LONDON: He is not a man given to self-doubt. His life story – now in its eighth decade – has been one constant parabola, rising and falling through endless triumphs and self-inflicted disasters. Now the curve is very much back on the upward trajectory.
He is as productive as ever, richer than ever and, he says, as happy as ever. Yet Jeffrey Archer claims he is feeling nervous.
Tonight, he will pick up his auctioneer’s gavel and start bullying an audience into opening their wallets, as he has done at more than 1 000 charity auctions over 30 years.
But this one will be slightly different. First, it is not taking place in some hotel function room or draughty charity marquee, but at the London headquarters of Christie’s.
Secondly, it involves a remarkable collection of ephemera which reflects the ex-Tory peer’s enduring powers of persuasion. This is not the usual sale of autographed football shirts and signed whisky bottles. It includes the handbag that saw 30 years of active service with Margaret Thatcher (donated by herself) and which is expected to fetch a six-figure sum.
There will be Lawrence Dallaglio’s match ball from England’s victorious 2003 Rugby World Cup Final (kicking off at £25 000, or R274 403).
Archer lured them all in by putting up a curio of his own – the stopwatch that timed Roger Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile – before asking others to follow suit and name their own beneficiaries.
It was turning 70 last year that prompted him to organise this week’s auctions.
A year on, he still does not feel like a septuagenarian.
“When I was young, someone at 70 would have been an old man. But I go to the gym three times a week. And I’m writing a book a year. I’m not slowing down,” he says.
This is the first time I have seen Lord (“It’s Jeffrey, please”) Archer of Weston-Super-Mare in person since the mid-1990s, when he was to the Tories what Lord Mandelson would become to New Labour – an irrepressible, ubiquitous, scandal-prone, networker who straddled successive party leaderships and ended up in the Lords.
When the Tories crashed, Archer went further still, hauled through the courts, the prison system and the media shredder. When he went inside in 2001, convicted for perjury during a libel trial 14 years earlier, some of his enemies thought he was finished. But he emerged from jail two years later anything but broken. Eight years and seven best-sellers later, he is looking leaner than the old Archer, and every bit as ebullient.
“I’ve just lost a stone” he declared triumphantly. How? “No bread, no third courses and one course only for dinner – Mary’s orders.”
The famously long-suffering Mary Archer, along with the Almighty, can take the credit for tomorrow afternoon’s auction, when Lord Archer will sell off a substantial chunk of the art collection he has been accumulating since he was 23. A Christie’s auctioneer will dispose of more than 100 paintings and sculptures worth an estimated £5m. They include Claude Monet’s La Seine pres de Vetheuil (worth close to £2m) and a Rodin bronze expected to fetch upwards of £500 000. “We just don’t have enough room for it all and Mary doesn’t share my madness for art – she’s got a madness for opera and gardens,” he said.
Archer’s place is so crammed with art that you have to think twice before putting down a cup of tea. And that is without all the stuff that has already gone off for auction.
The sale represents only 10 percent of the value of his collection.
There is a sense that Archer is moving on, clearing a few decks.
Here is a creature of habit in so many ways, a man who refuses to use a computer. Yet he is a past master in the art of self-renewal. While he remains a paid-up member of the Tory party, he does not receive the Tory whip in the House of Lords (he is excluded from party communications) and stays away.
“I’ve got books to finish. I don’t have time,” he said.
Anyway, he says: “My generation has gone. We’ve had our day
.”
Seventy-one years and 330 million books later, Jeffrey Archer is finally starting to mellow. – Daily Mail