We've got Paula to thank for the best gossip since Nixon

SPRING is in the air and the cherry trees are in full bloom but a sense of loss, a mournful emptiness, has descended on Washington this weekend.

The rest of the country, if the polls are to be believed, is thankful that the Paula Jones saga is finally over, but in the capital the music has died, the circus has left, the birds have flown. The future yawns forth vast and cheerless.

Yet everything could change tomorrow. Twice this year it looked as if Bill Clinton's presidential career was over: first when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, then when Kathleen Willey went on TV to inform a breathless nation that the President had groped her in the Oval Office. Each time the impression proved illusory. But who is to say that some other bimbo eruption - a Krakatoa this time, not a short-lived splutter - will not blow the lid off the Clinton presidency?

For now, though, the odds on Mr Clinton being impeached look as long as those on Kenneth Starr being elected president.

Yes, the funereal Mr Starr, the special prosecutor investigating the President, might yet come up with sufficient evidence to persuade Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings. But Mr Starr's problem is that, in the end, the decision will be made not on legal but political grounds. With mid-term congressional elections due in November, the Republicans will think and long and hard about taking such drastic action against a president whose approval ratings continue to soar, whose Houdini talents suggest that there is no trap from which he will not escape.

Senator Arlen Specter, painfully aware of the embarrassing electoral consequences of an all-out strike against the President descending into fiasco and farce, spoke for most of his Republican colleagues when he said: "Unless there is an open and shut case, the kind which would result in a resignation, as happened with President Nixon, I do not think there ought be an impeachment proceeding."

Against President Clinton, experience shows, there is no such thing as an open and shut case. During the past six years he has nimbly side-stepped potential calamity after potential calamity. The Paula Jones sexual harassment suit has gone the way of the Whitewater land deal, the Gennifer Flowers tapes, Filegate, Travelgate and the curious case of the election campaign funds from dubious Asian contributors.

The evidence is in. President Clinton is a political superman. Where he seemed most vulnerable, in his reckless disdain for the decencies of sexual etiquette, he has turned out to be a rock - as even Newt Gingrich has been forced to acknowledge. "Bill Clinton has plenty of courage," the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives said in a television interview. "Anyone who has taken the beating he has and stood up every morning has a lot of courage."

Paula Jones, who claimed he had crudely forced himself upon her in an Arkansas hotel room, looked for a long while like she might shatter Mr Clinton's impregnability. But in the end he just chewed her up and spat her out. She will not have her day in court. We will never know the truth about his "distinguishing characteristics".

So low has Ms Jones sunk in the flicker of time since an Arkansas judge threw her case out of court, that even her own family is deserting her. Charlotte Brown, her sister, accused her in a television interview on Friday of fabricating the story for money and declared that her reputation was tarnished for ever more. "I don't think people will respect her," Mrs Brown said.

But they might at least be grateful. She has furnished Washington's chattering classes with the best gossip since Nixon, the TV-watching masses with the most gripping soap opera, and the dirtiest jokes, since the OJ Simpson trial. Had it not been for her we might never have heard of Monica Lewinsky, of Kathleen Willey, of Elizabeth Ward, the former Miss America who only last week confessed to having enjoyed one night of sin with the President.

For all of those seamy tales emerged as a direct consequence of the extraordinary latitude America's sexual harassment laws grant plaintiffs to dig into the private lives of those whom they accuse. But Paula Jones was hoist in the end with her own petard - a fate which possibly awaits the feminist corps, who, lulled by the President's politically correct siren songs, never rose to her defence.

Ms Jones's one remaining friend, her self-styled spokeswoman Susan Carpenter McMillan, said that the judge's decision to throw out the sexual harassment case du siecle would send a message to America's men that it was now "open season for groping and grabbing".

Maybe. But in Washington, where outside the Oval Office they favour the gentler sport of conversation, the lights have gone out, the dinner tables are deathly still.