Last week, Westminster MPs were told to engage in wife swapping. The committee looking into their inflated expenses ruled that they could no longer employ their spouses, but said it would be fine if they employed each other’s wives instead.

While I can’t see how the taxpayer will gain from these wife swaps, it is nevertheless a great improvement on the current arrangement. To allow husbands and wives to co-work as well as co-habit has always struck me as a bad idea financially, socially, practically and emotionally. It is not only MPs who should be banned from doing it – everyone else should be, too.

But despite this, the workplace is stuffed with married couples who work side-by-side. I used to be half of one myself. There are high-profile examples in every type of occupation. In politics, there is Hillary Clinton and Bill; in philanthropy, there is Bill Gates and his wife Melinda. And in the specialised field of management gurudom, there is Jack Welch and Suzy – who share a bed as well as a syndicated advice column.

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F Scott Fitzgerald said: “There are no second acts in American lives.” An awful lot of entrepreneurs, investors and executives must hope he was talking nonsense.

The past 18 months have seen many reputations ravaged, plenty of high-profile sackings and a lot of business failures. I am afraid that in this digital world, such blemishes are recorded for all time.

Not many of us will emerge entirely unscathed from the battering of this downturn – a great deal of mistakes of different sorts have been exposed. So we should all maintain an optimistic belief that the world is more forgiving than is commonly supposed.

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