There's something about Mary ... that I can't stand

Beautiful, immaculate, brilliant, loyal, enigmatic, longsuffering. These are just some of the descriptions Mary Archer has enjoyed during her life as Jeffrey's wife. She has intrigued the public and the Press for decades.

"Has she elegance? Has she fragrance?" asked a judge famously. "Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance?" Last summer, she was again summoned very publicly to her husband's defence in his perjury trial, and now, once again, she's in court, this time to seek a permanent injunction preventing the publication of revelations about her by her former secretary.

My interest in Mary began a decade or so ago, when I began helping my husband Michael research his independent biography of Jeffrey Archer. I have learned a lot about her, and I certainly admire her cleverness, her poise, her clothes, her efficiency and her nice cats. But why is it that I find her so much more irritating than her buffoonish charlatan of a husband?

Partly it must be envy: because she's beautiful, clever, rich and well-connected. Partly it's because of her smug and superior air. But mostly it's because she has never explained how much she knew about the episodes of dishonesty which pepper the Archer saga; she is nearly always treated with kid gloves because of her imperious manner, her many academic qualifications, or because of misplaced sympathy for her as Jeffrey's wife.

It's said she is an enigma because she stays with Jeffrey, but for me there's no mystery. It's easier not to leave him. She has the status of being the wife of a peer, albeit a discredited one, able to call herself Lady. She has access to a huge fortune, including, it's believed, the British royalties from her husband's books. Without him she would not have been sought-after for "great and good" bodies, for parties, for photographers. She doubtless enjoys her husband's company, the fact that life is never boring, and she wants a united home for her sons. She's also able to lead her own life, professionally and socially.

Mary, to be blunt, has benefited from her husband's fame and wealth. She has defended and supported a liar and cheat, making light of any misdemeanours. To Mary, her husband's lies are merely "inaccuracies", his unethical Anglia share-dealing an " embarrassment". Just recently, Mary referred to the result of the perjury case as "ridiculous" and the whole process as "overblown". As Edwina Currie put it, Archer has been "a young boy indulged - first by his doting mother, and then by his wife", prepared to overlook and excuse.

How did Mary imagine that her student husband was able to afford two large properties and two cars at the time of her marriage? What has she got to say about allegations of tax and expenses fiddles? How does she account for his share-dealing in Anglia Television during the very same five-day period that she, a director, was negotiating a takeover deal? Why won't she apologise to Emma Nicholson over her husband's misleading claim in 1996's Who's Who to have raised £57 million for the Kurds? "He's made mistakes, both in his private and personal life," she commented in January, "but I don't think he feels remorseful beyond that." So that's all right then.

At the end of last year's trial, the judge was highly sceptical of Mary's evidence; a view unsurprising to anybody who sat through her evidence at either of the trials where she was a witness. Fifteen years ago, Mary gave the libel jury the impression she had a happy marriage, while all the time aware that her husband had been having a serious, long-term affair with Andrina Colquhoun. The Archers might have been content-with an "open" marriage, but they must have known the jury was being misled.

During the recent perjury trial, QC David Waters asked Mary if she had a sense of "unease" at the time. "I truly have no recollection," she said. Just minutes before she had boasted to the court she had "a good and clear memory". She also dismissed her husband's request to Ted Francis to lie for him as "trivial", and was evasive about what she knew of his affair.

It was recently reported that she has had a facelift. If so, this betrays a streak of vanity which has emerged many times. She has granted hundreds of interviews about herself over the years. She has modelled clothes for a glossy magazine, sung in cabaret on a TV show and at her own parties, featured several times in Hello! magazine, and appeared on many "celebrity"-style TV programmes. Mary, in short, loves the limelight.

Last summer her appearances at court had a curiously stage-managed air. As in the 1987 trial, she wore a different, and often eye-catching, outfit each day. Outside, she paused to let photographers see her straighten her husband's tie; in the witness box, she adopted a disdainful air, produced jewels from her handbag and shouted a correctionat the judge. The PR machine has been in action ever since the prison doors clanged on Lord Archer. Even as he attended his mother's funeral, days after the verdict, the family's "representatives" were touting Mary's story around Fleet Street for a reported quarter of a million pounds. There has since been a steady drip of quotes from Archer's friends about his fighting spirit and his ambitions for when he's released, a message Mary endorsed on radio and television.

Mary is, like her husband, happy to use the media cynically to further her own ends. It is interesting that she likes to be known as Dr Archer when she makes her media appearances, as if we are fondly expected to believe she has been invited on to Midweek, Today or Question Time because she is a leading academic. Radio and TV presenters, normally tough in their questioning of politicians, seem to quiver before Dr Archer. But when the occasional brave reporter does try to probe a little deeper they are dismissed as "impertinent".

Investigations into the truth behind the facade are "outrageous intrusion"; expensive lawyers are wheeled in to try to prevent publication of stories that don't match the image. But it makes people like me all the more curious. We'd like to know more about her life without Jeffrey, her friendships with brilliant North American professors. After all, it might make another good book!

Margaret Crick, researcher on her husband's biography of Lord Archer