For a man who owns eight grand homes, the prospect of one small prison cell must be daunting. Even as he awaited trial, Chris Huhne kept on buying properties to add to his portfolio.
The former Energy Secretary made a fortune in the City before he moved into politics. Had he won the Liberal Democrat leadership contest against Nick Clegg in 2006 — which many thought he could have done if the battle had gone on a little longer — he might now be resigning as Deputy Prime Minister rather than as a mere backbencher.
Huhne was once an award-winning journalist but it was newspapers which brought his career crashing down. He will now be remembered not for pioneering green policies as a government minister but for penalty points and a fateful affair with bisexual press aide Carina Trimingham.
His early life seemed to swing between business, journalism and politics as the mood took him.
At Oxford, he had been a Labour Party supporter and changed his surname from Paul-Huhne. After a spell at the Sorbonne, he earned a first in PPE at Magdalene College and made money in the City, which provided the basis for his current £3.5 million wealth.
He wrote for the City pages of the Guardian and Independent and won awards as a financial journalist in 1981 and 1990. But a life of writing was never going to be enough for the son of a businessman and an actress, albeit one whose career highlight was the voice of the speaking clock.
In 1999, and now a Liberal Democrat, he headed off to Strasbourg as an MEP for South-East England after two failed attempts to become an MP in the Eighties. In 2005, two years after the penalty points incident, he finally won a Westminster seat and set about securing a power base in the party, built around green issues.
He also lost to Menzies Campbell for the party leadership in 2006, but by 2010 he had increased his 568 majority in Eastleigh to 3,864 and his influence over party policy was becoming ever more profound.
His promotion to the Cabinet brought him the 10th most senior post in government, but his affair with Ms Trimingham, which he kept from his wife and family right up to the eve of exposure in the News of the World, was to bring him down.
The speeding points row was resurrected in the newspapers by his now ex-wife Vicky Pryce.
In February last year, the pair were charged with perverting the course of justice and Huhne entered the dock at Westminster magistrates’ court to select a seat as far away as possible from his ex-wife. He gave the impression of loathing every second he was in her company, but it was to be nearly another 12 months before his final disgrace.
