Falling among fans

Byron Rogers

A PRISON DIARY by FF 8282

Macmillan, £14.99, pp. 259, ISBN 1405020946

Iremember the day, the time, the place. Discussing the world's news with the village butcher, I brought up the perjury trial, and he said, 'Who?' Silent among the sausages in Greens Norton, I looked at him with a wild surmise. Remember this: in July 2001, it was still possible to meet an Englishman who had not heard of Jeffrey Archer. Never glad confident morning again.

It is Michael Crick I feel most sorry for. When you appoint yourself a man's personal nemesis you do not expect to find that in the process you are obliged to be a biographer to all of central casting. One by one they pop up: the police constable, the gym master, the only president of the Oxford University Athletics Club to have been neither graduate nor undergraduate, the charity fund-raiser, politician, bestselling novelist, husband of the enigmatic Mary, successful litigant, perjurer, convict.

And still they come, for ruin is a mere incidental detail to this remarkable man, or men. It would not be that much of a surprise were he to end up, without ordination, as Archbishop of Canterbury, just as that other great self-publicist Thomas a Becket did.

For each one is wholly new, bearing no relation to the others: the chrysalis, hidden from the public gaze, shatters, and the next Archer emerges running. But the newest of all is the most improbable so far, as out of nowhere, or HMP Belmarsh, comes FF 8282. The rabble-rouser of the Tory party conference, so hot on longer sentences for others ('Michael, we say to you: Stand and Delivery') has, just over a year into his own, become the pioneer of penal reform. Jeffrey Archer is now the Elizabeth Fry of our time.

Even old Autolycus, that 'snapper-up of unconsidered trifles' in The Winter's Tale, had some continuity in his careers:

He hath been since an ape-bearer; then a process-server, a bailiff; then he compassed a motion of the Prodigal Son, and married a tinker's wife within a mile where my land and living lies; and, having flown over many knavish professions, he settled only in rogue.

Archer, embracing sainthood by the North Sea, has none.

It is a strange experience to be reviewing this book. Once, had you mentioned his name in a newspaper, even in a weather forecast, the lawyers would have crawled over everything you had written. And now ... Also a man, who in passing has reedited his past so often, has the chance of setting the record straight. These diaries (another two are threatened) are also as close to autobiography, or in his case biography, as he has got, possibly ever will get. They cover just 22 days.

So what do you learn about the man? That he dislikes gaol, hates the mauve colour of his cell, hates prison food (he lives off a diet of bottled water, apples. Macvitie's digestive biscuits and Prince's ham), and sees himself as a devoted family man, giving readers a glimpse of the Archers at home in the good times: James and I would have been watching the Open Golf from Lytham St Anne's, hoping against hope that Colin Montgomerie would at last win a major. William would he reading a book by some obscure author I'd never heard of. Mary would probably be in the folly at the bottom of the garden working on volume two of her book, Molecular to Global Photosynthesis, and around seven I would drive across to Saffron Walden to visit my mother, and discuss with her who should lead the Tory party.

Whether or not he intended it, this is good comic writing. But apart from that and a roll-call of his clothes (he is hot on brand names, the Turnbull and Asser shirt, the Calvin Klein underpants), his Longines watch (which, even though Archer is only 61, his son James has asked to be left in his father's will), and his heroes and heroines, Oscar Wilde and Lady Hamilton, there is Little about him or his pasts, except that he had 'a decent education'. Like many others, I should like to have heard more about that education.

There is, however, one extraordinary sentence. Asked by a prisoner for advice as to whether he should get a barrister, Archer allows himself this reflection: 'During my seven-week trial I gained some experience of the legal profession.' During his seven-week trial? This from a man who probably knows as much about the legal profession as the Lord Chief Justice of England. It is as though with each reinvention the other Archers just cease to exist, being just speeded-up stages in evolution.

By the fifth day he is indignant about the shameful case of a 17-year-old charged

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The book is similarly disjointed. It starts with a chilling account of what it is like to find oneself suddenly in gaol, written by a man who by eight a.m. on his first morning was already two hours into his narrative. There are comic moments, as when the chaplain delivers a sermon on murder to a congregation of murderers (and Archer), assuring them that God will punish them for the rest of their lives, only he gives Moses as an example, which puzzles FF 8282 CI thought Moses died peacefully in his bed aged 130'). But after that he ascends into his own pulpit to address the Home Secretary on the iniquities of the system, with such interjections as, 'Are you still with me, Home Secretary?' and 'Are you still paying attention, Home Secretary?' These barks are reassuringly familiar to anyone intent on detecting traces of the old Archer.

There are others:

'You are sentenced to four years.' Mr Justice Potts stares down at me from the bench, unable to hide his delight.

It is like Toad's appearance in court in The Wind in the Willows:

To my mind,' observed the Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates cheerfully, 'the only difficulty is, how we can make it sufficiently hot.'

So the judge was biased, and it seems the witnesses who had him convicted, a friend and his former secretary, had their own reasons for giving evidence against him. Unfortunately Mr Potts's delight seems to have been shared by everyone I talked to about the trial.

Except ... except in one place. In HMP Be'marsh, on his fifth day, according to FF 8282, a double murderer amiably offered to have the secretary 'bumped off'. On the sixth day an armed robber told him the prisoners were looking forward to seeing Ted Francis and Max Clifford in goal ('We don't like people who stitch up their mates — especially for money'). Not only was he among fans (all of whom, he wrote, seemed to have read his books and queued for his autograph), he was among people who believed him. He, of course, does not explore the irony, saying only that he himself made no comment, and on the first occasion felt sick, but he has chosen to include these comments. Their effect is to create a sense of menace.

Again, when Emma Nicolson queried what had become of the Kurdish millions, something which postponed his transfer to an open prison, his first, and eager, reaction to his solicitor was 'Can we sue?' For a moment it is the old Jeffrey speaking, at that stage unfamiliar with the new.