Take Jeffrey seriously?

Pimps, publishers, restaurateurs, libel lawyers and sellers of dodgy paintings will tonight be cracking open the bubbly. Jeffrey Archer is free. The clown is loose. The circus is back in town.

Under the terms of his probation licence, Jeffrey has to nominate an address where he will choose to live. The obvious choice would be leafy Grantchester, where the devoted Mary has been assiduously burnishing her husband's reputation during his absence. There he could quietly ease his way back into society. He might even decide to re-read that famous Rupert Brooke poem, possibly amending the last lines to read:

"Stands the church clock at ten to three?

And is there money there for me?"

Instead, he has opted for his London penthouse, a mere five minutes' walk from the House of Lords. How wise of Parliament to shut up shop for the summer. Peers have taken themselves off to their holiday homes in the nick of time. But they can be sure of one thing: when they return they will find Jeffrey, the usual inane grin on his face, bouncing around on the red leather benches and embarrassing the hell out of everyone.

Jeffrey is a bumptious little man. In fact, Jeffrey might have had the word bumptious specially minted for him. He is the epitome of the offensively self-important person. But his problems go further than that. There is a gap between Jeffrey's perception of himself and almost everyone else's perception of Jeffrey. The result is a figure more appropriate to comedy than tragedy. It's hard to imagine casting Jeffrey as the tragic hero of a Greek drama. But it's very easy indeed to imagine him with his trousers round his ankles in a rollicking farce.

In short, Jeffrey Archer has become one of the great comic villains of our time. To find ways of describing him, we have to reach for words that seem to belong to an earlier, more colourful age: mountebank, buffoon, poltroon, charlatan, poseur, harlequin, clown.

Unlike Profumo and Aitken and others who have realised the error of their ways, Jeffrey thinks he is innocent. This in itself is pretty funny. He feels hard done by. He believes that in a fair world a man who is rich and popular ought to get away with anything. He is like one of those little toy figures with a round bottom in place of legs. When you knock him over, he just bounces back as if nothing had happened. Children find this amusing, which is appropriate because there is a lot of the child in Jeffrey.

If you were to take him aside and say to him: "Jeffrey, you've been a bad boy again, haven't you?", he would say: "Absolutely not. I have been maligned and misunderstood." And everyone would laugh.

If you were then to say: "But Jeffrey, you told fibs in court", he would say: "I don't accept that." And as the laughter grew, Jeffrey would announce some new commitment to an important charity, so that people would start taking him seriously again.

But taking Jeffrey Archer seriously is what we must never do. He's just not worth it. If he makes you angry, take a course in anger management. If he makes you want to kick him, kick the cat instead. This man does not operate by the same standards as other people. Aided by his bizarrely loyal wife, he is about to relaunch himself. It's not going to be a pretty sight: the fragrant and the flagrant united in a common cause: the rebranding of a discredited celebrity. Ex-con Archer will probably want to make you believe he cares a lot about prison reform. Don't believe him. He cares about himself. He will want to make you believe that vicious enemies have conspired to blacken his name. Forget it - the only vicious enemies that Jeffrey has are the seething neurons of his own imagination.

Now, once again, Jeffrey is asking us to take him seriously. And already he is finding people naive or stupid enough to do just that. The Mayor of London says Jeffrey should never have been jailed for perjury, but should have been fined instead. Perfect. I'm sure a heavy fine would have really hurt the man whose personal fortune is now thought to exceed £60 million.

The Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell wants Jeffrey to teach writing skills to disadvantaged youngsters. Putting aside the grievous harm thereby inflicted upon the English language, this proposal only reveals the desperate naivety of the woman. "He could show his repentance," says Tessa, "by privately undertaking important charity work." Wrong, Tessa.

You can't show repentance when you don't feel remorse. And what on earth makes Tessa Jowell think that Jeffrey is capable of private charity work? Now we hear rumours that the Howard League for Penal Reform has invited Jeffrey to speak at its autumn conference. I think the people at the Howard League would be well advised to think again. Do they really want penal reform to be a branch of comedy?

Well, you may say, at least Jeffrey should be thrown out of the House of Lords. Nonsense. Jeffrey Archer is the perfect symbol of Blair's corrupt and undemocratic upper house. Let the man stay there.

There is, however, one job that might be suitable for the wayward peer. I suggest that Downing Street puts Jeffrey Archer in charge of the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If he couldn't find any, he could always lie. He would thus be the perfect personal adviser to Tony Blair. Failing that, the new puppet regime being set up in Iraq may soon need a new Minister of Information. Comical Jeffrey. Now you're talking.