Lord Archer has hit back at critics who say his Oxford days show him unfit to be Mayor of London.

His enemies have been raking over the novelist's time at Brasenose College in the hope of wrecking his bid to be the Conservative candidate for Mayor.

But the Tory contender angrily rejected claims that he lied about his qualifications to get into Oxford and then misled everyone about his real position at Brasenose.

Lord Archer said: "No, I did not obtain any A-levels. Nor did I mislead Oxford University in telling them that I had."

He was as vehement in dismissing allegations that he captained the Oxford athletics club, when he was not a resident member of the university as the club's rules insist. "I was at Oxford, a full member of Brasenose College and yes, I did obtain a full blue in athletics," Lord Archer told the Evening Standard.

Lord Archer, who arrived in Oxford in 1963 to do a diploma in education, was never an undergraduate. His own reluctance to discuss his time at Brasenose only added to the endless conjecture and confusion about how he got in and just what he was doing there.

But he was stung into responding to an article by Paul Foot headlined "Why this man is unfit to be mayor".

Lord Archer even threw fresh light about his marriage certificate, which wrongly described him as a "research graduate."

He said: "As I had just passed the examination for a Diploma in Education at Oxford, it is possible that Leslie Styler, the Brasenose chaplain, who married us and whose writing it is on the certificate, assumed that as I had just been awarded a postgraduate Diploma of Education, I was a graduate of another university. The certificate is all in his writing, and I am not even sure I saw it at the time."

Lord Archer said his former tutor Ronald Burrows had described him as "a most excellent student", who had added that it was a great tragedy his pupil hasn't taught since.

But Brasenose College was yesterday standing aloof from the row involving one the most famous post-war figures connected with the college. "It is not our policy to comment about former junior members," said a spokesman.

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