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The bestselling author talks elections, the Tories and why he enlisted an art forger – and the woman who caught him – for a new book
For someone who at 84 has just retired from frontline politics by giving up his seat in the House of Lords, Jeffrey Archer seems as obsessed as ever by the minutiae of national and international affairs. On the evening of the day we meet he is off to give a speech to a Conservative Party gathering to rally their spirits in the wake of the crushing defeat at the polls in July.
“In 2019, I voted for Jeremy Hunt rather than Boris Johnson as our new leader [and prime minister to succeed Theresa May] and if he’d won we would have gone into the recent general election only having had one prime minister in five years. Johnson, Truss and Sunak wouldn’t have been needed, and we would have lost to Labour by just 50 seats, not this horrid number.”
Telling his audience “I told you so” won’t cheer them up, I suggest, when his party is wondering how to recover after a landslide defeat. “No, but we have to understand the challenge the party is facing. Labour’s 33.7 per cent of the vote in July is not the 43.2 per cent Tony Blair got in 1997. He had a 49 per cent approval rating. Keir Starmer’s is already minus four per cent.”The Conservatives could well be back in five years’ time, he insists. “The usual rule, if you lose by that much, is that you’re out for 10 years. I don’t think it will be that this time.”
Crucial, though, is who members like Lord Archer and his wife, Dame Mary, 79, vote for when their moment comes in November. They are presently undecided.
An award-winning scientist, specialising in solar energy, she has since 1988 chaired various public bodies and received her DBE in 2012 for service to the NHS. However, this week the new Labour Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, cancelled her new appointment as Chair of London’s Royal Parks in what some have suggested is part of a purge of those selected by the previous Tory government.
Her husband is unusually measured on this very public snub. “When I heard the news, I was naturally disappointed. What I do know is what an excellent job Mary did as chairman of the Cambridge Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the Science Museum Group.”
He switches the conversation back to the Tory leadership race. “We will attend our local hustings and make up our minds,” he says. “I don’t know any of the four candidates well, but I know James Cleverly a little and he’s a very nice man.”
However, he issues a warning to fellow members. “Any drift to the right will only result in Reform becoming even stronger and that will keep Labour in power for 30 years.”
And he is also keeping a keen eye on the forthcoming American presidential election. “I’d vote for Kamala Harris if I had a vote,” he says. “I couldn’t vote for Trump but I think he’ll win. Three quarters of Americans are not intelligent.”
But politics is not what we are here to talk about, he rebukes me sternly, as we sit in his spectacular penthouse apartment, with great glass windows looking straight out downstream of the Thames to his erstwhile political home, the Houses of Parliament.
It is his London base, scene of his famous Krug and shepherd’s pie Christmas parties for the great and good, though he and Mary – who have two sons, William and James, and five grandchildren, divide their time between here, the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, in Cambridge, subject of Rupert Brooke’s celebrated 1912 poem, and their place in Mallorca.
Next week he has a new book out, An Eye for An Eye, the penultimate instalment of his popular William Warwick crime series that has taken his likeable, clean-cut hero from a rookie copper on the beat in London right up to the senior ranks of the Metropolitan Police.
“I get letters from policemen all the time,” he reflects, settling back into his armchair, as trim, energetic and direct as ever, “telling me how excellent my research is.” If it sounds boastful – he neither seeks nor enjoys a reputation for modesty – then on this occasion the opposite is true. He is bigging up the other two people sitting with us.
“My research is not all my own work. I’ve got two giants alongside me.” And he gestures expansively towards Billy Mumford, an art forger who – like Archer, who was sentenced in 2001 to four years for perjury and perverting the course of justice – has done time behind bars, and Michelle Roycroft, a former member of Scotland Yard’s Arts and Antiquities Unit.
The global scale of Archer’s success – sales of over 300 million copies in 115 countries and 48 languages, 34 million of them for 1979’s Kane and Abel alone – has caused much speculation since his first novel Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less appeared in 1976, written to rescue himself from bankruptcy. “Does he write his own books?” is the question that comes up most often in online searches, with his clever, capable, high-achieving wife, Mary, regularly cited as his potential ghost-writer.
To be clear, for the record, he is responsible for painstakingly writing in longhand all 40 plus titles in his back catalogue, taking them through draft after draft to get them right. So, what role do these “giants” alongside him play?
Most fiction writers – successful and not – do real-life research. In Archer’s case, as with much else in his long and colourful life, he takes it to the nth degree.
