Newspaper Article

In Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, the politician's duped wife screams: \Don't come near me. Dont touch me. I feel as if you had soiled me for ever.\ Within this marriage one wonders if such an outburst would ever be possible and, if not, what prevents Mary Archer from making it

Billen, Andrew

1999

Overview

Since the News of the World two weeks ago broke the story of the false alibi Jeffrey Archer had prepared before his famous libel trial of 1987, the atmosphere at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester has certainly been closer to despair than the photographs released two Thursdays ago suggest. In them the two exchanged glances that could be read as loving, toyed with their cat, looked for all the world like a couple learning to live with a calamity that was not of their making. \"I am cross,\" she said, in what amounted to an extended picture caption, \"but I have formed the judgment that he is a decent and generous-spirited man over 35 years and that will not change over one weekend.\" In fact, she is much more wounded than this implies. Her brother, David Weeden, says that \"inside she is very hurt and upset\". She is convinced that there can be no return to public life for Jeffrey - and, if that is so, then surely Mary [Archer]'s future cannot hold the honours that Michael Crick, her husband's doggedly hostile biographer, once speculated could be hers: the headship of an Oxbridge college, the chair of the Arts Council or of the BBC. Mary's survival instincts have been forged by the three great crises her husband brought upon their marriage. There is a pattern, almost a template, to her reaction to them. Jeffrey gets himself into trouble. He keeps it from Mary. Finally he confesses a version of events. Mary momentarily reels, then cuts herself off from her feelings, patronises the revelation as \"Jeffrey's little bombshell\" and continues as if nothing has happened. In the next decade, Jeffrey not only avoided bankruptcy, but wrote his way into a fortune. In 1985 Mrs Thatcher appointed him deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. On the afternoon of Saturday 25 October 1986, however, he came to Mary with another little bombshell. He had just taken a call from the News of the World's editor, who was about to run a story that he had paid 2,000 to the prostitute Monica Coghlan. Since he had not, of course, mentioned the six phone calls she had made to him during the previous weeks demanding the money, Mary was \"dumbfounded\". Yet, within a week of his resignation as deputy chairman, Mary was hosting a dinner party at Grantchester attended by John Major, then a minister of state at the DHSS.

• Publisher: Evening Standard Limited
• Subject: Raphael, Adam