Downing Street yesterday indicated it would consider seriously the growing demands to strip convicted peers of their titles as Lord Archer spent his first full day in prison.
Several Conservative and Labour MPs are insisting that the House of Lords should be subject to the same rules as the Commons, where MPs convicted of criminal offences are expelled. The Leader of the House of Commons, Mr Robin Cook, has acknowledged "there would be a logic" to treating MPs and peers equally, and a Downing Street spokesman said that in the context of Lords reform stripping convicted peers of their titles "may be a subject that people wish to address".
The Conservative MP Sir Teddy Taylor led the calls for reform, declaring that if the House of Lords were to retain its respectability "people found guilty of crimes should be quietly excluded from it".
Another Tory MP, Mr Gerald Howarth, said there was a case to be considered, but he warned the Labour Government that it should not exploit the Archer case to score points against the Conservatives. "If the New Labour establishment want to use Archer simply to wreak vengeance on the Conservative Party, that would be ignoble," he said.
Some Labour MPs also joined the call for a change in the rules. Mr Andrew Mackinlay has already tabled a Commons motion calling on the government to legislate to exclude peers imprisoned for criminal offences from sitting in the Lords.
Lord Archer also faces the possibility of police investigations into his financial affairs, and the former Conservative Party member Baroness Nicholson, who is now a Liberal Democrat peer, called on the police to look into the novelist's fundraising efforts for Iraqi Kurds in the 1990s.
Lord Archer claimed to have raised up to £40 million but Baroness Nicholson told the BBC that Iraqi Kurds had informed her "that they never saw more than a smidgen" of the money. She said she raised the issue with fellow-Tories in the 1990s.
Lord Archer spent the first full day of his four-year sentence at the high-security Belmarsh prison in south-east London attending an induction programme designed to familiarise him with the prison regime.
A prison officer who was on duty during Lord Archer's first night in prison told the London Evening Standard that the new inmate was finding it difficult to adjust to his surroundings.
"He looked very low," he said. "When he first came in he smiled a bit and exchanged a couple of jokey comments with officers. But when I saw him later in the evening he was very quiet and sad. I think it was sinking in that he is facing a long time in prison."
Lord Archer could be released from prison for a short time today to attend his mother's funeral in Cambridge. Mrs Lola Hayne died shortly before Lord Archer was sentenced last week to four years for perjury and conspiring to pervert the course of justice over his 1987 libel action against the Daily Star.