Jeffrey Archer was last night still in doubt on the punishment he may suffer for publishing his memoirs of prison life when still a prisoner.
Conservative MPs and activists gathering for their annual conference are in little doubt they will suffer - whether their ex-deputy chairman gets an extra year inside or merely loses his cell TV.
Martin Narey, head of the prison service, will this week seek legal advice on the extent of the jailed peer and novelist's breach of regulations in naming prisoners and, eventually, profiting by £300,000 on some estimates. Insiders said a modest loss of privileges was the likely outcome, though some MPs were outraged.
Lord Archer's decision to write A Prison Diary - Belmarsh: Hell, and allow it to be serialised in the Daily Mail during the Tory conference can only guarantee that, yet again, his genius for generating publicity will work to the disadvantage of the party for which, even his enemies admit, he worked so hard.
It was reported yesterday that Archer could face extra days and even up to a year more in jail, because of the strict prison rules he was about to break.
Prisoners are not allowed to identify fellow inmates and are forbidden from being paid for work while in prison.
In an excerpt of the diary reported yesterday, Archer talked of having contemplated suicide, writing in one passage: "They've supplied me with a Bic razor and I consider cutting my throat. But the thought of failure is just too awful to contemplate."
He likened jail conditions to those of Turkey or Kosovo. And he wrote of the time when he was first stripsearched for drugs and razors under an arc light with a camera. His diary noted: "'Aquascutum, Hilditch & Key, and Yves St Laurent,' says the officer, as another writes it down." It has also been reported the book claims that Archer was offered crack within hours of being sent to the jail, and was terrified when confronted by violent dealers who targeted him because of his wealth and notoriety.
Outside Lincoln jail, where Archer was moved for breaching day release conditions, Lady Archer said he felt the diaries were important. "What he has to say about drugs, about paedophiles, and about lifers in particular is important and should be debated as soon as possible," she told reporters after her prison visit.
Asked if the situation would throw a shadow over the Tory conference, she said: "Jeffrey is not a member of the party."
Archer will be head-to-head with another unusual political author, the late Alan Clark, the maverick minister. His widow, Jane, is publishing his third volume of diaries - and having them serialised in the Times.
Normally the publicity surrounding two such immodest writers would have been heard throughout the past week. Neither is available to sit on chatshow sofas, though their wives have done them proud.
But this year's crop of sensational disclosures for conference season have all been drowned out by a third diarist whom both men would disdain as a pushy outsider: Edwina Currie, even though Tory grandees would put all three within hailing distance of each other, even Old Etonian castle-dweller Clark.
Yesterday Ms Currie stoked the flames of controversy by giving an interview to Gyles Brandreth, himself a Tory former MP and old chum from Oxford. It was granted free to the Sunday Telegraph, she stressed, instead of a £50,000 cheque from the News of the World.
In a lively, self-justifying performance Ms Currie went further than before in conveying what a loss to government she thought she had been when her ex-lover, John Major, offered her nothing better than the job of prisons minister in 1992. She turned it down.
Seeking to explain why a man she regarded as "a serious risk-taker, a chancer, an imaginative leaper into the dark" led such an indecisive government between 1990-97, she asked: "Could it be that during the 1980s [when their affair took place] when he was a junior minister, he was getting a lot of help and encouragement from certain quarters that wasn't available later."
It was Mr Major's risk-taking tactics in the 1990s - despite lack of advice from Ms Currie - that worried some Tory MPs last night, as newspapers dug up his pursuit of the New Statesman magazine in 1992-93 over rumours he had an affair with the No 10 caterer, Clare Latimer.
With hindsight it looks as if Mr Major pursued his libel action to gag further inquiries in that direction, not least because the magazines had the wrong woman. That was a huge risk, successfully bluffing without (unlike Archer) having to perjure himself.
With feminist columnists backing Ms Currie as a victim of male double standards, she contributed to the gender wars by referring to Archer as a "little runt". Last week Lady Archer spoke of Mr Major's "rare lapse of taste" in consorting with Ms Currie.