As well as the presence of Mumford and Roycroft in the room, the evidence of this obsessional quality is propped up against the flat’s Busby Berkeley staircase that leads up to the mezzanine. The plot of An Eye For An Eye centres on two things: a fake Rembrandt drawing and a lost copy of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 signed by Thomas Jefferson. Both of them are here for my inspection.
They are the work of Mumford, who sits quietly on an upright chair, dressed all in black, including his pork-pie hat and the thick frames of his television-screen glasses. He is the exact opposite of Archer, shy, softly-spoken, and prefers not to give his age.
“I’m a bit younger than Lord Archer,” is all he volunteers. On the secrets of his trade, he will only go so far. “Typhoo Tea and Camp Coffee,” he tells me with a straight face, “it’s the alchemy of mixing them together.”
Archer steps in. “I can’t have my readers telling me, ‘don’t be silly Jeffrey, you can’t produce a believable drawing that could be looked at and accepted as if it is by Rembrandt, one of the greatest artists the world has known’.”
For him – and he believes for his legions of faithful readers – authenticity is all. And if the suspension of disbelief fails with the Rembrandt, then the whole intricate plot of An Eye for An Eye falls flat on its face, because the fake has to pass muster with William Warwick’s art historian wife, Beth, director of the fictional Fitzmolean Gallery, an easy-to-spot cut-and-shunt of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum and Oxford’s Ashmolean.
“I had to find the leading forger in the world to show me that it was possible,” says Archer as he directs my eyes to the fake Rembrandt. “And is it?” To my utterly untrained eye, yes.
Likewise Mumford’s other forgery – of the American Declaration of Independence.
The story of how the one-time deputy chairman of the Conservative party and close associate of Margaret Thatcher joined forces with Mumford, who served a two-year prison sentence in 2012 after pleading guilty to forging 1000 paintings, is so good that it might fail the “believeable” test if it was included in one of Archer’s novels. This is where the other “giant” in the room, Michelle Roycroft comes in.
Unlike Mumford, who was drafted in just for this latest book in the William Warwick series, Roycroft, elegant from her immaculately-coiffed blonde hair down to her red-soled Christian Louboutin heels, has been part of Team Archer from volume one. “I’d been an undercover officer in the Met involved in a long-term operation. When we learnt that I was being targeted by one of the gangs I was investigating I was moved out of sight into the arts and antiquities team, a tiny unit.”
To her own surprise, she loved the work and stayed for 12 years, meeting Archer by chance at a party at a gallery in London shortly before she retired from the Met in 2016. As the art collection that hangs in the penthouse demonstrates – Monet, Matisse, Miro, LS Lowry and Eric Gill are all represented – he is a passionate collector, and that enthusiasm spills over into the whole William Warwick series via the main character’s gallerist wife.
“But I need the particular expertise of the arts and antiquities unit,” Archer explains. So he invited Roycroft to meet and they have been working together since. Unlike Mumford, whose full name appears on the page – “it’s an honour really,” he replies when I raise it – the character based heavily on Roycroft keeps her surname but Michelle is swapped for Jackie (her sister’s name) on the page.
“Jeffrey gives me the worst love life of anyone else in the books. And when I tease him, he tells me it is true to life, which he thinks is terribly funny.”
But it is the small details of her long service in the arts and antiquities squad – she now draws on her past police expertise to advice the British Museum on the recent thefts from its collection by insiders, but also has developed a specialism that see her “looking after” high-profile victims of stalking, harassment and blackmail – that are seen more often in the William Warwick books.
“If Michelle reads a draft,” Archer explains, “and says, ‘we can’t do that, the police are not allowed to’, I say, ‘tell me how you could do it instead.’”
Naturally enough, then, when he was looking to find and commission a world-class art forger, he turned to Roycroft who just so happened to have the right name in her contacts. “I’d been working in the shadows of the art world for 40 years,” Mumford tells me on cue, “and then I stepped into the light and there was Michelle.”
Her version is less prosaic. When her unit had been alerted by Bonhams auction house to some suspected forgeries of works by Maqbool Fida Husain, known as “the Picasso of India” that were selling for £30,000 each, their investigation led them to Mumford’s cottage door in Sussex in a dawn raid. Or rather to the local hotel where he was supplementing his illicit earnings by working as a waiter doing the breakfast shift.
“When we walked into the kitchen where Billy was plating up,” she recalls. “He said to me, ‘I’ve been waiting for you’.”
Mumford, who was brought up in east London, became keen on art as a child, after his mother brought home paints and paper for him from the school where she worked as a cleaner, nods in agreement. “In one sense,” he says, “I’d been waiting for the knock [of the police at his front door] to happen for 40 years since I sold my first forgery, a small Renoir, a still life of apples, to an American couple in Portobello Market.”
