Paul Vallely: Don't let the punishment fit the crime for Jeffrey

Archer's punishment seems about as apposite as sending an embezzler on day-release to a bank

It's a bit rum when you have to rely on Nasty Nick to occupy the moral high ground. Nick Bateman, if you can remember as far back as the first series of Big Brother, was the one thrown out of the house for cheating. This week he resurfaced outside the Theatre Royal in his home town of Lincoln to condemn the arrival of Jeffrey Archer – peer, playwright, perjurer and prisoner – at the start of the disgraced former Tory vice-chairman's day-release from jail as part of his "resettlement programme".

Nasty Nick had appeared at the Theatre Royal as Fleshcreep in last Christmas's panto, Jack and the Beanstalk. Archer had arrived – enter villain, stage right – to work as a stage-hand. But you never know. He might end up doing Nick out of a job if the management decide to switch this year to Pinocchio. So Nick came over all high-minded and announced that giving the lying politician such a cushy day-release sent out the wrong message to children. "It shows kids that crime does pay," he loftily opined.

The dubiety was widespread across the nation. The pampered prisoner – he arrived for his scenery-shifting in a BMW, wearing a suit – has only done a quarter of his four-year sentence and yet is already being allowed home on Sundays and has been permitted to sign a new £10m book deal with Macmillan after his previous publisher, HarperCollins, had said, in a rather infelicitous phrase given the circumstances, that it had "agreed to release" him.

And now here he was in the theatre, a form of human enterprise which, if it had a patron saint, might well choose Loki, the Norse fire-god known as the Wizard of Lies for his skill as a trickster, mischief-maker and shape-changer. When it comes to making the punishment fit the crime, this seemed about as apposite as sending an embezzler on day-release to a bank, or a counterfeiter to bone up his skills in the local print works.

Can those who make these decisions not recall the mood of national rejoicing the day the Lord of Lies was finally found guilty? Why, even puritan letter-writers to a London newspaper shared with us how they had danced round the kitchen table when the news came on the radio, and even "allowed themselves an extra glass of wine". What the nation would have preferred was that "Lord" Archer be offered his chance to give something back to society in the form, perhaps, of breaking rocks whilst wearing striped pyjamas and feet-manacles.

Some might even have wanted recourse to the punishments of a harsher age. In Elizabethan times, according to William Harrison's Description of England (1587), perjury was punished by "burning in the forehead with the letter P, the rewalting [chopping down] of the trees growing upon the grounds of the offender and loss of all his movables." In Protestant Germany they were even more severe, cutting out the tongue – since the offence was verbal – or chopping off whichever hand had been raised when the oath was taken. But that was in the days when the primary aim of the criminal law had ceased to be the compensation of the victim, as it had been in the Middle Ages, and not yet become the rehabilitation of the offender, as it is today.

The aim of all this was not so much cruel and unusual punishment as public humiliation. That, of course, is terribly out of fashion in these days of psychological sensitivity and perpetrator counselling. And yet there is something in us which yearns for punishment that is apt.

Jeffrey Archer is a man who lived a fantasy life to such a degree that the boundary between fact and fiction became not just blurred, but non-existent. He thrived in a world of self-deception and self-delusion of theatrical dimensions. It was dramatised in his last encounter with the theatre, in which fantasy merged with reality as he starred as himself in his play The Accused, at the end of which the audience was asked every night to vote on whether the defendant Archer in the dock was guilty or not guilty. It was almost as if he thought he could control the end of the Old Bailey trial which jailed him for perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

What Jeffrey Archer needed at the end of all that was something which might have taught him, or demonstrated that he had learned, a different perception of reality, and with it some sense of the humility which has always seemed missing from his public persona. It is reported that the prison authorities turned down his initial day-release request to work at a charity shop run in Boston on behalf of the Red Cross, the aid agency with which he was embroiled in a controversy over sums raised for the relief of the Iraqi Kurds. But, instead, they have allowed him to re-emerge into the world of illusion and trompe l'oeil that is the theatre.

If there is no phrase "poetic injustice", it's about time someone coined it.

p.vallely@independent.co.uk