Britain More Scandalous Than Fiction

By Sara C.Medina

The plot could have come from a popular potboiler. An ambitious young British politician has a one-night fling with a prostitute, who then tries to blackmail him. When he refuses to pay, she tells her tale to the press. But the newspapers nobly refuse to print her story, and the politician goes on to become Prime Minister.

In fact, this is an episode in Jeffrey Archer's First Among Equals, a 1984 best seller. But if truth is often stranger than fiction, there are also fewer happy endings. So it was for Archer, 46, deputy chairman of the Conservative ! Party and the author of six top-selling novels, including Kane and Abel and the current best seller A Matter of Honor. Last week the Sunday News of the World (circ. 4.8 million) carried a five-page story claiming that Archer had offered Prostitute Monica Coghlan (pounds)2,000 ($2,800) to pay for a trip abroad to avoid scandal. The same day, Archer resigned the post to which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had appointed him a year earlier.

Archer, who is married and has two sons, maintained that he had never met Coghlan, much less had a relationship with her. "Foolishly, as I now realize, I allowed myself to fall into what I can only call a trap," he said in a statement. He admitted, however, that he had been telephoned by a woman calling herself Debbie, who later turned out to be Coghlan. She said a client of hers was telling people that she and Archer had "had an association." In later calls Coghlan said she was being hounded by reporters about the purported liaison. "In the belief that this woman genuinely wanted to be out of the way of the press, and realizing that any publicity of this kind would be extremely harmful to me," Archer said, he offered the money. "For that lack of judgment, and that alone, I have tendered my resignation."

The scandal-loving British press was gleeful, especially the News of the World. Its story included transcripts of phone conversations that had Archer suggesting that Coghlan wear a green leather suit and meet a friend of his at London's Victoria Station. After accepting an envelope stuffed with (pounds)50 notes in view of a long-lens camera, however, the woman returned it, telling both Archer's envoy and a hidden microphone, "I can't keep running, can I?"

The vicissitudes of Archer's life have already been put to use in his novels. An Oxford student who in 1969 became the youngest Member of Parliament, at age 29, he had to resign five years later after bad investments left him near bankruptcy. He turned to writing, and loosely based his first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, on his experience. A main character in First Among Equals, who becomes Prime Minister in the considerably altered U.S. version, also suffers severe financial reverses.

By the time of Kane and Abel (1979), Archer was out of debt and into fame. That brought him to the attention of Thatcher, who liked his novels and comeback success story. She tapped him for the party post, where he drew good crowds on the political circuit.

The Archer affair will be a short-term embarrassment for the Conservatives, who have endured worse sex scandals. In 1963 Secretary of State for War John Profumo was forced to resign after he lied to the House of Commons about his liaison with Call Girl Christine Keeler, who was having an affair with a Soviet military attache at the same time. In 1983 Party Chairman Cecil Parkinson stepped down after his secretary announced that she was pregnant with his child.

While some Tories thought Archer had done the "honorable thing," most agreed he had acted with astonishing imprudence. Few would be surprised, however, if he did not manage to come out of the scandal a winner, although probably not in politics. Virtually everyone is expecting a novel to emerge from it all.

With reporting by Christopher Ogden/London