She knows that feminism is really “about knowing when the public good outweighs your having a temper tantrum over a personal offence”. Philip Weiss of the New York Observer contrasted the two women thus: Miss Hill is “a very private and proper person, maybe repressed She doesn’t seem comfortable with sexuality”. Mrs Jones, on the other hand, “is plainly someone who feels comfortable in the sexual arena” So there you have it. If it is abject and degrading for the American republic when the President is interrogated by a grand jury about his “inappropriate” amorous activity (and I would certainly agree that it is), was it not equally abject and degrading to see the Senate solemnly discussing pubic hairs on a can of Coke? Was what Justice Thomas supposedly did to Anita Hill worse than what President Clinton supposedly did to Paula Jones?The answers to that question from Clinton partisans have vied for a Pulitzer Prize in Speciousness and Casuistry. In the Seventies, liberal Democrats detested President Nixon and invoked any means to bring him down, from media aggression to the Independent Counsel Act. In the Nineties, conservative Republicans detest Clinton and are using media aggression and an independent counsel to try to bring him down.And some of Clinton’s friends are the very people who led the attack on Clarence Thomas when he was nominated to the Supreme Court.

At the time, I could not help thinking that Churchill had led us through one great war on what many doctors would now call a functional alcoholic’s daily intake, and Lloyd George through another when, as AJP Taylor put it, he was the first prime minister since the Duke of Grafton to live openly with his mistress. Both men did, after all, win their wars.Unlike Lloyd George, Gladstone was a pious Christian, and (despite his quaint encounters with London prostitutes) he was a faithful husband. And he famously said that seven of the 11 prime ministers he had known had been adulterers, which was not said to imply that they were unfit for office.But are Clinton’s partisans the people to complain? Too many of them are hoist by their own petards. But there was shame in his eyes as he spoke – the shame of a lousy husband who is, I suspect, a good father..

MANY AMERICANS – and not only those who admire President Clinton – are appalled by what has just happened in Washington and wish that it had not. Why should private consensual conduct between adults (however outre) be used to humiliate a national leader? Has America gone mad?

There is a plausible response to the attack mounted by right-wing Clinton- haters and Kenneth Starr. You can’t change human nature; political leaders have lived irregular private lives since time immemorial; everyone lies about sex. Indeed, this argument should be especially persuasive to us here.
One of the first signs of the new morality in American politics were the Senate hearings for Senator John Tower, accused of liking a drink and female companionship. She is, quite obviously and genuinely, the focus of parental affection that is natural and strong.

But the Clintons cannot entirely escape their generation, and the Sixties that produced them was, in one important way, different from the decades that preceded it – namely in its strong indulgence of an a kind of romantic, unforced love for children.Chelsea Clinton was named after a Bob Dylan song, testament to the sentimental era of her conception. I very much doubt that this is true.America knows exactly what the deal is with this President. Ardent Republicans foam at the mouth and wonder in their puritanical journals why the God- fearing do not march upon the White House demanding the replacement of soiled goods with a brighter, cleaner incumbent. But, in their hearts, they know that the presidency, the greatest political prize in the world, is such a glittering jewel that the ambitious will do anything to retain it.Bill Clinton, with his easy courtliness and his Jesuitical meanderings on the nature of what is and is not sex, would have been a perfect 19th- century president, while Hillary has updated the serviceable historical model of tough political comrade-in-arms.

The basic rule of this kind of alliance is that the partners, having moved beyond causing each other conventional emotional pain, should spare each other embarrassment.This explains the calculation behind Mr Clinton’s circumlocutions. It does not very much matter that they are illogical, as long as Hillary can keep up her facade. It is a failing of the late 20th century’s imagination to imagine that emotional fulfilment is the height of aspiration between some partners.Pacts between husbands and wives for the sake of power are as old as time. In Robert Graves’s novel I Claudius, based on Suetonius’s account of the marriage of Augustus and Livia, she saves Augustus the trouble of awkward assignations by providing the Emperor with young Syrian women, the better to concentrate on the really important business of advancing the interests of her son Tiberius, and their dynasty.Eleanor Roosevelt, as the files revealed last week in insouciant details, kept her lesbian lover, while FDR seduced Eleanor’s secretary. Goggling at Jerry Springer and confessions of lust and perversion from the Bible Belt, we conclude that Americans are more naive and hysterical than us veterans of the old country and the old hypocrisies. This may well be a true reflection of the relationship – one pact among the many that an ambitious politician makes.While the chat shows on both sides of the Atlantic will have a long jabberfest of the “Can she forgive him?” variety, the marital relationship between the Clintons has long been placed in the service of the maintenance of Mr Clinton’s presidential career, and Mrs Clinton’s equally enjoyable role of feisty First Lady. But they defended each other like wildcats, much as Jackie Kennedy did her faithless husband, and Hillary has done Bill.