Put your money in a TESSA

Jesus, why doesn't she just resign already? This story is going to run and run, and every time a new allegation is made the only comebacks will be "I didn't know!" or "But everyone does that." The new one, (via Iain and Guido) is that shares in Old Monk, which she categorically denied that her husband owned, were in fact owned by an off-shore company of which Mills was the sole beneficial owner.

It's a definite untruth. The shares were owned, legally, by her husband, and she denied specifically that this was the case. The defence will obviously be that she didn't know, but is this good enough.

Jowell is effectively acting as a director of the United Kingdom (run with me here) and as such is in a position of trust, what we in the business call a fiduciary position. There are a whole series of laws and rules on this, and they include the duty to disclose any potential conflict of interests arising from the director's spouse. The defence of lack of knowledge is not absolute. There are five distinct categories of knowledge (this is why law school is so dull). The key one here is that a director can be assumed to have had knowledge of a conflict, if he bloody well ought to have known. Jowell is either so dishonest that she is happy to ignore the law, or so incompetent that she isn't aware of the law in the first place. Or, as the Devil's Kitchen demonstrates is so often the case with this Government, both.

Incidentally the picture is of the Capuin monastery in Rome, Old Monks, you see? Oh forget it.