Jeffrey Archer, the novelist whose books sold more than 300 million copies and whose political career ended with a prison sentence, has died at the age of 86. His publisher, HarperCollins, said he died “suddenly and peacefully at home” on Monday, between writing sessions. His final novel, Adam and Eve, is due to be published this week.
Archer was born in north London on 15 April 1940 and moved as a child to Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, where his family bought a house from the mother of John Cleese. Across a five-decade career he produced a long run of bestsellers, among them Kane and Abel and the Clifton Chronicles series, and he often set his novels in his home town of Wellington, Somerset.
Politics ran alongside the writing. Archer won the Lincolnshire seat of Louth in 1969, served as an MP for five years and later became deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. In 2001 he was jailed for four years for perjury and perverting the course of justice, after he was found to have lied in his 1987 libel action against the Daily Star, a case in which he had been awarded £500,000 in damages. He was released in 2003 and returned to the House of Lords, where he sat until he retired in 2024.
He kept working until the end. On Sunday he was signing books for fans at the Leicester Square Theatre in London with the broadcaster Gyles Brandreth, and the week before he had returned to Wellington School to promote the new novel. He had also been due to appear at the Cheltenham Festival on Saturday. Brandreth wrote on X that Archer had been “a great storyteller to the last”, and later told the BBC that his friend had become a gentler person after prison.
Tributes came from publishing and from Westminster. Kate Elton, chief executive of HarperCollins UK and his editor, called him “the master storyteller and an editor’s dream”. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch described his death as a huge shock and said he had sent her a kind message that same morning, while former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi remembered a dear friend with a gift for storytelling. Archer and his wife, Mary, celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary this year. They have two sons and five grandchildren.
