By PETER CALDER
Baron Archer, of Weston-super-Mare of Mark in the County of Somerset, is furious.
It's 10 am and he's returned to his tennis-court-sized Auckland hotel suite to find the curtains drawn, the room in darkness, the table cluttered with the remnants of his unfinished breakfast.
Like a stoat pouncing on a chicken, he dives for the phone.
"Archer here. Royal Suite," he barks. "I'm just about to do a major interview with a major newspaper. Can you please tell whoever is handling this room to GET A GRIP.
"And ... ," here he pauses theatrically for the punchline, "we'd like some coffee."
It wouldn't have done for the Duke and it won't do for His Lordship either. Though to be fair (Lord Archer, after all, spent large slabs of our time together outlining his certainty that I wouldn't be) this is not a man who exults in his nobility.
"Jeffrey," he says, when I wonder about what to call him. "I like to be called Jeffrey."
The board in the lobby welcomes "Lord Jeffrey Archer" and, dimly through my antipodean ignorance of forms of address, I sense a Kiwi gaffe.
"You're quite right," says Archer. "Technically, Lord Jeffrey Archer would be the son of a Duke. Everybody gets it wrong. But I don't expect anyone to get it right.
"People don't nowadays bother to ring up and check," he says, wincing at the world's sloppiness. "I was created a Baron. All Barons are Lords."
Archer who was elevated to the peerage on the same day, in 1992, as his old friend Margaret Thatcher (who had put his name forward) and a tunesmith by the name of Andrew Lloyd Webber, reckons titles should be abolished, but his reasons are not egalitarian. Long (but no longer) a political mover and shaker at Westminster, he says smarter people would sit in the House of Lords if the ones who didn't work could be weeded out.
"You'd get more serious people wanting to do the political side rather than people who want the title."
In town to promote his newest collection of short stories, To Cut A Long Story Short, Archer was keen to talk about writing - though not, as became clear, about very much else.
"Britain's top-selling novelist" as his book jacket describes him, says he "hates writing, the physical process at least."
Unable to type and computer-illiterate, he writes longhand in big letters with a felt tip - and says that when he starts a book he feels like a marathon runner who reached the finish line on his last legs.
"When I sit down and write, I remember that my last book took 700 hours over two years. So when I pick up the pen and start I know I am in for a marathon."
(It occurs to me later that 700 hours over two years adds up to an hour a day - and there's still a fortnight off at Christmas. But in hindsight I'm glad I didn't bring it up. He would, if later events were any guide, have suspected I was calling him lazy and predicted the headline "Lazy peer works barely an hour a day!").
Silent and attentive, I make a better interlocutor. I may occasionally wonder aloud, lobbing the journalistic equivalent of "it's marvellous, really, I don't know how you do it" at him and watch him purr in reply.
This "author tour" - an endless round of interviews and book-signings is a real break, he says. He's been working frantically on his third play, The Accused, a courtroom drama in which he plays the title role and the audience brings in a verdict before one of two alternative last scenes are played out. It goes into rehearsal in three weeks and the playwright says it's good to get away.
In any case, he explains, "an author who begins to think [that he doesn't need to tour because he'll sell anyway] is a fool. Never take your readers for granted. Go out there every day as if you are fresh and new."
Archer's ascent from the brink of bankruptcy to a riverside apartment overlooking the Houses of Parliament is the stuff of legend, particularly since his recovery began with the writing of Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, a novel inspired by his own disastrous financial experience. Popular myth has it that the book saved him, though it was not until his third novel, Kane and Abel that it turned "from minus to mightily, mightily plus."
He reels off the sales figures and smiles indulgently when I mention the critical response. "I couldn't give a damn [what the critics say]," he says, though he remembers that The Scotsman called First Among Equals "the best political novel since the death of Trollope."
"I could never be a figure of literary merit. I don't have the education or the command of language. I write to be an entertainer, a storyteller, I want you to turn the page."
He is less phlegmatic about accusations that some of his short stories may not have been original.
"If you wish to write that," he says, impaling me with an imperious glare, "you'll receive a writ the same day and you'll pay within three weeks. But be my guest. If you can find any [instance in which the same two words follow each other] in any other book at all ...
"How could you write Kane and Abel and bother about plagiarising a short story? It's about the most ridiculous accusation an intelligent man could put. If you say to me: 'Have people given you stories?' - of course they have. Somebody once said to me: 'Wouldn't it be amazing if the foreman of the jury had actually committed the crime?' and I went away and wrote a whole story on that. Now if that is plagiarism ... "
The temperature in the suite has dropped perceptibly.
Jeffrey Archer's is a life full of unanswered questions. Michael Crick's biography, Stranger Than Fiction, traverses most of them (Archer has not read it, but tells me there are 18 errors in the first 20 pages) but he has made it clear to his minders - who have made it clear to me - that he won't. There will be no questions here about Monica Coghlan, the prostitute he paid to go abroad; nothing about the revelation that he asked an alibi witness, the cornerstone of a successful defamation suit against a tabloid newspaper, to lie; not a word about the consequent collapse in November of his candidacy for Lord Mayor of London, even if they make more interesting reading than his plodding prose.
Yet apparently harmless questions bounce off a wall of contempt. His professed ambition to be Prime Minister by the year 2000 - reported by the British Press Association in 1990 - is dismissed.
"I've never heard anything more ridiculous in my life," he says."I've never delivered that sentence and whoever said it made ... it ... up."
Only a fool would think that last year's scandals are the end of Archer's public life. Stephan Shakespeare, his aide, said in November that "there is never an end for Jeffrey, just another chapter." Yet Archer won't be drawn on how that chapter might read.
"I have a play in the West End and I've just signed a three-book contract, so my life's pretty occupied."
So does he have a future in public life? No comment.
Does he hanker for one? "I hanker," he says, and pauses so long that I wonder whether he's going to say he hankers to see me closing the door to the suite. "I hanker," he continues at last, "for a hardworking, good life - which is what writing is."
I wonder aloud why he has made so many enemies. He quotes a colleague who says that people dislike him without meeting him and that everyone who meets him likes him, which makes me feel out of place.
"I can't be bothered with that sort of navel-gazing," he says when I persist. "I'm not saying anything in case of being misrepresented.
"I'm just trying to have a good time. I'm on a book tour, which has been most enjoyable until this interview."
To buy books online from FlyingPig
To Cut a Long Story Short
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less
Kane and Abel
First Among Equals
<i>Calder at large:</i> Paled by the Jeffrey Archer stare
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