EVEN David Blunkett’s closest friends were asking last night why he had risked his political career for a potentially fatal second time by taking a directorship two weeks before he was due to return to the Cabinet.

In the middle of March, only three months after his resignation over the allegations that he fast-tracked a visa application for his married lover’s former nanny, newspapers were confidently reporting that Mr Blunkett would be back in the political frontline.

On May 5, polling day, The Times reported that the Prime Minister had given Mr Blunkett a personal undertaking that he would be returning to high office. Only Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, had been given such a cast-iron assurance.

Yet on April 21 Mr Blunkett had quietly joined the board of a then little known company called DNA Bioscience. On May 6, the day after the widely expected election victory, he resigned from the board when he was made Work and Pensions Secretary. On the same day that he became a director Mr Blunkett bought 12 shares in DNA Bioscience for £15,000, 3 per cent of the company’s value. He put them in trust for his three adult sons. If, as expected, the company is floated next year, they could be worth about £280,000. Mr Blunkett has pointedly declined to say what salary he was being paid as a director.

When he returned to the Cabinet Mr Blunkett told his senior civil servants about his shares and included them in the register of MPs’ interests.

Last night MPs were not just questioning his judgment in becoming embroiled in such an overtly commercial transaction in the middle of an election campaign in which he had an important role in energising Labour supporters to go out and vote. They were also questioning how Mr Blunkett could have ignored or forgotten the rule — not a voluntary guideline — that ministers have to seek advice from the independent Advisory Committee on Business Appointments about any job they wish to take up within two years of leaving office. The committee’s advice is voluntary, but the need to seek it is not.

Since December Mr Blunkett had received three separate letters from Lord Mayhew, the chairman of the advisory committee, spelling out the rules on taking up paid jobs within two years of leaving the Cabinet.

Mr Blunkett took the job with DNA Bioscience only five weeks after the final reminder from Lord Mayhew and only four months after leaving the Government. Yet still he did not consult the committee.

Asked why Mr Blunkett took the job in the first place, a member of his office said that Mr Blunkett was far from certain at the time that he would return. “Newspapers were writing that he would come back but David but been told nothing officially by the Prime Minister,” the source said.

At Westminster some MPs were increduluous that Mr Blunkett had not been punctilious in following the rules, especially after his conduct as Home Secretary had been the subject of an official inquiry.

He was still living, as he is now, in the grace-and-favour house in Belgravia that went with the Home Secretary’s post. Tony Blair had personally intervened to ensure that Mr Blunkett stayed in the house — a clear sign that he was on his way back.

Chris Grayling, the Shadow Leader of the Commons who has led the Tory attack on Mr Blunkett, said: “Most reasonable people would find his behaviour inexplicable only two weeks before polling day.

“In private we know that Mr Blunkett was boasting that he would be back in the Cabinet after the election. He knew that questions would be asked about the business company he kept. Why did he not wait until after the election?” With his London home rented out, and having enjoyed a Cabinet salary since 1997, Mr Blunkett, should have no financial worries. He was out of the Cabinet for only four months, but his departure was softened by an £18,000 redundancy payment.

One explanation is that that Mr Blunkett, whose Cabinet salary is £134,000, may have needed the money to pay for his legal battle with his married former lover Kimberly Quinn, which would have run into tens of thousands of pounds.

The latest spate of damaging headlines for Mr Blunkett have uncomfortable echoes of his public break-up with Mrs Quinn. Last year, when he was still Home Secretary, he met Tariq and Lucy Camilla Siddiqi, an ambitious couple, at a dinner party. Mr Blunkett would have been interested in the fact that the couple ran a company offering DNA tests for a fee. To win access to William Quinn, the two-year-old son of his former lover, he had had to prove that he was the father.

The couple introduced Mr Blunkett, devastated after his bitter break-up with Mrs Quinn, to Sally Anderson, 29, an estate agent at Annabel’s nightclub in Mayfair.

They had a number of dates, but the relationship fizzled out. Initial press reports of his liaison with Ms Anderson seemed to be mere tittle tattle of no political consequence.

But Ms Anderson, pursued by the popular press, decided to cash in and sold her story for a reputed £50,000 last month. It was Ms Anderson’s kiss-and-tell revelations that lifted the lid on the extent of Mr Blunkett’s relationship with the DNA company.

The Siddiqis had approached Mr Blunkett to join the company as a non-executive director because they hoped that such a high profile politician’s name on the company notepaper would impress their clients. Mr Blunkett’s experience of fathering a son by a married woman made him an ideal candidate for a directorship.

Mr Blunkett of all people in the government would know how marketable DNA testing may become. The DNA company equally knew that David Blunkett was highly marketable, which was why his photograph with Mrs Siddiqi was put up on its website. In the photograph Mr Blunkett was smiling broadly. Will he be smiling for much longer? The first reports about his alleged involvement with the nanny’s visa emerged one month before he was forced to resign. The real controversy over the DNA directorship broke two weeks ago. Mr Blunkett will be hoping that history is not about to repeat itself.

UNANSWERED POINTS

Why did he fail to consult, as required, the independent advisory committee which had sent him three reminders of the rules?

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