At home with Lord and Lady Archer

The story begins in 1979. Margaret Thatcher had just become Britain’s first woman prime minister, an average house cost £14,000 and Blondie’s Parallel Lines was the bestselling album of the year.

Jeffrey Archer was a former Conservative MP, living in a rented Cambridge flat that had been made available to his wife, Mary, the first female don at Trinity College. Ill-judged investments had left him half a million in debt and put the kibosh on his political career, so, in an act of sheer desperation, he decided to write a novel.

Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, published in 1976, had been a minor success, but all the pennies it made were used to fill up that £500,000 hole. As Archer admits, his main contribution to family life at the time was doing the school run with his two young sons, William and James.

His second book, Kane and Abel, changed all that. The Americans had acquired a taste for Jeffrey Archer and offered him $3.2m for it. “One day I was struggling to pay the heating bill, the next I was a millionaire,” he recalls, shaking his head in disbelief. “The first thing I wanted to buy was a house. A proper home.”

The property that caught his newly minted eye was the Old Vicarage, a 17th-century pile in the postcard-pretty village of Grantchester, 15 minutes’ drive from Cambridge city centre. Mary wasn’t quite so keen, but was eventually swayed by nearly three acres of garden and the house’s connection with the poet Rupert Brooke. (She is a patron of the Rupert Brooke Society). Brooke lodged there for a couple of years from 1910 and wrote The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, which features the famous line: “Is there honey still for tea?”

When Archer invites me to Grantchester at the tail end of the summer, he excitedly shows me the house, bought from Dudley Ward, an undergraduate friend of Brooke, its vast Elizabethan dining table and the strip of lawn that once belonged to Lord’s cricket ground.

Dame Mary, his wife of 52 years — who stuck by her husband after his 2001 trial for perjury and subsequent prison term — will be joining us on the tour, and we wait for her in the drawing room. It’s authentically antique. No telly. There’s a collection of Moorcroft vases and the walls are covered in oil paintings. In fact, almost every inch of the house is covered with paintings. Some are expensive — there’s a Pissarro — but a lot are simply nice pictures by unknown artists.

“I fell in love with paintings when I was a teenager,” Archer explains. “I was desperate to go on a date with this art student, but the only way I could get her to talk to me was if I went to a gallery.”

The dining room is next door, and he sits me down at the Elizabethan table. “Margaret Thatcher and John Major have both dined at this table. Who else, I wonder? What tales it could tell... And this is a thousand years old,” he says, pointing to an ungainly bench that sits beside an original fireplace. It’s covered in ancient grooves and ridges. Archer strokes his hand across them. “Isn’t that wonderful? It’s like reaching into the past.”

Mary, an eminent scientist and chairman of the Science Museum Group, arrives. “Right, what do you want to see? Nothing’s off limits.”

“What about the bedroom?” Jeffrey asks, looking worried.

“There’s nothing to hide,” she trills, leading us upstairs.

Mary is true to her word, wafting in and out of every door. The bling-free main bathroom. The master bedroom, with a grandchild’s artwork and a hefty Jacobean four-poster.

“One of the few left in this country,” Archer says. “This one came from an antiques dealer we worked with for many years. After I’d earned a bit of money, I said, ‘We’re nouveau riche and we want some antiques. Get me the good stuff.’”

Although The Sunday Times Rich List puts Archer’s wealth at £150m, the Old Vicarage is remarkably normal. No cinema room, no gold-plated Bentleys — Mary drives a 10-year-old Audi — no Kane and Abel-themed pool. They’re not overly precious about the heirlooms, either. “This isn’t a museum,” Mary says. “It’s a home.”

Archer admits the house is very much his wife’s project. “It was in quite a state when we bought it,” Mary says. “Basic things like damp-proofing and central heating. Bringing the Edwardian kitchen and scullery up to date.

“The house was built in 1683 and I’ve obviously kept as many of the original features as I can. I even tried to go for original colours. I found a fragment of deep red on one of the chimneys, and that’s what I used for the dining room.”

As we head into the garden, Archer can’t help chuckling. “Look at her,” he says, pointing at Mary. “She doesn’t stop.” She is striding purposefully towards the trees, pulling up dead flowers and lugging broken branches into the undergrowth.

The garden is magnificent, but looks like hard work: Mary is helped by one part-time gardener and Paula, the live-in housekeeper. The Mill Stream, a tiny tributary of the River Cam, borders the bottom, and Mary has added a little lake with an island and secret hidey-holes for the grandchildren. But, again, it all feels natural. No straight lines, no over-manicured lawns. The one thing you do notice is the collection of sculptures: 51 of them, by artists such as Christopher Marvell, Maurice Lambert and Sydney Harpley.

The other striking element is Mary’s Folly, a pretend castle ruin, built in the 1870s, that now serves as offices for the couple. After extensive refurbishment, it was opened by John Major in 1990. “John called it my second folly,” Mary laughs. “He said the first was marrying Jeffrey!”

Archer’s office has the famous pen and pencil lined up on his desk — he always writes longhand. His political past is referenced by a couple of Pugin’s iconic Portcullis chairs, as found in the Houses of Parliament. “I didn’t nick ’em,” he grins. “These are reproductions.”

Tour over, we start to wander back inside, but the Archers continually stop, pointing out a sculpture, a tree, a giant gunnera or just a favoured view of the house.

When I ask if they’ve ever thought of leaving, they’re shocked. “Wash your mouth out!” Archer growls. “We have been offered silly money to clear off, but there is zero chance of that happening.”

“This house is us,” Mary adds. “A forever home. The only way you’re getting me out is feet first in a wooden box.”

Heads You Win by Jeffrey Archer is out now in hardback (Pan Macmillan £20)