He had turned to deception, he remembers, after being expelled by St Martin’s Art School in London. “I’d discovered booze and women and a funny thing had happened in a life-drawing class. I lost my scholarship and had no money.”
By the time Roycroft arrested him four decades later in 2009, he had a wife and two children, whose school fees he covered by retreating to a back bedroom with firmly closed curtains where he had easels and paints. “I never worked in the daylight, always an electric light, always hidden away.”
As a sign of his relief at finally being caught – “it didn’t feel like a relief when I ended up in Wandsworth Prison,” he corrects me – he confessed everything and worked with Roycroft as arresting officer. After he had been sentenced, he even wrote her a letter thanking her for her “kindness.”
“What police officer gets a letter from a prisoner saying thank you?” she asks. “I think we just respected each other, didn’t we?”
Mumford smiles back in agreement. He now continues to make forgeries of famous art works – he prefers the word “forgery” to “copy”, he says, because his work involves bringing something of his own to the subject – but nowadays he signs them so there can be no confusion as to their origin.
After his release, Roycroft invited him to meet Archer here at the penthouse. “I was astounded by the art. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. When I asked where the loo was, I was told, ‘down the hall, by the Picasso’. It was pretty overwhelming.”
Now it is Archer’s turn to smile affectionately. “If Billy had been a boring old toad, I wouldn’t have had him here,” he joshes to his guest. “I’ve listened to them [Billy and Michelle], how they talk, what they do, and stolen the lot. The attention to detail is what makes my books special.”
Mumford picks up the remark. “Lord Archer steals things – the details that Michelle shares with him about police work, about conversations in the police. And I steal things. Picasso once said, ‘good artists borrow and great artists steal’.”
And there are other things, he adds, that bind them together. “I’m the same as Lord Archer in my work. When he writes a book, it is research, preparation and a long, punishing schedule, with the main thing being correction, correction, correction. I paint the same way as he writes.”
While those awarding literary prizes have never elevated Archer to the ranks of the greats, he is undeniably a publishing phenomenon. But nowadays, he says, he doubts that it would be the same story if he was starting out again.
“The publishing industry is going through a strange stage at the moment. Eight out of the top ten bestsellers are women, and they mainly write for women between 16 and 21. Would Kane and Abel get to number one today? I suspect it wouldn’t. I got lucky.”
Roycroft concurs. “There are too many TikTok detectives around today who try to solve crimes rather than read about them. They damage police investigations and damage families. It is so wrong.” She mentions the case of mother-of-two Nicola Bulley who disappeared in January 2023 while walking her dog in St Michael’s on Wyre in Lancashire, where social media was alive with people pointing an accusatory finger at her husband, before it was shown that she had drowned accidentally.]
Archer’s trademark candour might also hinder him if he was a novice writer now. Cancel culture, he reveals, has reached his door.
“I’ve only changed a word once. My publisher said they didn’t like my use of ‘West Indian’. They preferred ‘Caribbean.’”
Did he give in? “I didn’t want a row so I did, but my old friend Sir Clive Lloyd [the cricketer, another enthusiasm of Archer’s] was captain of the West Indies not of the Caribbean.”
There is a final volume of the William Warwick series underway, about which he will let slip nothing, but after that? For once he struggles for an answer. “Let’s leave it as a cliffhanger.”
Perhaps it is his experience so far of retiring from the House of Lords – done to pre-empt Keir Starmer’s planned purge of hereditary peers – that is tempting him to contemplate calling it a day. He believes the cull will see the Lords lose “a lot of wisdom and knowledge”, pointing to the example of his exact contemporary former Tory Chancellor and leadership candidate, Ken Clarke, but for himself he prefers to go before he is pushed.
Yet, when he describes his daily routine, he makes it sound as if it’s almost business as usual.
“I was in the House yesterday. I can’t vote or speak, but I’m still a Lord, I can still eat and drink there, and attend debates by sitting on the steps of the throne.”
And talk politics to his heart’s content. No real sign, then, of him slowing down.
On September 25, join bestselling author Jeffrey Archer online as he talks to Billy Mumford and Michelle Roycroft – the now reformed art forger and the detective who brought him down – to discuss his new novel from the William Warwick series, An Eye for an Eye. To book tickets visit telegraph.co.uk/extra-events
An Eye For An Eye by Jeffrey Archer is out on September 26 and available to preorder now (£22, HarperCollins). To read an exclusive extract, visit telegraph.co.uk on Saturday at 3pm
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