New Blog One: Reader Digest

Reader Digest

After resigning from the House of Commons, his political career continued, and from September 1985 to November 1986 he was Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. Alongside his writing, he was active in many fields, co-ordinating the Campaign for Kurdish Relief and raising money for charity—more than £10 million in the last ten years—as an amateur auctioneer. For his achievements he was made a Life Peer in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List of 1992.

Having run a successful campaign for Mayor of London for two-and-a-half years, from 1997, in 1999 Jeffrey Archer was selected, by an overwhelming majority, as the official Conservative Party Candidate for London’s Mayor. In November that same year, he withdrew his candidacy, having been charged with perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and was released in July 2003, having served two years. Three published volumes of his Prison Diary recount that time of his life. Volume I, Hell, is a searing account of his first three weeks in the high-security prison, HMP Belmarsh; Volume II, Purgatory, is set in HMP Wayland, a C-category prison; and the third and final volume, Heaven, is about his final transfer to an open prison.