Now Tessa Jowell’s widower falls for bohemian Pandora
DAME Tessa Jowell’s husband, David Mills, was devastated when she lost her brave battle against brain cancer last year.
But now the lawyer has found love again, with a bohemian aristocrat 15 years his junior.
Mills, 75, introduced his new love, the artist Pandora Mond, to his famous friends at BBC broadcaster Andrew Marr’s very exclusive 60th birthday party at the Ivy Club in Soho last weekend.
‘They have been together a while,’ one of Pandora’s friends tells me. ‘It’s a serious relationship. It’s wonderful that Pandora has put a smile on his face again.’
Pandora, who turned 60 this week, is the daughter of industrialist, the 3rd Lord Melchett and the author Sonia Melchett. Her brother was the Greenpeace campaigner Peter Melchett.
While she was an art student at Oxford, Pandora achieved some notoriety when a society photographer captured her exposing a breast. The picture appeared in a magazine under the headline, ‘The Return of the Bright Young Things’.
Mills is reluctant to comment on his new romance, telling me: ‘I never discuss my private life.’ Pandora is similarly discreet.
It’s not known if she has met Mills’s children with Tessa: musician Jess and Matthew Mills, who is married to food blogger ‘Deliciously Ella’ Woodward.
Pandora also has two grown-up children from her marriage to former rock drummer Nicholas Wesolowski.
Jowell married Mills in 1979, but they separated in 2006 after he was found guilty of accepting a bribe for providing false testimony for Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Mills was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, which he never had to serve.
He and Tessa were reconciled in 2012, the year of the Olympics she helped bring to London as Culture Secretary, but they continued to live in separate homes. Her flat in Highgate has now been sold, along with the family home in Warwickshire.