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Hours after Rachel Reeves broke down in tears in the Commons chamber in July – an episode that followed Keir Starmer's refusal to guarantee her job amid Labour's botched welfare cuts – she hosted a private drinks party at the Treasury.
Two people were by the Chancellor's side throughout the soiree: her sister Ellie Reeves, the Government's Solicitor General, and husband Nicholas Joicey, one of the country's most senior civil servants.
He had travelled to the event from Oxford, where he is on secondment for a year as Interim Chief Operating Officer of the Blavatnik School of Government.
Joicey took up the Oxford post to avoid any conflict of interest between his own professional life as the second most senior civil servant at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and his wife's work as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The potential for serious strains between the Chancellor and her civil servant husband were vividly exposed after her first Budget imposed inheritance tax on farmers.
The Treasury insisted that the tax hike would affect only 28 per cent of the nation's 209,000 farms.
Yet Joicey's own department, Defra, flatly contradicted the Treasury, arguing that the actual figure was 66 per cent or 138,000 farms.
Who was right? The Treasury or Defra? The Chancellor or her career-civil-servant husband?
Was there no conversation or pillow talk at the couple's south-east London home over this hugely unpopular tax raid?
Joicey, 55, is now at the centre of the row which could yet cost his wife her job as the first female Chancellor since the post was created in 1316.
On Wednesday, Reeves claimed that she and her husband were unaware they had broken the law by failing to obtain a 'selective' licence to let their family home after they moved to No 11 Downing Street.
Yet within 24 hours, her story had unravelled. It emerged that she had misled the Prime Minister himself after a cache of emails was released showing that her husband, Joicey, had taken part in extensive conversations with their letting agent about their need for a rental licence.
Yet Downing Street merely reprimanded the Chancellor, accepting her explanation that she had broken the law by omission – because neither she nor Joicey had checked with the agents to establish whether or not the licence had actually been obtained.
This failure to check is a blunder which surprised colleagues and MPs who have worked with Joicey, a civil servant since 1996.
He is renowned as a stickler for detail and procedure. With a doctorate in history from Cambridge, he has a Rolls-Royce brain and is hugely ambitious.
A Treasury high-flyer, he was hand-picked by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and appointed one of his senior speech writers.
One senior Whitehall source said: 'Gordon is no slouch and would only have someone in his A-team who was seriously clever, hard-working with a forensic brain.
'So it's odd that Nicholas forgot to check whether they had got the right paperwork to let the house, especially when the law of the land is involved. It is quite out of character.'
Joicey joined the civil service after a year as a journalist on the Left-leaning Observer newspaper. During Liz Truss's ill-fated premiership, he ran Downing Street's economic secretariat making him arguably the most powerful civil servant in the land, albeit for only 49 days – the length of her term in office.
Even then, despite the brief tenure, there was a whiff of a conflict of interest as his wife was already Shadow Chancellor.
After Truss quit, Joicey, who had impressed the short-lived PM when they worked together at Defra during David Cameron's premiership, moved back to his old department as the number two civil servant.
But with Reeves's popularity plunging after her disastrous first tax-raising Budget last autumn, he moved to Oxford.
'It was just too complicated to carry on in Whitehall,' said a senior source who knows the couple.
Their high-powered jobs have long caused domestic difficulties. The couple, who married in 2012, met at the British embassy in Washington when she was on secondment from the Bank of England and he was working for the International Monetary Fund. They have two children. Reeves, 46, a Leeds MP, was back at work five months after the birth of their daughter Anna in 2012. Their son Harold was born in 2015.
Even before the General Election, the couple were trying to juggle professional interests with their domestic duties.
Asked how she balanced work and family life, Reeves said: 'We manage it. The reason we're where we are in south-east London is because we're near my parents, and we do get help.'
But when they moved into Downing Street last summer, the children were moved to new schools.
The domestic routine was further disrupted when Joicey moved to Oxford, spending several days a week there.
Privately, the Chancellor has expressed sadness to her friends that she does not see as much of her husband as she would like.
'They are a strong couple who are firmly joined. But every marriage comes under strain from time to time and they are no different,' said another source.
'It's even more difficult when they both have big jobs and are both away from home for long periods.'
The serious row over the licence will have caused even more strain.