Out and spoiling for a fight

Breakfast at Hollesley Bay Colony prison near Woodbridge on the Suffolk coast is at 7.30, but on Monday morning an impatient Jeffrey Archer is unlikely to have much appetite for his usual bowl of cereal.

When the meal is finished, the former Tory party deputy chairman and mayoral candidate will be led to a holding room to check all the possessions he arrived with are still intact. He will sign for them and be reminded of the conditions of his parole - he cannot leave the country without permission or change his residence, and must stay in touch with his probation officer and uphold the law.

He will then be handed £47 in cash to help with transport costs should he need it, which he won't, and anytime after nine in the morning he will be allowed to walk out the door to freedom and an army of photographers.

Archer will have been in prison for two years and two days, and a photograph of him taken only last Friday showed he has changed physically.

In Hollesley, the average cost of catering per prisoner runs to £1.07 a day, which does not allow a lot for fresh fruit and fish. Since his arrival last October, Archer has been eating sausage rolls and potatoes, beef pie and turkey stew, and as a special treat, as revealed by a former inmate, he bought himself some mini Swiss rolls for Christmas.

The stodgy diet has made an impact on his waist and, judging from the picture taken in the prison's library where 63-year-old Archer worked for £7 a week, the usually effervescent lord has lost some of his fizz.

One thing will not have changed. Having seen him in the communal shower, an inmate noticed that Archer was "tuppence short of a threepenny bit".

From prison, Archer - who is not planning to make a statement or stand still for pictures - will drive himself in his Jaguar, accompanied most likely by his wife Mary and sons William and James, to the Old Vicarage, the 17th Century riverside house in Grantchester Archer bought for £180,000 in 1979, famous for having once been home to the poet Rupert Brooke.

According to Archer's office, still run from his penthouse flat overlooking the Thames, it will be a low key day and there will not be a celebratory party. So much for change.

For just as Archer will find little different about the Old Vicarage since he was last there (he had, after all, a home visit only two weeks ago), those who know him do not expect to find a reformed character from the man who was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

Unlike Jonathan Aitken, another disgraced Tory, there will be no remorse or contrition. If you are looking for humility, they say, look away now. Talking to senior Tories, his biographer Michael Crick, former mistress Sally Farmiloe (now Farmiloe-Neville), Stephan Shakespeare, his sidekick during the failed bid to be London mayor, not one person thought Archer would be a fundamentally different man.

"He will bounce back as if nothing had happened," Crick says, while Farmiloe-Neville, who knows him intimately following a three-and-ahalfyear affair, adds: "I can't see him changing but having said that he is like a chameleon in that he can reinvent himself. He has done it several times and will do it again."

One Tory put it this way: "Jeffrey is Jeffrey, always has been, always will be." Another friend said: "I can assure you it's Jeffrey's giant strength - as well as his giant weakness - that he just keeps moving on forwards. I know of no one who takes less notice of the trail he leaves behind. He's relentless."

But while Archer has been in prison, the world has moved on and his position of influence at the Tory top table has considerably diminished.

The likes of Lord Lamont and Michael Portillo have visited him in prison, but a sense of betrayal lingers deep and his own set of friends is by no means clear. Crick said: "Those people who used to go to his parties such as John Birt, Robin Butler the former Cabinet Secretary and [ former Archbishop of Canterbury] George Carey have an interesting dilemma: do they go the next time they are invited or not. If they don't go, it looks as if they are fairweather friends and if they do go they look increasingly foolish."

But even in prison the surprise visit of comedian Billy Connolly seems to indicate that Archer has the capacity to add a whole new group of admirers.

He may need them as some of the old Tories, with the exception certainly of close friend Gillian Shepherd, may not be around. Archer was expelled from the party for five years in 1999, even before his trial and conviction, and any reapplication would only help New Labour towards a third term.

Shakespeare, who has visited Archer in prison, said: "I don't think he will be shunned by the party but they will both want to keep themselves very separate for a while. I would be surprised if he planned a political comeback."

