The Archer enemy

Less than 24 hours after the gates of Belmarsh prison slammed shut behind Jeffrey Archer, a report emerged that the disgraced Tory peer had been spotted in the exercise yard amiably shooting the breeze with great train robber Ronnie Biggs. This news will have come as a grave disappointment to a slavering British media which would undoubtedly have preferred to hear that the disgraced Tory peer had been found lying unconscious and brutally sodomised in the shower block with a crudely fashioned shiv sticking out of his thigh.

If nothing else, this story about Archer and Belmarsh’s Mr Biggs goes some way towards proving that Lord Archer’s skills as a glad-hander, networker and master manipulator will serve him as well in prison as they did for so long on the outside. Two years in jail isn’t such a long time – as someone who spent six of my formative years in boarding school, I reckon I could do it hopping on one foot as long as the price was right and I wasn’t chained to the same radiator as Terry Waite.

However, it is certainly ample time for Jeffrey to churn out another of those unfeasibly popular, poorly written, badly researched, quasi-autobiographical novels for which his name is a byword. The inevitable media hoop-la surrounding his (and its) release in July 2003 ought to ensure that any such tome rockets to the top of the bestseller list, thus enabling its author to pay off any monies he might owe the Daily Star several times over.

It was amusing to read the newspapers in the immediate aftermath of Archer’s conviction. Each and every front page vilified him for being a compulsive liar, while the back pages of the very same editions tore into English rugby player Austin Healey for being too profligate with the truth. Many sportswriters lay the blame for the Lions Test series defeat in Australia squarely at Healey’s door. By slagging off Australians and chronicling the dissension in the Lions’ ranks in a Guardian tour diary, they reckon he spoon-fed the Wallabies the extra motivation they needed to win the deciding Test.

It has since emerged that the diary in question was ghost written by Eddie Butler, an Observer rugby correspondent, former Lion and Welsh rugby international. While Butler has admitted that the prose may not have been Healey’s, he insists the sentiments – culled from occasional clandestine interviews – certainly were. This is not uncommon practice in sporting circles: one Irish GAA star of my acquaintance is paid a tidy sum to chat on the phone to a reporter from a popular daily newspaper for 20 minutes once a week, and the ensuing “column” appears weekly under his mug shot and byline, and – I’m told – invariably makes for massively entertaining reading. It is in a minority, as most newspaper articles written by athletes are stultifying in their tedium and rarely give readers what they really want: a true insight into what is going on behind the scenes.

Of course nothing illustrated the totalitarian regime documented by Healey more than Lions manager Donal Lenihan’s subsequent rumblings that an embargo be placed on future Lions tour party members writing for newspapers and internet sites. These sour sentiments showed that Lenihan had gloriously missed the point of Healey’s column. The Lions did not lose the series because of anything that was written in a newspaper. If anything other than the superiority of a fine Australian team was responsible for their demise, it was a fractious camp and a total absence of rapport between over-tired and under-enthused players and their despotic coaching staff.

Austin Healey is to be lauded, not vilified for telling the truth, and sport lovers everywhere have a duty to defend his right to be honest. His sentiments, which have not been denied by a single one of his team-mates, made for riveting reading and yet when he returns from a the holiday he is currently enjoying in Hawaii, he will be forced to stand before a

disciplinary committee comprised of his team manager Donal Lenihan, team coach Graham Henry and team captain Martin Johnson. That’s the same Martin Johnson, by the way, who at the time of writing is currently holidaying in Hawaii with his friend Austin Healey.

Meanwhile in London, dedicated socialist and newt lover Mayor Ken Livingstone has just announced details of his new congestion tax. From January 2003, Londoners will find themselves having to pay £5 a go to drive into the centre of their city. Needless to say, many motorists are bitterly critical of the mayor’s plans, particularly as it is clear that nothing can be done to alleviate already chronic rush hour over-crowding on the Tube in such a short space of time. As a result, motorists in heavily taxed cars fuelled by heavily taxed petrol will have to pay a further five quid tax a day just to get to work. And while it might seem funny because it’s happening to Johnny Sasanach, it can only be a matter of time before some bright spark in Dublin corporation sits up, takes notice and instigates a similar proposal in Ireland’s capital in order to raise additional millions for Corpo coffers.

Conspiracy theorists will probably find some way of blaming Austin Healey for Mayor Livingstone’s latest hair-brained scheme, although I’m more inclined to hand the credit to the duplicitous Jeffrey Archer. If his lies hadn’t forced him out of the race to Wherever It Is The Mayor Of London Lives, Red Ken probably wouldn’t have got within an ass’s roar of the chain of office.