IT WAS supposed to be not so much Mills and Jowell as Mills & Boon, at least until Saturday. Now a marital split, or “trial separation”, has been added to a supposed financial scandal.

If there is one individual whose words I believe entirely in his comments on this affair it is Alastair Campbell when he says that he did not advise Tessa Jowell to take this course of action. He could not have been responsible for such a crass exercise in public relations. It is invariably better to appear “wronged” than to look “cynical”. And that, fairly or not, is how the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport will seem to many people this morning. This has become an embarrassing soap opera. It will end in more tears.

Until the announcement from his solicitor, I had assumed that it could not become worse for David Mills than it was for a few hours over Thursday lunchtime. If he had watched the news channels (and he could be excused for avoiding them), he would have seen himself wedged between helicopter pictures of a van taking the alleged Kent robbery conspirators back to prison and footage of Gary Glitter being led into a Vietnamese courtroom on child sex abuse charges. In an accidental and subliminal manner, these images were damning by association. It is not the only way in which this saga has been unfair on him.

For humbug and hypocrisy have been high on the menu. It started with the insinuation that there is something innately dubious, certainly morally, about what Mr Mills does for a living. Lord Hattersley led that charge on these pages when he asked how anyone on the Centre Left could be married to a figure who specialised in tax avoidance, never mind the person concerned doing so while retaining a Labour Party membership card in his wallet(s).

Now, Lord Hattersley is a writer with few peers, but also a peer without an absolute monopoly on the rights and wrongs of human conduct. One could suggest, for example, that a man ready to accept large pay cheques from the Labour-libelling and loathing Daily Mail is not ideally placed to provide homilies on ethical social democracy.

Tax avoidance is neither illegal nor illogical. It exists partly because of government ineptitude over the way in which tax laws are framed, partly because of government incentives in favour of certain “investments” (such as the insane support awarded to the British film industry to induce Madonna’s husband to make his next turkey somewhere like Peckham) and partly because governments appreciate that capital is mobile and would rather live with a degree of tax avoidance than create a new troupe of tax exiles. There might be a few people who believe that they have a duty to calculate their maximum possible tax liability and then skip down to the Treasury and hand it over in order that that organisation can spend it with its customary efficiency. One does not, though, have to be a swivel-eyed Thatcherite to believe otherwise.

Then there is the red herring of the ministerial code. Article 5.24 asserts that ministers may not “accept gifts, hospitalities or services from anyone which would, or might appear to, place him or her under an obligation”. The same principle applies if gifts are offered to a member of their family. The commonsense intention here is to prevent politicians being “influenced” (to frame it very politely) either directly by money or other valuables that are given to them or their partner.

The worst-case scenario involving Mr Mills (and it is an extremely serious one) is that he was deliberately circumspect when providing evidence in the trial of a Signor “B”, was subsequently offered a reward for being selective with the truth, understood that this was indeed the purpose of the “gift”/“long-term loan” and opted to retain the bounty.

If so, it would be surprising if Italian prosecutors did not seek to put him in the dock. The identity of his wife, let alone her ministerial role, in this is irrelevant. She could have been Ms Howell or Ms Powell or Ms Trowel as far as Signor B was bothered. This is a world away from what the ministerial code was created to discourage. Surely it would come into play only if Mr Mills were receiving presents from those who wanted the Royal Opera House knocked down so that they could build property on the site, or to ensure that contracts for Olympic stadiums went their way, or to have the BBC’s licence fee abolished (the ends might justify the means in that example).

Finally, there has been a lot of talk about “salvaging careers”. All of it has been about Ms Jowell. But what state is her husband’s career in after this controversy? Let us take the best-case situation for Mr Mills — one that is not completely implausible. This is that he received the money not from Silvio Berlusconi but another wealthy Italian, as he asserts. It is that the “gift” is best understood as a “bonus” on which tax in Britain was paid eventually. It is that nothing, ultimately, is pinned on him by the Italian judiciary.

Yet after the publicity of the past ten days it will hardly be business as usual for Mr Mills Incorporated. Rich people do not, as a rule, want their tax arrangements in the spotlight. Who would rush to employ a lawyer who arrives with an army of inquisitive reporters trailing behind him and whose own hedge fund and trust fund activities have been laid out in mind-numbing detail? One career is already in tatters whatever happens next. I suspect, alas, that a second will shortly follow.

These events have been identified as a “morality play” in some quarters. Farce with a trace of tragedy would be more like it. If they indicate anything deep and meaningful, it is our continued social and institutional inability to cope with “power couples”. Jowell and Mills may be an unusual subset of that ilk but other instances will follow. A “trial separation” from humbug and hypocrisy all round would be well worth an experiment.

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