Chelsea helps her father by quitting college to fill the First Lady's shoes

The First Daughter, Chelsea Clinton is to take a term out from Stanford University to help her mother campaign for the Senate and her father to savour his last months in office. She may also go to Australia in September as the President's official representative at the Sydney Olympics.

The First Daughter, Chelsea Clinton is to take a term out from Stanford University to help her mother campaign for the Senate and her father to savour his last months in office. She may also go to Australia in September as the President's official representative at the Sydney Olympics.

The announcement, issued by Mrs Clinton's office at the White House, marks Chelsea's formal passage into public life after a teenage years in which her privacy has been carefully guarded by her parents. Four years ago, she reportedly pressed to be allowed to help her father campaign for re-election, but was firmly told "no".

As Chelsea approaches her 21st birthday next February, the unwritten pact between the Clintons and the US media over their daughter's privacy will become harder to sustain. Perhaps for this reason, she and her parents have apparently decided she should become a minor public figure in her own right for the remainder of her father's presidential term. Mrs Clinton's office said Chelsea would return to Stanford in time for the winter semester in January, by which time the new President will have been elected and on the verge of inauguration.

The White House also made clear that she would graduate from her four-year course on time, because of the extra credits she has accumulated in the past two years. The credits system at American universities permits students to prolong or shorten their time at college, so in taking a term out Chelsea is not being granted any special privilege.

No details of her progress or her grades either at school or college have ever been divulged, but no special dispensations are thought to have been made for her admission to the undergraduate medical course at Stanford - one of the most competitive courses at one of the most prestigious (and expensive) universities in the country. It is not even certain that she is still on the medical course: there was talk at one point that she was switching to history, but this was never confirmed.

The lack of information about her Stanford studies is just one example of how carefully controlled Chelsea's emergence into public life has been. While still at school, she accompanied her parents - separately or together - on official foreign trips, but was rarely photographed.

The individual public programme she followed when she accompanied her father to the Indian subcontinent this spring marked a watershed of a kind, although she was closely chaperoned by her grandmother and made no public remarks. Her role as stand-in for the First Lady was as low-key as the Clintons could make it.

Even when Mrs Clinton moved out of the White House to New York to embark on her Senate campaign, the White House was concerned to deny that Chelsea would in any way move into the role of First Lady. She did occasionally host White House and other official events with her father, but until very recently this was the exception rather than the rule.

She has rarely spoken in public: almost the only time was when she was asked - and answered - a question about life in America during a visit with her mother to Africa. Her answer, which included her view that America had big social problems, is almost her only on-the-record statement.

While Bill and Hillary Clinton have been virulently criticised, separately and as a couple, for their personal conduct and their politics, the way they have brought up their daughter has attracted unqualified praise - including from so well-qualified an individual as the late Jackie Onassis. Their love and regard for Chelsea has been clear for all to see; it was equally clear that Mr Clinton's deepest regret when his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky became public was the effect on his daughter.

Perhaps in preparation for her new role, Chelsea has been more visible in the past two weeks than before. She accompanied her father on his curtailed trip to the Group of Eight summit in Japan and returned with him to Camp David, where was hoping to replicate the feat of his Democratic predecessor in the White House, Jimmy Carter, in mediating a Middle East peace agreement.

The Carters, like the Clintons, had a young daughter, Amy, whose progress from awkward, brace-toothed teenager to comely young woman was as closely watched, and as carefully guarded, as Chelsea's. Amy is now married, with children, and lives far away from the glare of publicity: a future that could in time be Chelsea's, too.