But in America? Wow, is America screwed up about sex. In public life perhaps the most sexualized society in the world still views sex through a presbyterian prism in which sex outside marriage is seen as a scandalous, potentially imprisonable matter.

It is one of many things that helps destroy American politics. After the Clinton affair, it turned out that one of Clinton’s biggest Republican pursuers, the speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, had cheated on both his first and second wives. Democrat Al Franken resigned from the Senate three years ago after a photo of him emerged doing a comedy skit pretending to cup a woman’s breasts. Donald Trump somehow got away with pretending to be some God-fearing monogamist. And just this August, the Democratic governor of New York Andrew Cuomo had to go when it transpired that, among other transgressions, he had put a hand on a woman’s cheek at a wedding and asked if he could kiss her. There is so much to blame Cuomo for. His administration’s cover-up of COVID nursing-home deaths is one thing that springs to mind. But a sex scandal in which no sex occurred was what did it for him.

So I wonder what would have happened if Clinton had come clean all those years ago. True, a few more vases might have been airborne in the White House that night. But gosh it could have helped the nation fracture a bit less.