While his favourite restaurants such as Le Caprice and the Savoy Grill will be happy to see him visiting again, there are others who would prefer him to disappear. For example Archer won't be able to sit in the members' stand at the Lord's cricket test between England and South Africa starting on 31 July as last year the MCC, which runs Lord's, suspended his membership for seven years. He does not, according to his Who's Who entry, belong to any other clubs.

Archer will also have the rest of the summer to make a decision about returning to the House of Lords as it will be in recess until September.

Fellow peers have already expressed their dismay that he cannot be stripped of his title without an Act of Parliament, and Archer will be aware that should he try and speak in the House he may be drowned out by cries "that the noble Lord be no more heard".

But whatever the Lords may do or the MCC and Tory party have done, Archer is not an isolated figure and, from his first-floor cell in Hollesley, there have been plenty of signs that he will not go quietly into the night.

His diary for the rest of the year is already getting filled. Although, surprisingly, Pan Macmillan does not list Archer among hundreds of authors on its website, next week it will announce the release of Prison Diary 2, the second of three planned reminiscences of his time inside.

The first, controversially published under his prison number FF8282, was subtitled Belmarsh: Hell, and the second instalment is expected to be called Wayland: Purgatory, after the Norfolk jail he was in before Hollesley. On the website of internet booksellers Amazon the new book is already being discounted before publication, from £14.99 to £10.49.

Then there is talk about Archer's supposed commitment to penal reform. Although they won't confirm it officially, the Howard League for Penal Reform has lined him up as a guest speaker at their annual conference in September. Archer is believed to be taking on the issues of drug use and illiteracy in prison.

Farmiloe-Neville, who notes that it could be a bit of a bandwagon, says: "The thing about Jeffrey is - and I know a lot of people hate him, - that he has got boundless energy, is very dynamic. If he did get involved in prison reform he would put in 101 per cent, using his knowledge from the inside."

Archer, worth £60 million, also has the backing of charity. While in prison, signed books were sent to be auctioned by the Cardiff Lions Club for the elderly and needy. The Worcestershire support group for the Crohn's in Childhood Research Association received one on request, as did the Air Ambulance Service.

A school in Glamorgan collecting funds for Save the Children raised an extra £5 from a signed copy of Archer's prison diary, while the Aids charity Lighthouse benefited to the tune of £4,500 when it auctioned off a dinner with Archer in the House of Lords on his release. Yesterday the British Legion Poppy Appeal told the Standard it was happy to receive funds from Archer, as it did last year when he was still in prison.

Farmiloe-Neville says: "I think the Essex crowd, the fringe charities, a lot of the entertainment crowd will book him for auctions as he does have curiosity value. They will want to see what he looks like, has he put on that much weight, is he wrinkled, what is his character and personality like now.

"People are much more interested in naughty people than good people, devils rather than angels."

There will be nothing charitable about Archer's main move this summer. He has been reported to be investigating the background of his former secretary Angela Peppiatt, who testified against him in court, in order to discredit her ahead of a planned appeal, while Emma Nicholson, who called on the police to investigate charity fraud allegations against Archer, is said to be the subject of ongoing scrutiny by Archer and his supporters.

Part of the operation to clear his name has already been exposed. Archer's sons William and James are said to have tape-recorded an entire dinner party in order to obtain "evidence" that Archer's trial judge Sir Humphrey Potts had allegedly been prejudicial to Archer. Legal experts have dismissed the boys' tapes as without merit.

Crick says: "He and Mary will carry on and try to clear his name until the day that they die. They spend huge sums of money on lawyers, the bill from [lawyers] Mishcon de Reya must be many millions by now, and they will pick every little hole they can in that trial but I don't see them getting anywhere. It will go on and on and on."

All that aside, the great question is whether Archer will be able to sell his story of life inside once he is free. On the face of it, given the guidelines that inhibit newspapers giving money to convicted criminals, the answer must be no.

But could such exposure be orchestrated another way? Very definitely. What well-endowed newspaper wouldn't want to liven up the silly season with a lively dose of Archer?