THE tangled web woven by disgraced politician Chris Huhne, after he persuaded his wife to take his speeding points ten years ago, has brought his life crashing down like the Twin Towers.

At the centre of the whole horrible business are the fiery texts that flashed back and forth between him and his son, Peter, over what Huhne was trying to do.

Reading the texts, to me, anyway, Huhne displays the same apparently cold and emotionless behaviour that lead him to first cheat on wife, Vicky Pryce, and then to dump her for his hatchet-faced press aide, Carina Trimingham.

At one point in the text conversation Huhne tries to say he’s proud of his son’s exam results.

“Leave me alone,” thunders Peter.

“You have no place in my life and no right to be proud. It’s irritating that you don’t seem to take the point... don’t contact me again, you make me feel sick.”

Some commentators have dismissed Peter’s stance as rudeness and teenage exaggeration but I don’t think so. The poor lad had seen his family shattered, his father exposed as a cheat and then he had to face the fear that his mum could be packed off to prison for perjury.

None of this appears to have flickered on Huhne senior’s radar.

In another text he insists he is ‘thinking of you lots’ and Peter accuses his father of just not getting it. In that, at least, Huhne is not alone.

Because too many parents who have behaved like him still seem to think that saying ‘I love you’ makes everything okay. Even if they have caused untold pain and anxiety to the people they are supposed to love most.

Even if what they have done has caused the family to be split, homes to be sold, schools to be changed and living standards to plummet.

Love, as the saying goes, is patient and it is kind. It isn’t puffed up with itself. And where children are concerned it has to be more than that.

If you love your children you put yourself out for them.

You go without nice things so they can have them, instead. You give them your time, even if you are rushed off your feet, even if it’s only half an hour a day to read them a story or watch their favourite TV show with them.

When they are older love means taxiing them around at stupid o’clock because you want them to be safe. It means ignoring thoughtless remarks and yet keeping an open ear for any cry for help.

And love means that if your marriage is dying and really can’t be saved, that you make every effort to end things as decently and in as civilised a manner as possible, placing your children’s interests at the centre of every decision you make and attempting to treat the other parent with kindness and dignity, even if you hate them and they drive you mad.

It’s a huge ask. But better, surely, than a personal disaster of the proportions now faced by Chris Huhne.

PS Nick Clegg’s said to have fired the starting pistol for the by-election in Huhne’s Eastleigh constituency.

Could he just tell us now which pledges his candidate will be breaking if they are elected to office?

Because it will save a lot of time.