BBC News Online looks back at the major events of his once-promising life in pictures.

As an Oxford University athlete in 1964, his contemporaries remember his many false starts

With his then fianc�e Mary, whom he married in 1966

As a Conservative MP for Louth in Lincolnshire in 1969

With the Beatles, in their dressing room during a 1963 concert in Liverpool

In 1986 as Tory deputy chairman, with the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at the party conference

The 1987 case: Jeffrey and Mary triumphant after winning record libel damages. He denied sleeping with a prostitute

John Major attended the Archers' Christmas champagne party at their penthouse flat in 1996

Archer, with arch-rival and eventual winner Ken Livingstone, during the 1998 London mayoral race

Archer was made a life peer for services to the Conservative Party, and remains a peer despite his jailing for perjury

The couple held a photocall in 1999, after Archer stood down as mayoral candidate when the alibi stories surfaced

With his personal trainer at his home in 1999

Art imitating life: rehearsing his role in his own play, the courtroom drama The Accused, in 2000