN Association - a charitable body - after it was reported in the Press that no fewer than 69 of his expense claims had proved to be false. Despite this, he has continued to raise money for charity, although he claimed that his Simple Truth concert for the Kurds had raised over 57 million pounds, whereas the Simple Truth was that it only raised four million pounds. Easily confused. In his speech to the Kurds earlier this year, he tried to win them over by urging them to chant 'Bijou Kurdistan' which he thought meant 'Long Live Kurdistan'. This in fact would have been 'Bijit Kurdistan' - 'bijou' meaning 'bastard'. Strangely, none of them joined in.. (HIGNFY again)

On another occasion he was arrested for tryng to shoplift by walking out of a store in Canada carrying a suit - he claimed he was looking for the shirt department.

When Jeffrey married, under 'job title' on his marriage certificate, he marked "research assistant". He was not a research assistant, but his wife was. So he presumably copied her. (messybusiness web site - not funny and two years out of date, don't bother with it)

There was another scandal involving insider trading some years ago.

The case for which he has gone down originated as a libel action he initiated against a newspaper which claimed that he'd been seeing a prostitute. They demonstrated that he'd paid her £2000, handed over at a railway station. During that trial he also got friends (and possibly his wife) to purjure to cover for him, and paid someone a large amount of money to leave the country until the libel trial was over. Archer's wife Mary testified for him during that trial (the judge was evidently smitten, decalring her "fragrant", virtually instructing the jury to find for Archer on her word). He won considerable damages. I can't remember whether it was these damages or something else that he invested in the stock market after claiming that he'd given it to charity.

Big time liar.

And it's difficult to underestimate the level of hatred some of us still feel for the Tories, particularly people like Archer and Portillo who were darlings of Maggie the Merciless, Empress of the Known Universe.
posted by Grangousier at 12:55 PM on July 19, 2001

Oh, he definitely seems like a prick. But at least, whatever his multitudionous faults, he didn't back down when they came to bite him on the ass. I'm ultimately just admiring his cheek, as my granny would say. If you're going to go down anyway, you should go down swinging.

Seems to me like he's a modern example of hubris finally catching up to a person.
posted by Ezrael at 1:48 PM on July 19, 2001

Oh, he definitely seems like a prick. But at least, whatever his multitudinous faults, he didn't back down when they came to bite him on the ass. I'm ultimately just admiring his cheek, as my granny would say. If you're going to go down anyway, you should go down swinging.

Seems to me like he's a modern example of hubris finally catching up to a person.
posted by Ezrael at 1:48 PM on July 19, 2001

I won't be 'celebrating', I quite like him. Not sure why but I do.
posted by wackybrit at 2:41 PM on July 19, 2001

Damn doublepost.
posted by Ezrael at 3:02 PM on July 19, 2001

I'm not sure he has gone down swinging. More like he thought he could get away with it yet again, and is now wondering what has changed. There's talk that his wife may now be investigated for perjury in *this* trial...

He's got off with so much - there was the feeling that, being rich + famous, he was above the law.

However, watching the fat old Tory bastards getting the knife in on the news tonight it became clear that he's also getting it from the other side - looks like he was considered "new money"...

He'll go to a soft prison - like Aitken - and I suspect he'll spend the time usefully writing. To do all he's done, he must be tough + driven.
posted by andrew cooke at 3:20 PM on July 19, 2001

My first comment when I heard the news was, "Great. He'll have lots of free time to write another fucking book..."

If there's ever a man who richly deserved jail, it's Archer. What I don't understand is how the jury took so long deliberating. The evidence appeared clearcut to me. Obvously, when you follow a trial in the newspapers, you only see a snapshot of what goes on. But still...
posted by salmacis at 3:28 AM on July 20, 2001

Thank you, Grangousier.
I'm glad the creep is finally going down (barring a successful appeal), but I think it was a crap charge.
The newspaper should never have printed the story in the first place.
If he'd just ignored the story, spent a year in the country and then returned to public life, it'd all be forgotten by now, like Hugh Grant's contretemps.
He was Lewinskied, but didn't get away with it.
posted by flowerdale at 6:33 PM on July 21, 2001