Entertainment

Jeffrey Archer Guilty Of Perjury

July 19, 2001 / 8:54 AM EDT / AP

Novelist, playwright, and disgraced politician Jeffrey Archer was found guilty Thursday of perjury and obstructing justice. A jury at London's Old Bailey deliberated four days before convicting him of four counts of perjury and obstructing justice in connection with a libel trial in 1987. He was acquitted on one count.

Archer, confidante of former Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major and member of the House of Lords, has had a flamboyant career embraced dizzying success and self-inflicted disaster.

He was accused of asking a friend to lie for him during his libel case against a tabloid newspaper. That former friend, Ted Francis, was acquitted Thursday of a single charge of perverting the course of justice.

In 1987, Archer won a lawsuit against the Daily Star newspaper, which accused him of hiring a prostitute.

But in 1999, after Francis told his story to a tabloid newspaper, Archer he acknowledged that he had asked Francis to lie in the libel case and say they had dinner together on a particular night. Archer said he was actually dining with a close female friend.

Archer was forced to resign as the Conservative Party candidate for mayor of London after the story broke.

He faced two counts of perjury and three counts of obstructing justice. The trial judge had dismissed one further charge of perverting the course of justice and one of using a false instrument.

A larger-than-life character who has maintained a position on the fringes of political power for decades, Archer has bounced back time and again from brushes with scandal, financial ruin and the law.

During the sensational six-week trial — which was front-page news and a favorite topic of gossip in Britain — jurors were given details of Archer's high-flying but complicated life, hearing from both his wife, Cambridge academic Mary Archer, and his longtime mistress, Andrina Colquhoun.

Archer himself declined to give evidence. Prosecution lawyer David Waters portrayed him as a man whose ambition drove him to lie, "a man ... who whatever successive allegation or obstacle he faced, his instinct and solution was to manipulate events and fabricate a dishonest answer."

Archer's lawyer, Nicholas Purnell, said it was prosecution witnesses such as Archer's former secretary Angela Peppiatt — who said she fabricated diary entries on Archer's instructions — who had lied.

The prosecution accused Archer of producing the false diary as evidence during the 1987 trial.

Archer was elected to the House of Commons at age 29 in 1969, but within five years was forced to resign after bad investments drove him to bankruptcy.

That experience inspired his first book, "Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less."

His third novel, "Kane and Abel" and the U.S. television miniseries it spawned, transformed Archer into a publishing powerhouse. In 1991, he signed a three-book deal with HarperCollins for $30 million.

A former deputy chairman of the Conservaives and tireless fund-raiser for the party, he received a life peerage in 1992, becoming Lord Archer of Weston-Super-Mare.

While out on bail before the trial Archer starred in "The Accused," a play he wrote and in which he played a doctor accused of murdering his wife. At the end of each performance, the audience was asked to vote on whether his character was guilty or not.