In their separate bolt holes, Tessa Jowell and David Mills had reason over the weekend to wish they lived in Italy. There, despite his complex ties to leading Italian business people and politicians, Mr Mills’s troubles and their impact on his spouse and marriage have only fleetingly aroused the interest of the local press. (The weather has also been unseasonably mild.) The contrast with the couple’s chilly British reality could not have been more marked, or more justified. Where reasonable people might ordinarily have only sympathy for the participants in an imploding marriage, they are instead bewildered by the litany of unanswered questions and frankly baffling answers thrown up so far by the affair of the many and varied Jowell-Mills mortgages — an affair that goes to the heart of issues of ministerial accountability that the Government claims to hold dear.

There will be more questions and answers today in the House of Commons, where Ms Jowell has pledged to appear as usual to face her opposite number, Theresa May. She may yet ride out the storm that her husband’s business dealings, and her professed ignorance of them, has unleashed. Any decision on her future is, after all, a political one, since she has not been accused of breaking the law, and Tony Blair has already given her the benefit of any doubts he harboured over potential breaches of the ministerial code. But the scrutiny of Mr Mills’s finances and of what his wife knew about them, and when, now has its own momentum. If there is more damaging information yet to emerge, emerge it will. Ms Jowell would therefore be wise to take advantage of the calm that should descend on her London home now that her husband has moved out, and examine her conscience more rigorously than ever. If it is clear, as her supporters insist it always has been, she should remain in office. If not, she should step down.

The sheer complexity of Mr Mills’s personal investments, and of the tax-avoidance schemes that are his professional specialism, has so far allowed Ms Jowell to insist that she knew next to nothing about them. She was unaware of a six-figure “gift” to her husband until it was reclassified as income, she told Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, and he and Mr Blair had little choice but to believe her. The complexity of any marriage, likewise, means no outsider can be certain of why it lasts or fails. However, as rival camps depict rival scenarios — one of a warm partnership torn miser-ably asunder by the media and Italian prosecutors, the other of a cynical public relations stunt hatched to distance the Government from its latest embarrassment — this much is clear: in the circumstances, Ms Jowell could not have conceived of a more dramatic statement of her loyalty to Mr Blair than to part from her husband, and she did so soon after the disclosure that he had mentioned his connection to the Prime Minister in a letter pleading to be allowed to practise in Dubai.

Hilary Benn, one of several government figures who rode to Ms Jowell’s rhetorical defence yesterday, said the notion that her marital hiatus may have been a political calculation was “beneath contempt”. It is not. This marriage may indeed have been strong. Those involved may indeed be miserable today, but the timing of the split invites a healthy dose of scepticism. To feel nothing but sympathy for the couple would verge on the naive.