James Howard Archer born 10 June 1974,[1] is an English businessman and former stock market trader. His parents are Jeffrey Archer, an ex-Conservative politician, and Mary Archer, a British scientist specialising in solar power conversion.
As a teenager James Archer attended Eton College, where he became captain of the Athletics team. He then went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he and three friends shared a large three-storey house with a Colombian hired help who did the laundry and cleaning and provided breakfast in bed.[2]
In 2003 he met Tara Bernerd (who had just opened up her architectural and design agency 'Target Living')[3] and they married in Rome in 2005. However by mid 2009 they were separated and are now amicably divorced.[4]
In London, James Archer rose to fame as a member of a cadre of five stockbrokers known as the "Flaming Ferraris" after the rum cocktail they adopted as their trademark drink.[2][5] In December 1998, one of its members orchestrated a public relations stunt which ensured that they were pictured arriving at Nobu, an expensive Japanese restaurant in Park Lane, in what The Independent characterised as "Reservoir Dogs-style".[2] The stunt, intended to raise their profile and further increase their then-significant earnings, backfired.[2]
James Archer was expelled from the SFA register by the Financial Services Authority in 2000,[5][6] after being found to have attempted to manipulate the closing price of the Swedish stock exchange through aggressive short-selling shortly after the Nobu debacle.[2] Archer was required to pay £50,000 towards the legal costs of the Securities and Futures Authority.[5]
Subsequent to 2001, he has become a director of Marlborough Gate House (Freehold) Ltd. (of which he was originally Secretary), also TFM Partners, and is a Limited Liability Partner in Target Living Homes LPP, together with his ex-wife Tara Bernerd.[1]