London, July 27: Millionaire author Jeffrey Archer, who was freed on parole Monday after serving half of a four-year jail term for perjury in a case involving sex, lies and high-profile politics, has led a life as colourful as the characters in his best-selling novels. Talented and ambitious, the British peer and former Conservative Party deputy chairman was a high flyer who could never quite escape the whiff of scandal, despite a talent for bouncing back from humiliating setbacks.

Politics and sex were the ingredients which ensured his success as a novelist. But in real life the combination led to the downfall of the man who once hoped to become mayor of London.
He was tried for perjury and perverting the course of justice after the confession of a friend, Ted Francis, who admitted he had supplied a false alibi for Archer during a libel case the peer brought against the Daily Star in 1987.
The tabloid newspaper had said Archer slept with a prostitute. Archer, now 63, sued and won 500,000 pounds (800,000 dollars, 700,000 euros) in damages. But the case was destined to come back to haunt him.
Ambitious from his earliest years, Archer used his charm and fund-raising abilities to climb almost to the top of the Conservative Party.

He joined the Tories while a student at Britain's prestigious Oxford University and launched his political career a year after leaving college by securing a seat for the party on the Greater London Council in 1966.

Three years later, in 1969, he won a resounding by-election victory to become a member of parliament at the age of 29.

His parliamentary career came to an abrupt end in 1974 when he was brought to the brink of bankruptcy by the collapse of a Canadian industrial cleaning company in which he had invested.

However, with typical resilience he used his experiences as material for his first book "Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less", published in 1975, the first of a series of blockbusters set in the worlds of high finance and politics. In 1992 he was recommended by Thatcher's successor John Major for a peerage, entitling him to sit in the House of Lords, the upper chamber of parliament.

His seesaw career received another knockback in 1994 when questions were raised over his purchase of shares in Anglia TV, of which his wife Mary was a director.

An official inquiry led to no action against Archer and soon he was campaigning to be the Tory party's candidate to become the first elected mayor of London.

But the claim in November 1999 that he had asked Francis to provide him with a false alibi against the Daily Star forced him to abandon his bid and he was expelled from the party.

The star witness in his court case was Archer's long-suffering wife Mary, 58, an academic who has stood behind her husband in his many mishaps.

Famously praised for her "fragrance" by the judge in the 1987 libel trial, when the couple said they had a stable married life, she later admitted she had learnt in a newspaper of Archer's affair with one of his personal assistants, Andrina Colquhoun.

She said, "We've explored the further reaches of 'for better and for worse' than most couples."
Bureau Report