The Spectator’s Notes | 11 March 2006

As so often with people in public life, the career of David Mills is beyond satire. If an anti-Blair left-wing playwright invented him, critics would accuse him of improbability. Mr Mills seems to have done almost everything which traditional Labour supporters hate. He has made a career of advising people, including the loathed Silvio Berlusconi, on how to create offshore tax-shelters. He has given questionable court evidence for him, allegedly for money. He facilitated a £300 million sale of tanks by Ukraine to Pakistan. He administered a company in the Isle of Man. He lobbied to prevent the ban on tobacco advertising in motor racing because of his former directorship of Formula 1 Team Benetton. It would not surprise one to hear that he had arranged for General Augusto Pinochet to reside for tax purposes in the Cayman Islands, or flogged a few tactical nuclear warheads to Sir Mark Thatcher and Simon Mann. It’s a magnificent defiance of the goody-goodyism of his party (he’s Labour too) and his wife. What is really puzzling, though, is the houses. The Mills/Jowell homes in Kentish Town and Warwickshire are bog-standard, upper-middle-class residences which could have been acquired with normal professional salaries by a double-income couple in their forties or fifties. Everything about Mr Mills — his very good suits, permanent tan, strangely brown hair, raffish charm and posh cars, not to mention his entire career — puts him in a different league. Are those really the only houses in the Mills ménage? Tessa’s recreations in Who’s Who are ‘Reading, gardening, music, Italy’. Is there a palazzo somewhere?

The strangest aspect of the Jowell/Mills affair is the revelation that Alastair Campbell advised the couple not to separate on the grounds that, unlike a marriage, ‘politics is transitory’. One understands, though one does not admire, Campbell as the purveyor of cynical advice.