Archer, 65, is now back living in the 13th-floor apartment with stunning views of Westminster across the Thames, where he has hosted some of London’s most glamorous parties.

“I have remained silent for five years,” he confirms as the photographer drags him around the apartment for pictures. “If you have seen anything from me printed in a newspaper it’s made up.

“But I realised that if I went on writing I couldn’t just sit in an ivory tower and say, ‘I refuse to talk to anyone.’ And now I have written a book that I really want people to read.”

Wearing a business shirt without a tie or jacket, he is friendly and lively but proper and a touch wary.

“I suppose I am a bit more suspicious and careful of people nowadays,” he says when I ask him how he changed in prison.

The spectacular apartment is a central part of the image Lord Archer has constructed for himself. It is clearly meant to impress, with its multimillion-pound art collection and shelves lined with artefacts such as a photo of Lord Archer running for England and a stopwatch that recorded some famous athletic event.

Some have even been curated, with little explanatory notes for visitors. Lying near a personally inscribed photo of Margaret Thatcher is an invitation to the Baroness’s 80th birthday party the next week, and it is no accident that it has been left on view. Lord Archer, who uses the penthouse as an office, spends most of his times here while his wife, Mary, lives mainly at their Cambridge home. Once we have settled into two couches in a corner overlooking the Houses of Parliament, he says I am “the first person in the real world” to have read his new novel, False Impressions.

A fast-paced yarn which incorporates the 9/11 attack on New York, it is set around the fight for ownership of Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. It is Lord Archer’s first novel to deal with an art theme, and he says he has poured into it “30 years of love of art and collecting.”

He desperately wants it to do well, claiming he cares more about this book than any in his life, as it is “a comeback book for me in a way.”

Lord Archer left prison anxious he might be treated as pariah. He had been suspended from the Conservative Party for five years, cast out by the Royal Society of Arts and even banned for seven years from his MCC membership at Lord’s cricket ground.

“You wonder how people will look at you on the street, how they will treat you. You have no idea; you sit and wait. I was totally wrong — they couldn’t have been more friendly or kind.”

Archer, who dedicated his prison diaries “to foul-weather friends”, estimates that “about eight of the 400 who used to come to my parties” have turned on him, most of them journalists.

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