Jeffrey Archer's real crime is to have taken on the system

A lot of people swanked up to Jeffrey Archer when he gave big parties. I remember going to interview him at his London penthouse for some political profile I was doing and slightly losing my own cool over the panoramic views he had of the Thames.

If only I could pull myself together and start writing books again, I thought. But I couldn't. The notion that what Archer does is what most journalists could do if we only "descended" to writing pot-boilers is simply not true. Writers write what they can and it is near-impossible to write up or down successfully.

I read the excerpts from Archer's diaries in the Daily Mail and they seemed competent, but not much more. The silver lining was that, in reading reviews of them, I came across the writing of "Erwin James", a pseudonym for the Guardian's prison columnist who is serving life for two murders.

Now his is really compelling and intelligent prose on life inside, and if James says that Archer is to be commended for getting through his weeks at Belmarsh, I'll buy that. He also shares my judgment that, on the evidence of the excerpts, we don't have a Solzhenitsyn or a Wilde on our hands. What we have is Jeffrey Archer.

The usual qualification of "you may not like him but . . ." applies in spades to Archer. You may not like him, but the consistency of the man is mesmerising. His inability to change spots is undiminished.

A perjurer is by definition a hypocrite, but something about Archer acts like honey for other hypocrites. He attracts the finger-wagging of truly stupid politicians and bureaucrats in the boneheaded prison system he is giving the finger to. It's not Archer's prose that tells us anything new about the problems in our prisons. It is Jeffrey Archer being Jeffrey Archer that tells all.

I don't know how recently our prison system decided to try to "liberalise", but at some point our worthies decided that reform meant day release and conjugal visits, and so on. Without debating the merit of these changes, it's sufficient to note the arrival of what for shorthand's sake you might call the "Swedish component" into the British penal system. Unfortunately, our reformers forgot to introduce Swedish officials to operate it.

The notion behind giving convicts days out of the prison environment is to put them back in their normal environment. The normal environment of 99.9 per cent of prisoners will not include a champagne lunch with a friend who happens to be a former education secretary (Gillian Shephard). For Archer, it does. He did not breach the purpose of a day out - only the small-mindedness of our penal system's managers, who lack sophistication and haven't the imagination to grasp that definitions of "normal" will vary.

Media interest in a high-profile prisoner's day out frightens the wits out of some penal muckamucks and ministers. Faced with a headline or two about Archer's champagne lunch, David Blunkett exhibits the sagacity of the rear end of a pantomime horse and vows vengeance on the dreadful luncheoneer for doing what his own department's initiatives encourage.

Martin Narey, director-general of the Prison Service, must have an empty calendar to spend quite so much time threatening Archer. His Prison Service invokes one of its obscure rules - and bingo!: Archer is transferred to a nastier prison. And sent to peel potatoes. Once in the crosshairs of the bureaucracy, you can't take a breath. They will find seven rules you have breached.

I can see how having prisoners publish books about fellow prisoners while in prison could create tensions and be a disciplinary problem for management. But that's not what is getting everyone het up. This is the old game.

On one side are some prison managers jealously guarding their turf and trying to create as many difficulties as they can for people under their thumbs, partly I suppose because they are simply mean. Wise prisoners circumvent them by playing the game in order to make life easier for themselves. On the other side are the Jeffrey Archers, who, in full recognition of the rules, challenge them.

Archer may do this because of a genuine belief - genuine, even if self-righteous - that such rules should be challenged. He probably also does it because he has a personality that finds nothing more abhorrent than submission and anonymity.

It is far more painful for Archer to be out of the news and not talked about than to be suffering some sort of administrative punishment. He could have waited two years to publish his book and all would have been well. The authorities have played straight into his hands by making such a fuss.

There is a dark aspect to all this. Last July's European Court ruling stopped the appalling business of prison governors being able to add six months to a prisoner's sentence if they decided behaviour inside warranted it. Still, Martin Narey (again) remains hopeful: "Disciplinary action could lead to . . . days added to his sentence," he warned after Archer's diaries were published.

A prisoner goes to prison to serve the sentence of the court, not that of the prison authorities - nor indeed that of fellow prisoners. Prisoners should be under the rule of law, not men, which is why I also happen to dislike the whole parole system.

Archer's four-year sentence means he is eligible for parole in two years and automatically released in three. Our parole system encourages absolutely nothing but hypocrisy. The Canadian defence lawyer Edward Greenspan tells a story in his autobiography of a convicted paedophile whom he defended. The paedophile was an engaging sort, who never used force on his victims, only charm.

Still, his actions were clearly illegal and he was sentenced to nine years. Greenspan met him in jail while visiting another prisoner. "Psst," said the paedophile, "there's something I want to show you." Inside his cell the walls were plastered with Playmates-of-the-Month featuring particularly large bosoms. He nudged Greenspan and winked: "Parole's coming up."

As Greenspan points out, once convicted of a crime, a prisoner passes from a world of strict and reviewable legal procedures to one of confidential memos and ever-changing bureaucratic edicts. In this twilight zone, prisoners spend a lot of time trying to guess how best to manipulate the parole system. The likelihood that this aids their rehabilitation and reform is minuscule. It will only develop their manipulative skills and their cynicism about the society that many already feel has been unfair in its treatment of them.

When something goes wrong on a minor level, like Archer's champagne lunch, the system responds by threatening to postpone a prisoner's parole hearing. When something major goes wrong and a paroled prisoner commits another crime, public, media and MPs go dotty and demand an overhaul of the entire parole system, which generally means a temporary changing of the rules.

The cynicism of the prisoners, all of whom are caught in these periodic bouts of hysteria, only increases; and the protection of the public is not enhanced. Prisoners quickly realise that parole is just a management tool with which administrators threaten them, and this encourages untold numbers to lie or dissemble.

From the Prison Service's point of view, parole is primarily used to encourage good behaviour in prison - not the expectation of reformed behaviour outside. The general public outside prison walls couldn't care less about problems inside; all they want to know is how difficult parolees will be on release. The two sets of expectations have little relationship to one another.

When a woman is raped, it makes no difference to her whether the rapist has served his full sentence or is out on parole, though, from the way the media and politicians discuss it in the heat of the moment, it sounds as if no offender would ever break the law again if only he were locked up for his full term.

Everyone feels victimised by the parole system. The convict knows it is a tight little world where a bullying guard's record can explode his chances for freedom. Those criminals who believe themselves to be innocent know that, while theoretically the parole board cannot discriminate against anyone claiming a miscarriage of justice, their chances of being released are compromised by lack of "remorse". Sentencing people to the actual terms we expect them to serve in jail might make more sense.

Perhaps Archer will give us his views on this crucial question, now that his parole is threatened and his sentence may be extended. Or possibly he will develop a sense of remorse and Messrs Blunkett and Narey will become his new best friends, Major Barbaras to his Todger Fairmile. They say the prisoners now call him "Lord Jeff". Perhaps, when "parole's coming up", he'll aspire to be the new Lord Longford.