Angela Tilby - 08/10/26

Available for over a year

Good morning. Jeffrey Archer, the politician, entrepreneur, novelist and peer died on Monday; one of the most colourful and perhaps ambiguous figures of recent decades. In the foreword to his final novel, he wrote......"I should have been Prime Minister, captain of the England cricket team, or an Olympic gold medallist...". He then quotes words attributed to Marcel Proust, ‘We always end up doing the thing we are second best at’. Jeffrey Archer was a big personality, a celebrity, the Queen described him as ‘an irrepressible life force’. His life was full of trial and error, massive fortunes went along with moral disaster, and a very public disgrace which led to him spending two years in prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice. Even this didn’t deter him, and he returned successfully to public life. His friends remember his lavish London parties where shepherds’ pie was matched with champagne. Many also say how hugely likeable he was, and how he radiated positivity and good cheer. Whether he was making or losing a fortune - and he did both - he always managed to recover and start again; his moral and financial disasters were recycled into plots for his best-selling novels and a few years ago his net worth was calculated at over 200 million. It would be easy to see him as a stereotype of a lovable rogue – but there is more to his life than that. When I read the Gospels, I am often struck by how Jesus recognised that good and evil are wound together in the human spirit. The story of the unjust steward is a masterpiece of irony. The steward in the story has been called to account by his wealthy employer for bad management, and his solution is to write off the debts of a string of fellow debtors. The employer, surprisingly, does not condemn the steward but praises his shrewdness. It’s not what we expect to hear and it leaves us wondering about the nature of good and evil, of how human motives are rarely pure, and how even deeply flawed characters can be capable of generosity, while what appears to be perfect integrity can sometimes be moralistic and condemning. The quote attributed to Proust that ‘We always end up doing the thing we are second best at’ might even express a deeper truth: that our greatest ambitions do not always anticipate what will be our true contribution. As Jesus so often reminded us, none of us is wholly good or wholly evil, but the spark of redemption lies in everyone. I shall read Jeffrey Archer’s novels in future with that in mind.