At a recent lunch the Financial Times hosted for management consultants, one of them introduced us to the “spouse test”. Before you submit a proposal to a potential client, the consultant said, ask your spouse to read it. If he or she can’t make sense of it, rewrite it.

The role of spouses in telling us when we are going wrong at work is largely hidden. This is understandable; married life is private. Almost the only time we get a glimpse of what a spouse has contributed to a senior executive’s career is when the couple gets divorced.

Even then, the courts typically concentrate on what the wife (usually it is the wife) has done to maintain a comfortable home and bring up the children, freeing her husband to focus on making his entrepreneurial or corporate fortune.

Occasionally, the judges will go a little further, as in the important English case of Charman v Charman, where the Court of Appeal in 2007 referred to the man being ousted from his company, after which “the parties grew close and the wife gave the husband considerable emotional support”.

Emotional support is often as far as spouses are expected to go. Colette Young, founder of ExecuMate, which counsels corporate spouses, advises forbearance too. “As a spouse, you can’t say ‘put that BlackBerry away’. You have to know part of that life is they’re on 24/7,” Ms Young – whose husband Larry Young is chief executive of Dr Pepper Snapple, the drinks company – told Associated Press.

Should spouses go further? A public declaration of devotion to the boss is usually embarrassing and not very effective.

Sarah Brown’s lauding of her husband at last month’s Labour party conference – “my husband, my hero” – does not seem to have done an enormous amount for the prime minister’s electoral prospects.

Linda Lay’s public defence in 2002 of her husband Ken, the former chief executive of Enron – she called him a “moral human being” and said that they had lost millions of dollars too – was widely held to have been a public relations disaster.

There must be more to being a leader’s spouse than this. Who better to moan to about your cabinet colleagues and the ungrateful voters – or about the board, the shareholders and the staff? Who better to advise you to cancel the furious e-mail you were about to send?

A recent (unauthorised) book about their marriage reports that Michelle Obama advised her husband against making Hillary Clinton his running mate and insisted, against his initial judgment, that the “Yes we can” campaign slogan would be a winner.

Denis Thatcher did not give interviews, but his wife knew the difference his business experience could make to her political judgment. “Nothing escaped his professional eye – he could see and sense trouble long before anyone else,” Margaret Thatcher wrote in The Downing Street Years.

She said that her husband’s knowledge of the oil industry meant she had someone to turn to during the second oil price shock of 1979. “Being prime minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone,” she said.

However, the signal service spouses can render is to tell leaders what no one else dares to.

In June 1940, Clementine Churchill wrote a letter to her husband, tore it up and then wrote it again. Roy Jenkins, in his biography of Winston Churchill, described the letter as “terrifying”, which it must have been – both for the writer and the recipient.

“My darling,” Mrs Churchill began. “I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know. One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner. If an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas – good or bad – will be forthcoming. I was astonished & upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you – I said this & I was told ‘No doubt it’s the strain’.”

“My Darling Winston – I must confess I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be cannot bear that those who serve the Country & yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you – Besides you won’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness.”

“Please forgive your loving devoted & watchful Clemmie.”

You don’t get that quality of advice from many management consultants.

michael.skapinker@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/skapinker