Has Labour cancelled Lady Archer because of who her husband is?

Blocking Jeffrey Archer’s wife from taking up a post with the Royal Parks charity could be the start of a purge of Tory appointments made, but not finalised, by the time Keir Starmer took office, says John Rentoul

Mary Archer, who was made a Dame in the 2012 Queen’s birthday honours list for services to the NHS – with her husband, Jeffrey (Getty)

Should someone be judged by their spouse’s politics? Mary Archer, the wife of Jeffrey Archer, the disgraced former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, has had her appointment as chair of the Royal Parks in London cancelled by the new culture secretary.

On the surface, this looks like a petty and vindictive act, by the incoming Labour government, that does not reflect well on its ambition to unite the nation after the alleged divisiveness of its predecessor. But the case of Lady Archer’s disappointment is also an intriguing whodunit.

Her unpaid role was announced in May by Lucy Frazer, the most recent Conservative culture secretary, to take effect when Loyd Grossman, the former MasterChef presenter who is the current chair, came to the end of his second term in July.

After Labour won the election, Lisa Nandy, the new secretary of state for culture, media and sport, paused the appointment. Now, Nandy has announced that she has asked Grossman to stay on until May next year while a search for a new chair takes place.

No mention of Lady Archer, or that an appointment had been made and now unmade. Whose idea was it to turn her into a non-person whose appointment had never happened?

Plainly, Nandy must have wanted her out, and Keir Starmer must have signed off on the decision. But is it part of a wider purge of appointments made but not finalised by the time of the election? Here, we find only mysteries, riddles and enigmas.

Starmer cancelled Rishi Sunak’s appointment of Gwyn Jenkins as national security adviser, although that is more the kind of high-politics post for which you would expect a new prime minister to choose their own person.

The new government also delayed the naming of a new ambassador to the US, and is expected to make a political appointment rather than give the job to Tim Barrow, the current national security adviser, as Sunak had planned to.

The Royal Parks is a bit different. It is a charity that runs eight green spaces in London that belong to the crown. Lady Archer’s appointment was welcomed by the chief executive, and the royal family was obviously happy with it.

Lady Archer is eminently qualified. An eminent physical chemist specialising in solar power conversion, she has taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, and was appointed – by Tony Blair – to chair the board of Cambridge University Hospitals from 2002 to 2012. She also chaired the board of trustees of the Science Museum from 2015 to 2023.

So the decision to “disappear” her appears to be mere vindictive partisanship. Caroline Dinenage, the Tory chair of the Commons culture, media and sport committee, called it “spiteful”.

Lady Archer’s husband was a Conservative MP, deputy chair of the party, and later a Tory peer. He was jailed for perjury in 2001, having lied in a 1987 trial when he sued for libel over a true report of his having paid for sex.

In the original case, against the Daily Star, Mr Justice Caulfield instructed the jury to recall Mary Archer’s appearance in the witness box: “Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? Has she been able to enjoy, rather than endure, her husband Jeffrey?”

The point still stands in 2024: it cannot be right that she should be paying a price for the sins, ideological and criminal, of her husband.

Lady Archer’s own political views are shrouded. She is, it is true, chancellor of the private University of Buckingham, such a bastion of Thatcherism that Margaret Thatcher herself held that post from 1992 to 1998. But it is a respectable academic institution, and it looks as if someone has simply decided that Lady Archer is guilty by association.

The question of who gets to be the – unpaid – figurehead of a prestigious royal charity may not be the most pressing of the thousands of decisions facing the new government. But it is another telling sign of the guiding instincts of the administration.

It sets a bad precedent. Maybe it will all be forgotten by the time there is next a change of government, but it adds to the mentality of “to the winner, the spoils”. It is an unwelcome Americanisation of our politics, by which an election is followed by the changeover of thousands of political appointees, from vital executive posts to bureaucratic sinecures.

Perhaps the best thing would be for Starmer, after running what Nandy calls a “fair and open competition”, to appoint Lady Archer after all.