Archer’s edifice of lies led to disaster for Turner and a dilemma for Nick Lloyd

SCANDAL: Jeffrey Archer denied having sex with Monica Coghlan

CHRISTOPHER WILSON remembers the Monica Coghlan scandal

How well do you know your friends? Sometimes hardly at all, even though you've been chums for years. And when you're the editor of a great national newspaper, what happens when one of those old friends suddenly turns out to be a wrong'un?

Do you ditch them, or stand by them?

That was the dilemma facing Sir Nicholas Lloyd when the edifice of lies Jeffrey Archer had built around himself finally started to crumble in the late 80s. Most of us are old enough to remember the notorious libel trail when Archer accused Lloyd Turner and the Daily Star of inventing the fact he'd had sex with a prostitute.

It was 1986, and the News of the World had broken the original story – that Archer had given a woman called Monica Coghlan £2,000 through an intermediary to leave the country and lie low.

That much was provable. But what the irrepressible and much-loved Turner, then editor of the paper, could not resist was providing that one extra juicy morsel – that Archer had actually had sex with Coghlan.

In my previous existence as a gossip columnist I'd learned one cardinal rule – unless you're present to witness the dirty deed, you're on a hiding to nothing when Mr Shagger McNasty's lawyers come a-calling. The inevitable denials from the outraged couple will result in your apologising, paying up with the company's money, and most crucially – saying goodbye to your job.

Imply they boinked, by all means – that can leave you with a get-out when you're in the dock. Gild the lily by writing they put the bread in the oven, did squat-thrusts in the cucumber patch, tossed a hot dog down the hallway, got their kettle mended.

But don't ever say they f***ed.

Lloyd couldn't resist, however. He knew Archer's secret – despite in the subsequent trial that old booby Mr Justice Caulfield asking, "Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?"

The answer was yes, you fool. Read the runes.

But it was a mis-step by Lloyd. Next day all hell broke loose as Archer's lawyers, all guns blazing, kicked off proceedings against Express Newspapers. Since he was a millionaire, high-profile novelist, close chum of Margaret Thatcher and deputy chairman of the Tory Party, any settlement was not going to come cheap – in money terms, but also reputationally.

Which left the editor in a quandary, as he and Archer had been chums since Nick was at Oxford (and Archer wasn't).

There can be no question in my mind that Nick knew absolutely nothing about Archer's extra-curricular activities. But of course he needed to play catchup, and quick.

Which is where I came in. I'd left the paper the year before but Nick heard that Andrina Colquhoun, Archer's 'personal assistant', had once been my girlfriend. I'd mentioned this to an Express lawyer, a dim fellow with a name strikingly similar to the prostitute's, pointing out that there could be a weakness in Archer's prosecution case against the Star if it was proved that he had an irregular sex life.

Which he unquestionably did. Andy, as she was called, was his weekday mistress in London while the 'fragrant' Mary Archer stayed behind in the country. It wasn't difficult to prove.

I was commissioned as a freelance to do the full works on Archer – who and what he really was, where the bodies were buried. Nick may have been his friend, and quite evidently a loyal one, but it was clear there were gaps in his knowledge – gaps created not by a lack of inquisitiveness, but through Archer being, to put it bluntly, a compulsive liar.

It was a gem of an assignment, spurred by the fact I remained fond of Andy, though we hadn't seen each other for some years, and I felt she'd been treated appallingly by her lover – he'd ditched her the moment Mrs Thatcher (another Archer sucker) made him her deputy chairman.

Andy, an innocent in the world if ever there was, had expected more, and believed it when Jeff said that one day she'd become his Lady Archer.

My inquiries lasted several weeks and took me some unexpected places, including the corner shop in Weston-super-Mare when the proprietress remembered him as a needy, snotty-nosed kid called Tuppence, as in “Anything for Tuppence?”

More crucially I uncovered a bundle of juicy morsels from other extramarital activities – Sally Farmiloe, the woman he once rogered in a multi-storey car park, was an old contact from William Hickey days – and I put together a series of revelations which would have made an interesting read, to put it mildly.

Trouble was, this was the Express — and it was Express Newspapers in the dock. Nobody wanted to pour petrol on the flames. My findings were quietly put away in a drawer.

It didn't matter much to me because I got paid. But what I did find astonishing was that the Express lawyers, who by now had learned quite a lot about Archer's clandestine sex life, never asked him about it in court. He blustered his way through the case, convincing the judge of his flawless marriage, and walked away with the equivalent of £2million in today's money. Of course he had to pay it all back, plus £1.5 million in interest, when he was done for perjury and sent to jail for four years in 2001.

In his wake of that perjury trial he left behind a trail of destruction – his mother, who died from the shock of it all; the cause of his misfortunes Monica Cochlan, who perished horribly in a car crash just weeks before the proceedings opened; a sadly disillusioned wife (though she stuck by him); and, of course, Lloyd Turner, who'd been sacked by Lord Stevens six weeks after the original trial.

Andrina Colquhoun — who was obliged, humiliatingly, to tell the court how she'd been Archer's mistress but thought she would become his wife, fared better. She went on to marry — and happily. Sir Nicholas, I feel certain, will have risen above it all and never once considered deserting his friend – for even in journalism, personal loyalty is everything.

Jeffrey Archer, to me a fine example of that noble phrase 'the scum also rises', continues his career as a prolific novelist — “one of the world's best selling authors” according to his website (he's not even in the top 20).

Despite his jail term, the peerage he received from Mrs Thatcher was never taken away from him, and he remains entitled to call himself Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare.

20 August 2024

GARTH PEARCE writes: A small and insignificant footnote to the revealing and splendidly written features by Christopher Wilson and Alan Frame on Jeffrey Archer…

During one of my interviews with John Cleese he said: “When we moved from Weston-super-Mare to Bristol in 1953, the Archers bought our flat, number 53, Eastern Mansions, up the hill from Weston town. I don’t remember meeting him, but I do remember Mrs Archer — Lola — who used to write a column for the Weston Mercury called Across the Teacups.”

A rather dull, scandal-free snippet, but I did find it a remarkable coincidence that in a town with a population of 77,000 the two most internationally famous residents had shared the same address.  

When in Weston a few years later, I checked it out.  Eastern Mansions is, for the record, at 24, South Road. The last flat to be sold in the block in February earlier this year went for £219,000.

The date of this particular interview, October 5th, 1988, corresponded with Cleese mother’s 89th birthday.  “She would be scared to get together with Lola,” he said.  “She was fearsome and it was, allegedly, an odd family.  I think his father (William, nearly 40 years her senior) died in the flat a few years after we sold it to them.”