Whatever the truth in the swirl of stories around Bo Xilai’s wife, ranging from poisoning in Chongqing to bottom-pinching in Bournemouth, a clear political motivation is evident. Gu Kailai is to be blamed for all transgressions of a material or human kind, be it moving large sums of money out of China or murdering the British businessman, Neil Heywood.

A political affair. Initially at least, her husband will be blamed simply for infringing Communist Party discipline (and, at any rate by inference, for not having kept his wife in order). Later he may be charged with pecuniary offences, as the fallen Party bosses of Shanghai and Beijing were before incurring long prison terms.

But his prime offence was political – to have been too ambitious and to have challenged the consensual central control of the Party by his populist, individualistic style. When it became known that he aimed to get control of the national internal security apparatus if promoted to the Politburo Standing Committee later this year, his peers could only quail at the thought of him staging across the country a repetition of his no-holds-barred crusade against the underworld and its political associates in his base of Chongqing. Nobody would be safe from his unwanted attentions.

But if Bo’s ambition sealed his fate, now that he has been brought down it would be doubly embarrassing for the leadership, present and future, to admit that a member of the Politburo who was widely expected to rise to the top decision-making body was involved in the kind of financial shenanigans alleged to have been carried out by his family. Nor can Beijing disown the “Chongqing model” given that almost all the Standing Committee members visited the municipality to express support for what Bo was doing, The debts which the municipality racked up to fund its development may be a problem in due course but the city’s core role in the “Go West” strategy mean that it cannot be written off as the folly of a man our of control.

Splitting the couple. So a wall has to be built between the couple. Gu is the subject of a myriad media leaks which are impossible to check but which no journalist can resist. Meanwhile, her husband remains in limbo, awaiting a decision from his superiors as to how drastic his punishment should be. Since his foremost crime, as far as the leadership is concerned, was against the Party centre, it now has to be protected from further harm.

Thus, appeals by people sentenced in Bo’s anti-crime crusade in Chongqing are getting no joy. Extending clemency even to those who got lighter sentences would open a can of worms. As observed to the Financial Times by Li Zhuang, the lawyer jailed for 548 days for allegedly advising a defendant to say he had been tortured, if the verdicts on people like him were re-examined, what about the dozen or so who were executed?

As for Gu Kailai, she seems set to join the procession of Chinese women painted in lurid colours by their opponents for political reasons. After the fall of the Gang of Four following Mao’s death, rumours spread that his wife was having an affair with a young member of the leftist group, a former industrial worker from Shanghai who was at one point chosen by the Great Helmsman as his successor.

The Dragon ladies. Another of Mao’s choices as his dauphin, Lin Biao, felt impelled at one point to circulate a note to other Politburo members stating that his wife had been a virgin when they married – this after stories that she had had affairs at the Communist wartime base in Yan’an. Five years later she was alleged to have egged on their son to foment a coup against Mao which ended with the family fleeing to the Soviet Union in a Comet airliner which crashed en route.

During the Nationalist period, Chiang Kai-shek’s wife, Soon Meiling, was portrayed as the epitome of the Dragon Lady, seeking to amass power and probably having a one-night stand with a visiting US presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, in China’s wartime capital of Chongqing (as it happens, Bo Xilai’s subsequent power base). “Pure sex” was one visiting Western journalist’s verdict on her.

In the dying days of the Qing dynasty, the eccentric Englishman, Edmund Backhouse, wrote pornographic accounts of flings he claimed to have had with the supposedly sexually voracious Dowager Empress Cixi; these were dismissed for decades as fiction but have recently been rehabilitated as possibly at least partially true. Further back, in the seventh century, China’s only female emperor, Wu Zetian, was pictured by her successors (who, like most incoming rulers, were anxious to do down those who went before) as having consumed so many aphrodisiacs to keep up with her young male lovers that she grew a second set of teeth.

Cherchez la femme. So far the stories about Gu have gone little further than mutterings about her relationship with Heywood and a British newspaper report that she “fascinated” the men of Bournemouth where she had a flat allegedly registered in the name of a French architect. Still, she is clearly being set up as the fall gal of the Bo affair. Her husband will not escape, but the deflection of blame in her direction is a Party imperative and the crimes will be made to fit the punishment.

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