If President Clinton falls, history will record that the woman who brought him down was not Monica Lewinsky, but Linda Tripp, a matronly, middle-aged former White House secretary with whom he never even contemplated a sexual relationship. She was a spy and a detective, a seemingly bluff, business-like Miss Marple figure whose cunning, trickery and fierce single-mindedness lulled the President's chief accomplice into telling all.
Had Ms Tripp not insinuated herself maternally into Monica Lewinsky's graces, winning her absolute trust, it is likely that the young college graduate would not unwittingly have spilled the beans about what she claims to have been an intense affair with the President. Without the 20 hours of taped conversations with Ms Lewinsky that Ms Tripp secretly recorded last year, Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor investigating the president, would not be in possession now of by far the most damaging evidence he has accumulated in four years of relentless toil.
The tapes tell of sexual encounters in a study next to the Oval Office, of feverish midnight phone calls, of Ms Lewinsky's progress from star- struck infatuation to confusion, tears and dejection, yet of her determination to do the honourable thing and lie to protect the man she came to call "the creep" and "the big he".
Sticking with "the cover story", she says, "is what I signed up for when I began the relationship". And then she adds she is desperate that Mr Clinton not find out she blabbed about the affair. Thanks to Ms Tripp, Mr Starr now has these recordings and several others said by some who have listened to them to be shockingly graphic in their description of the relationship that Mr Clinton insists on saying was not "improper".
The evidence suggests strongly, however, that Mr Starr has ample evidence to demonstrate that Mr Clinton had a sexual relationship for more than a year with an attractive, evidently impressionable year- old woman who caught his eye in when she arrived at the White House on a work-experience basis. Thanks to Ms Tripp, who turned up at Mr Starr's office with her devastating evidence only 12 days ago, the special prosecutor is potentially armed now with the legal weaponry to charge the president not only with perjury, but with coercing Ms Lewinsky to commit perjury.
