Falling among fans

I remember the day, the time, the place. Discussing the world’s news with the village butcher, I brought up the perjury trial, and he said, ‘Who?’ Silent among the sausages in Greens Norton, I looked at him with a wild surmise. Remember this: in July 2001, it was still possible to meet an Englishman who had not heard of Jeffrey Archer. Never glad confident morning again.

It is Michael Crick I feel most sorry for. When you appoint yourself a man’s personal nemesis you do not expect to find that in the process you are obliged to be a biographer to all of central casting. One by one they pop up: the police constable, the gym master, the only president of the Oxford University Athletics Club to have been neither graduate nor undergraduate, the charity fund-raiser, politician, bestselling novelist, husband of the enigmatic Mary, successful litigant, perjurer, convict.

And still they come, for ruin is a mere incidental detail to this remarkable man, or men. It would not be that much of a surprise were he to end up, without ordination, as Archbishop of Canterbury, just as that other great self-publicist Thomas