Politician and Novelist Jeffrey Archer: ‘Swifties ruined my favourite pub!’

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Jeffrey Archer was born in 1940 in Holloway, but grew up in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare. He was accepted to Oxford in 1963. While there, was successful in athletics, competing for the university in sprinting and hurdling. It was in 1969, at the age of 29, that Jeffrey was elected as an MP. He represented Louth in Lincolnshire for 5 years, until he became the casualty of a fraudulent investment scheme that left him half a million quid in debt. Archer wrote his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, in the autumn of 1974, as a means of avoiding bankruptcy and has since penned more that 50 novels over half a century. His 1979 novel Kane and Abel remains one of the best-selling books in the world, with an estimated 34 million copies sold. It’s fair to say Jeffrey has not been immune to scandal over the years. In 2001 he was sent to prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice, after he was found to have lied during a 1987 libel trial, in which he was suing the Daily Star for saying he’d paid for sex with a prostitute. Jeffrey Archer answered the famous 15 in 2024.