Last Thursday, Gordon Ramsay and his wife Tana went to Birmingham to conduct a cookery demonstration and sign copies of both their new cookbooks. They could have cancelled, everyone would have understood, but instead the Ramsays turned up, business as usual, all smiles.

"What a week I've had," pronounced Gordon as he went on stage at the BBC's Good Food show, making it clear he knew what everyone was thinking and wasn't afraid of it. And, within earshot, Tana kept smiling as he made jokes about mattresses -- the couple had a new one delivered to their house last week, as any tabloid reader will know -- and mistresses, about Delia Smith and her book How to Cheat, and about how his mother was in the audience so he was on his best behaviour. "I didn't do it," he called out to his mother from the stage. "I love you."

This is as close as Ramsay has come to making a statement since allegations of an extra-marital affair broke in a British tabloid last Sunday. His actions -- and wife Tana's -- have said a lot since, but the celebrity chef has neither denied nor admitted anything. And he was unspecific on Thursday about what it was he didn't do -- all of it, or just certain bits -- declaring love as if that backed up his protestation of innocence, as if loving someone has ever proved an impediment to doing something that might hurt them.

But more important than what Ramsay said was the fact that he was there at all, not hiding away in shame, not acting out of character, but being the Gordon Ramsay we know and, in a strange way, even love.

Had he cowered at home and cancelled absolutely everything, not only would it have been an admission of absolute guilt, but possibly marked the end of Ramsay as a brand. Instead, by coming out fighting -- as we might expect of him -- the brand has a chance of survival.

How his marriage fares will be a different matter, and a lot of that will be down to how Tana chooses to proceed, though her presence alongside Ramsay on Thursday says that she may already have made her decision, regardless of what today's tabloids have on his alleged affair.

It didn't take until Thursday for Tana Ramsay to make her position known -- in actions, if not words. Only hours after allegations of her husband's infidelity broke, she was happily presenting a united front. Or, perhaps more accurately, presenting a happy, united front.

Last Sunday, a British tabloid ran the story of Gordon Ramsay's alleged affair, with pictures of him leaving a hotel, pictures of his alleged mistress and an account of how, where and when he had been carrying on with this woman, Sarah Symonds, for the last seven years.

The detail of the story was cringe-making. It recounted how Ramsay had apparently called to his restaurant, Maze, the night he was photographed, and then left to visit the adjoining hotel, where he went to Sarah Symonds's room and left an

hour later, after what was reported as a sort of flashing-lights, coast-clear signal from a waiting driver. "They had sex," an anonymous source was reported to have said of what occurred in the hotel.

Worse than the detail of Ramsay's alleged sneaking around, however, was the revelation that before meeting him, Sarah Symonds had visited a Soho sex shop and bought two bottles of amyl nitrate -- "poppers", which work as a muscle relaxant and give a short-term buzz -- called "Rush" and "Rave".

Somehow, this turned the whole thing rather more sleazy, and shattered Ramsay's image of authority -- on which his whole career is based -- even further. Hammered home in the reporting was how Ramsay sells himself as a family man, involving his four children in the animal-husbandry aspect of The F-Word tv series, always lavishing praise on his wife, Tana, and supporting her offshoot career in cookery writing.

In doing so, however, those who broke the story missed the point. Misunderstood, even, what it is people like about Ramsay and what could turn them against him -- which seemed, bizarre as it may sound, the story's intent.

It's not as a family man that we engage with Ramsay, but as a guy who is all about doing a job well, about doing your best, striving, having some backbone. So if we felt disappointed in Gordon last Sunday, it wasn't because he suddenly seemed some kind of sham, but because he was suddenly weakened and stupid.

It suddenly seemed that the man who makes a living and endears himself to us by pointing out the blindingly obvious to others couldn't see the obvious when he met Sarah Symonds. Or, if he could, it still didn't stop him jeopardising his personal and professional lives to have an affair with her.

For, it emerged almost immediately, Sarah Symonds is no innocent whom Gordon Ramsay dazzled into bed with his success and celebrity. Sarah Symonds has been around this block before, with an affair with Jeffrey Archer and a book called Having an Affair? A Handbook for the Other Woman under her belt. She has told all about her time with Archer, including details of his sexual tastes, appeared on the Late Late Show and Oprah, and, it was reported last week, approached UK publicist Max Clifford months ago about representing her if and when her affair with Ramsay became public. She wanted, it was reported, to do as Rebecca Loos, who claimed an affair with David Beckham, had done and enjoy celebrity on the back of it.

Clifford declined, apparently, but it is interesting that the spectre of Loos should arise, given that the Beckhams are close friends of the Ramsays -- who are quite closely mirroring the former couple's defiance in the face of such allegations. And the Beckhams, unusually, are the rare couple whose relationship and careers have survived such scandal.

