After lunch a medievalist and Becket scholar, Ann Duggan, talked to us about the period. The first day of rehearsals was spent with a fight arranger talking about weapons and fighting. The four knights (onny Lee Miller, ames Purefoy, Martin Marquez and Chris Fulford – Mali Harries is the only woman in the play) picked out their swords and tried exercises with the weapons. It makes the play more accessible having no yeahs or nays.The action takes place over a whole year and covers day-to-day problems like queuing for the bath. When they run out of money the knights decide to open the castle to the public as a stately home in an early example of aristocratic entrepreneurial spirit.nDespite it’s modern elements, the play has plenty of 12th-century influence, too. We didn’t know whether people would accept the mix of a period setting with modern language, but it seems to work.

Perhaps we may suggest a title for a new book: The Past Is Never Behind You.. J

ust back from a weekend relaxing in Malta and trying to recoup my energies without succumbing to an inevitable cold It’s hard to come down after the opening of a play. “I have always hoped that my good points outweighed my bad, and that I could make a positive contribution to public life. However, although I would like to be mayor of London, I am unwilling to put my family or the party through six months of sustained attack.”
Lord Archer will return to his work in the House of Lords and for charity and to his writing. Lady Archer was a non-executive director in Anglia, and an insider trading investigation ensued. Lord Archer was exonerated, but the whiff of scandal remained.
Yet the challenge of serious office still beckoned. And with the announcement that London would have its own mayor, Lord Archer laid his claim to the title.

“I don’t feel that I’ve achieved anything politically and I don’t really want to leave this Earth having been a dilettante on the sidelines,” he said recently.
He threw his heart and soul into campaigning, visiting every constituency. He has now sold 120 million books worldwide and has a fortune measurable in tens of millions.
But riches were never enough Political ambition remained. He bounced back to become deputy chairman of the Conservative Party in 1985, only to resign over the Monica Coghlan affair, a peculiar encounter with a prostitute. The story raised more questions than it answered, yet Lord Archer proved triumphant in court.

He won £500,000 damages after explaining he had paid her £2,000 only to help her escape press attention.
Political damage had been done, but Lord Archer remained an energetic figure in the party, the darling of the constituencies and Baroness Thatcher alike. By the 1992 election, he was the Tories’ unofficial cheerleader. He was created a life peer for his efforts.
But trouble struck again. He left Parliament and decided to write his way out of financial disaster. Within a year, he had published Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, an instant best-seller.

Brushing them aside, he married Mary, a brilliant research graduate, in 1966, won a seat on the Greater London Council a year later and by 1969 was MP for Louth, in Lincolnshire.
But within five years he was close to broke, thanks to a rash investment. Although he was only loosely attached to the university, his early acquaintances were left with the impression that Lord Archer had been “at Oxford”, just as a certificate from a body-building course was later mistaken for an American university degree.
Nonetheless, he became president of the university athletics club and was chosen for the British Olympic team, developed an interest in politics and joined the Oxford Union.
After Oxford, he became a public relations officer and fund-raiser working for the European Movement and the United Nations, where he faced minor allegations of inaccurate expenses. “If I go for it,” he said, “we’re all going to have to face the past.” His critics might have responded: “Which past?”

For the truth of Lord Archer’s life story has always suffered from what his wife, Mary, called “inaccurate précis”. As he withdrew his candidacy yesterday for the one job that he believed would ensure his place in history, there was a certain poetic justice that it was a lie that deprived him of it.
Jeffrey Howard Archer was born in Somerset in April 1940 Even at its beginning his life was mired in confusion. On his birth certificate, his father, William, a bigamist and fraudster, was described as a “journalist”, which he was not.
The young Jeffrey Archer attended Wellington, a small private school near Taunton – not the more prestigious college in Berkshire.