It’s not just Tessa Jowell who is being investigated — it’s the entire government

Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet secretary, has been obliged to deal with a considerable volume of intricate business in the course of his brilliant Whitehall career. When he was John Major’s press secretary in the mid-1990s Sir Gus was obliged to familiarise himself repeatedly with the private lives of Tory ministers and MPs. As a senior Treasury official under Gordon Brown he was forced to master the yet more perverse and arcane subject of working family tax credits.

Yet nothing can have prepared Sir Gus for the complexity of his investigation into David Mills, husband of the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. The ministerial code is clear. It states that ministers should declare any gifts to family members. But what is Sir Gus to make of the $600,000 payment made to Mills six years ago?

Two years ago Mills informed his accountant Bob Drennan that he had received the $600,000 as a form of recompense for giving evidence in court on behalf of a client. This client was referred to only as ‘Mr B’, and it has been widely assumed that Mills meant Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister. ‘At around the end of 1999, I was told I would receive money,’ wrote Mills, ‘which I could treat as a long-term loan or a gift. $600,000 was put in a hedge fund and I was told it would be there if I needed it. For obvious reasons of their own (I was still a prosecution witness, but my evidence had been given), …[the donor] needed [this] to be done discreetly.’