After allegations of David Beckham's affair with Rebecca Loos broke -- over which the litigious Beckhams have never sued -- the family's first response was to go on holiday.

They went skiing, Victoria immaculate in designer ski gear and amazing sunglasses which hid any red eyes and distracted from her drawn face. She kept physical contact with her husband for the cameras, and, whatever went on behind closed doors, Brand Beckham betrayed no weakness. And whatever went on in private, they kept their relationship going, had another child, moved to LA and never lost popularity or each other.

No doubt the whole scandal took its toll, but nothing huge -- like family or fortune -- was lost.

One has to wonder what they may have been saying to their friends, the Ramsays, last week.

Last Sunday afternoon, Gordon and Tana Ramsay appeared outside their family home. Together. They had their arms around each other, his smile was rather less ready than hers and Tana had her other hand on his stomach, protectively, as if defending what was hers. Of course, in a way, she could smile, she wasn't accused of doing anything wrong, but the steel in this woman was already evident.

He might be the scary man on the telly, with the bad language and the huge reputation, but she, we have discovered, is an equal force.

What's interesting about the Ramsays as a couple is the contrasts in their characters and backgrounds. His was a childhood of hard knocks. His father was, according to Ramsay's autobiography, a "hard-drinking womaniser" whose itinerant habits saw the family dragged from Scotland all around England. Ramsay left home at 16, hoping to become a professional footballer, and was tried out by Glasgow Rangers but never signed because of a badly injured knee. At 19, Rangers told him to try out for lower division clubs, but Ramsay declined because he didn't want to be merely adequate at something and believed his nascent interest in cooking could become an excellence.

Even then, Ramsay was about being brilliant, not ordinary, which is why he must now be sick, not just because of what revelations today's papers might hold, but because he has built his whole adulthood on being better than everyone else.

Tana Ramsay -- born Cayetana Hutcheson -- is from more comfortable beginnings. Her father -- who is his son-in-law's business partner, with a reported 31 per cent stake in a business that is said to have earned the chef £65m -- was a successful businessman, she wanted for nothing growing up and, while she now has a range of family-food cookbooks, has always been happy to be known as "Gordon's wife".

In publicity for her books, she's always seemed utterly happy with her husband's workaholic habits, his outspoken aversion to nappy-changing and other such women's work, his absence at their children's births, his mocking of women's cooking skills. And not because she's weak -- that's obvious now -- but because it suits her. The reason she's married to Gordon Ramsay is because she's able for him, and this is why, probably, he's always been so gushing about her during his own publicity drives. He probably admires her. Which, of course, doesn't preclude him from being unfaithful to her.

The problem with becoming a star, as Gordon Ramsay has, is that you start believing you can do no wrong. Significantly, Ramsay's success as a chef happened simultaneously with his television success. His first foray into TV was with Boiling Point in 1999, which followed him setting up his first London restaurant and achieving his first Michelin star. Later, that restaurant won two more stars, making Ramsay one of only three UK chefs to win and, to this day, maintain three Michelin stars.

In 2004, now the proprietor of several UK restaurants -- at Claridge's and the Connaught hotels in London, among others -- he starred in Hell's Kitchen, quitting after one series to star in the successful US version. That same year he began the ongoing The F-Word series, and later came Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares -- which also has a US strand -- where he tells ailing restaurants how to save their skins. Generally it's a case of ordering people to buck up and get a backbone, and it's the role in which Ramsay seems most at ease.

When we get used to a person as a figure of authority, it's hard to see them being stupid. And if the allegations are true, Ramsay did not only stray from his marriage, but strayed with a most ill-advised person. Sarah Symonds had kissed and told before. Sarah Symonds enjoys notoriety, it seems.

So what was Ramsay thinking? Other than the obvious sexual thrill, he may have fallen into the trap that often comes with celebrity: of believing he could do no wrong. One assumes that, despite her ability to smile every time she emerged from her house last week to face waiting photographers, behind closed doors Tana Ramsay has been pointing out to her husband the error of his judgement.

What both the Ramsays want right now, of course, is for the whole thing to go away, albeit in different ways. If Ramsay did wrong, he is reacting the classic way of simply wishing to say sorry, promise never to do it again and then make it disappear. She, on the other hand, would like the attention to subside so that she can set to really sorting it out. He will wish the revelation of his sin to be an end to it, while she will understand it's only the beginning of a long road to repair.

A credit to her strength of will however, is Tana Ramsay's obvious awareness that cutting up all her husband's clothes, trashing his collection of fast cars, or sabotaging his cooking demonstrations, will achieve nothing but to wreck more than what is damaged already. Some see this as cynical, a protection of the cash cow, but it is in fact a sign that Tana Ramsay may have greater sense and strength than her husband. And that, if Brand Ramsay survives this, it will be to her credit.