Hannan's Call to Order

A week of after Jeffrey Archer was jailed, BBC Wales's veteran broadcaster Patrick Hannan reflects on his personal experience of the fallen politician.

Since practically everyone else in Britain has been rushing to tell their Jeffrey Archer stories, I don't see why I should be left out.

Not that I knew him well, as everyone is now urgently making clear, but I did spend a couple of hours with him when I chaired a question and answer session at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in the early summer of 1992.

Archer demonstrated his skills at Hay-on-Wye

At one point in the discussion I asked him if it was true, as was often alleged, that he didn't actually write his books himself, that the chore was contracted out to other people.

"Certainly not," he said. "My latest book went through 17 drafts."

A friend approached me later. "Imagine what the first draft must have been like," he said.

It was at that event that I got a tiny insight into the way in which Archer persuaded many distinguished people to give him friendship and trust, often against their better judgement.

Often, indeed, against the published evidence.

It's curious to think that practically the only thing on which Lady Thatcher and John Major agreed in recent years was that Archer would be an ideal Conservative Mayor of London.

So too did William Hague, describing him, unbelievably, as a man of "probity" despite the fact that Archer was by then known by practically everyone to be one of the most dubious people in public life in Britain.

His secret, it became clear, was that he was essentially a brilliant salesman, the sort of guy who could get you to buy double-glazing for the kids' Wendy house and an insurance policy for it afterwards. His product, though, was himself.

Now of course we all understand what a relentless manipulator he has been, as well as a liar, fantasist and fraud

One small incident that afternoon in Hay revealed his skills.

We'd been on stage for getting on for an hour and I was about to draw the session to a close with a final question from the audience.

Archer leaned across to me and whispered: "Just one more."

I asked for another question and he used the opportunity to launch into what was clearly a well-rehearsed peroration, summing up his life and philosophy, a clever sales-pitch for Jeffrey Archer which also showed that he was really in charge of proceedings rather than the nominal chairman - me.

Now of course we all understand what a relentless manipulator he has been, as well as a liar, fantasist and fraud.

The surprise is, I suppose, that this should have come as a surprise, particularly as the indefatigable Michael Crick had put much of it in a book, Jeffrey Archer: Stranger Than Fiction, more that six years ago.

He apparently has an obsession with the number 17 and gives it as an answer without regard to anything as mundane as fact

Others have revealed that even the answer about the number of drafts his book had gone through was probably an invention.

He apparently has an obsession with the number 17 and gives it as an answer without regard to anything as mundane as fact.

But for my money the most extraordinary thing about Archer is something that is undeniably true.

A quarter of a century ago, faced with financial ruin, he decided the way out of his difficulties was to write a best-selling book.

It was impossible, an absurd ambition for a man with no experience of writing and an obviously limited talent for the trade.

But he did it, to the endless fury of struggling authors the world over.

Everyone would like to know how the secret, if only to use the formula themselves, so in Hay-on-Wye I asked him how he'd done it.

It was perhaps the only question for which he didn't have a ready answer.

But then, of course, unlike much of what he said about his life, it had actually happened.

Patrick Hannan's weekly political programme, Called to Order, is live on Radio Wales, 93-104FM, 882 and 657AM, and DSat channel 867.

You can also listen to BBC Radio Wales live online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/live/rwv5.ram.

e-mail: [e-mail]