The Doctor’s dilemma

With this book, character assassination reaches a level not known since William Shake-speare did the business with the Macbeths, another family with political interests. First there was Michael Crick with Jeffrey Archer, Stranger than Fiction. Now there is Crick’s ex-wife Margaret with Mary Archer. I see from the blurb that there is a daughter, who presumably even now is amassing files on William and James Archer. For the Cricks, nemesis has become a cottage industry.

Lady — no, Doctor — Archer (‘call yourself “Lady” and they think you haven’t got your O levels’) did her best to stop the book being written. Photographers were asked not to let their pictures be used, friends were instructed not to speak. Michael Grade, an innocent, asked if the Archers had authorised the book, and, on being told they hadn’t, refused to answer questions about parties at their house. A strange man rang Margaret Crick to deflect her by offering her large sums to write about football, about which she knows nothing. A journalist rang to say that until they heard about the book the Archers had been planning to approach her about ‘doing the dirt’ on her ex-husband, whom she had helped in his research. There were lawyers’ letters, and Lady Archer even called on the president of Simon and Schuster in New York. Margaret Crick’s book is thus, as you might expect, dedicated to ‘librarians and archivists’.

Not that you can blame the Doctor for her sense of self-preservation. Had someone done to your husband what Michael Crick did to hers, an ex-wife would be the last person you would invite in for tea and desk diaries. Once the mere mention of Jeffrey’s name, his opinions on the weather, say, would have had the alarm bells ringing for lawyers in newspaper offices. Now, following his conviction for perjury, you could probably invent a brief excursion as Grand Cyclops to the Weston super Mare branch of the KKK, and they would not even bother to check the cuttings.