Split decision
Tessa Jowell had managed for many weeks, months and years to separate herself out from her husband's controversial dealings - it's more than a decade now that the Italian courts have been taking an interest in David Mills.
What changed all that was one mortage application, for a vast sum of money for most people - £350,000. Her name on it, his financial dealings, and the only way in which it was found that she had not broken the ministerial code was because she had to plead ignorance.
She had to say, "My husband never told me. I never asked. I didn't know what this financial transaction was about." Had she known, she would have broken the code - Tony Blair would have been forced to sack her.
Now it is quite possible that, in the words of one friend of hers, there has been a breakdown of trust. That in the process of these documents coming out she has discovered things that she simply never knew about her husband, and she has also discovered that he has not told her all that she felt he should have said. But I am afraid, in the end, this is guesswork. What we know is that an enormous strain has been put on the family by the drip-drip of revelations from the Italian prosecutors.
We are told that they are now separating, but the hints from what I am being told, the hints from the statement from David Mills' solicitor, that this is temporary and that they hope to get back together again, suggest partly a painful personal decision but partly a calculation - to separate off the vulnerable political person, the minister, from her husband so that both can deal with their own problems in their own ways without becoming intertwined.
I'm 
