When the Recess Monkey was working on the script for our latest podcast (“script” in the sense of scribbles on the back of an envelope) he joked that Jowell would have to dump Mills to save her career. “Nah” that won’t work Guido told him, so we cut that quip out. Apparently Alastair Campbell thinks differently – though he says “David and Tessa have been good friends of ours for many years and we are obviously very saddened. First I knew was when David told me yesterday.”

Interesting things picked up in the week by Guido; journos on The Times were told not to go for Jowell’s jugular. The Guardian’s soft touch might have something to do with the editor Alan Rusbridger and his wife Lindsay being neighbours and old friends of Mills & Jowell. Mills’ daughter Eleanor is editor of The Sunday Times News Review. Colleagues are said to have given her a fake list of planned articles this week. The media consensus seems to be that Mills is a crook and Jowell is a dupe. Guido is too cynical to believe this, she claimed to Gus O’Donnell she didn’t know one of the loans had been repaid, but she signed a second mortgage application in March 2002 where she had to know, because she asserted, that there were no loans outstanding. Contradictory statements.

Incidentally, in one of those weird bits of synchronicity, the next book out from Mills & Boon really is entitled “The Italian’s Pleasure“.