Queen Camilla pays tribute to author Jeffrey Archer, who died at 86

Queen Camilla has paid tribute to the bestselling author and former politician Jeffrey Archer, who has died at the age of 86. In a statement, the Queen said: "Seldom does an author get to live a life as rich, varied and colourful as any of the characters in their books, or with as many surprising plot twists." She added that Archer was "not without flaw", but that "friends will recall him as an irrepressible life force through all the many differing chapters of his life".

The Queen said it was "with sadness that I learned of his death yesterday, on the eve of publication of his final work and so soon after appearing at my Queen's Reading Room Festival". Archer was a supporter of the Queen's Reading Room charity. She said her sympathies went to "Mary and the family", and added: "Wherever the next page turns to, I trust there will be champagne and Shepherd's Pie in abundance." According to BBC Culture, Archer's parties were known for serving champagne and shepherd's pie to guests.

In a statement, Archer's publisher HarperCollins said the author died "suddenly and peacefully at home" on Monday between writing sessions. Archer sold more than 300 million books in his five-decade writing career, including the Clifton Chronicles and Kane and Abel. He often set the novels in his home town of Wellington, Somerset.

Archer was born in north London in 1940 but soon moved to Weston-super-Mare in Somerset. In 1969 he was elected MP for the Lincolnshire constituency of Louth, and he served as an MP for five years before becoming Conservative Party deputy chairman. He moved to the House of Lords in 1992.

He was jailed for four years for perjury and perverting the course of justice in 2001, after being found guilty of lying and cheating in his 1987 libel case against the Daily Star. The court found he had lied in the libel action, in which he was awarded £500,000 in damages, and that he had perverted the course of justice by asking a former friend to give him a false alibi and producing fake diary entries. He was released from jail in 2003 and returned to the House of Lords until he retired in 2024.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch described Archer's death as "devastating news" and told BBC Breakfast on Tuesday that "we will miss him very much", adding that he had texted her earlier on Monday. She said he was "very much loved by the Conservative family" and, speaking about what she described as "other parts of his life", that "he did serve his time, he made amends, and he wanted to do a lot of good in the world". Former Conservative prime minister Sir John Major also paid tribute, saying: "We have lost a man who lived…"