Jeffrey Archer's 'foolish act of honourable man' – archive, 1987

Mr Jeffrey Archer , the former deputy chairman of the Conservative party, paid £2,000 to a prostitute he had never met to save his reputation and that of his party from scandal, a High Court jury was told yesterday.

The payment was the ‘very foolish’ act of a ‘totally honourable man,’ Mr Robert Alexander QC for Mr Archer, told the court on the first day of a libel action against the Star over an article suggesting he had sex with the prostitute, Monica Coghlan.

Mr Archer, who appeared in court with his wife, told the jury that he had never had sex with Miss Coghlan. They had not even met.

On the night last September when it was alleged the two had been together he had been dining with friends at a West End restaurant.

The article, published last November ‘appeared under the headline, ‘Poor Jeffrey, Vice-Girl Monica Talks of Archer – The Man she Knew. ‘

It continued inside the paper under the heading ‘Monica – One Of Her Clients Wanted To Dress As Red Riding Hood, Complete With Suspenders.’

Mr Alexander said that the article clearly implied that Mr Archer had sex with Miss Coghlan and paid her money for it.

It was an ‘extremely damaging’ libel, which had caused pain to Mr Archer and his family and appropriately ‘big damages’ were demanded.

The libeal was all the worse for being printed after Mr Archer had already categorically denied allegations that he had had sex with Miss Coghlan, a denial which the Star itself had originally seemed to accept.

In an editorial published the day after Mr Archer resigned as deputy chairman, the newspaper had described him as a ‘foolish but honourable’ man who appeared to have been the victim of a set-up by another newspaper, the News of the World.

Five days later, the Star was branding Mr Archer a liar, Mr Alexander said, choosing to acept the word of a prostitute that they had had sex rather than Mr Archer’s assurances.

Tape recordings of conversations between Mr Archer and Miss Coghlan, made by reporters from the News of the World, were played to the jury.

In them, Mr Archer consistently denied knowing her. But convinced by her claims that she was being hounded by newspapers for her story and desperate to ‘nail as false’ the story that the two had ever met, the former deputy chairman made what his counsel called his ‘one mistake’.

He arranged to pay her £2,000 to leave the country.

Mr Archer had no idea that the conversations were being recorded by M. Coghlan ‘in cahoots’ with the News of the World.

When on October 26 that paper, which Mr Archer is also suing, published the allegation that he had paid off Ms Coghlan, he resigned as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.

Mr Archer’s future, counsel told the jury, now lay in their hands. He had hoped for ‘further exciting opportunities in politics.’

Jeffrey Archer was awarded record libel damages of £500,000 and more still in costs from the Star newspaper for accusing him of paying a prostitute for sex. Fourteen years later, Lord Archer was jailed for four years after being found guilty of lying and cheating in the 1987 libel case.