Steerpike Steerpike

The remorseless rise of Jeffrey Archer’s mafia

Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Together For Short Lives

Much ink was spilled during the Cameron years about CCHQ’s A-list efforts to get more top talent from a range of diverse backgrounds into the Tory parliamentary party. But now it belatedly transpires one man foresaw the future and was nursing his own crop of rising stars before it was fashionable – onetime MP turned novelist Jeffrey Archer. The octogenarian author popped up on Times Radio on Sunday to offer his thoughts on the issues of the day.

Mr S was interested to hear Archer telling host Gloria De Piero that no less than six of the members of the organising committee of his 2000 London mayoral bid – which ended somewhat ignominiously after he was accused and then convicted of perjury – are now leading Tory MPs. The six of the best include Nadhim Zahawi, now minister for vaccines, ex chancellor Sajid Javid, home secretary Priti Patel and business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng who are both in the cabinet plus select committee chairmen Tobias Ellwood and Robert Halfon. Big names but which of them has achieved the most? For Archer there was an obvious choice: ‘The one who has done best of all is Stefan Shakespeare, who opened a company called YouGov and in my opinion probably beat the lot of them.’ Ooft. He continued: 

I didn’t see a prime minister among them, I could see that they would make the cabinet and I wasn’t at all shocked when Nadhim Zahawi was given the jobs of injecting us all because he’s a go getter, he’s a businessman, he’s a man who likes to make things happen so that didn’t surprise me at all and of course I was delighted when Kwasi made it to the top and Sajid because it’s all very well to talk about divergence but I was clearly doing it in London without thinking about it and people would say to me ‘Gosh have you planned that Jeffrey?’ and I said ‘No I happened to choose the best people available’ which is what you should do: ‘You should pick the best people available and it just wasn’t a coincidence that in my London team, seven fulfilled all the sort of rules that are now being demanded.

Archer’s long time nemesis Michael Crick noted back

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