We've watched the Lady Macbeth-like Hillary grimly standing by her wayward man, and we've watched the President of the United States, the chap with the zipper problem to end all zipper problems, discussing just what constitutes his idea of sex. But until now Monica "Hot Lips" Lewinsky has been little more than a fleshy vision in a beret, making bedroom eyes at Clinton in that famous video clip.

Jon Snow, however, had got the full Monica, and boy did he look like the cat that had got the cream. His television interview with her last night was television at its most shamefully prurient - and compulsively watchable. The silver-haired Snow seemed house-masterly at first. It pretty quickly became clear, however, that he was obsessively interested in all the gory details. But what of Monica? Almost all women regard Lewinsky with tight-lipped distaste. 

Men, however, take a different view. Monica is a "goer", and most chaps retain a soft spot for "goers". Respectable women invariably underestimate men's affection for louche ladies who hold out the prospect of uncomplicated oral sex. 

Yet what became clear during her frank, good-humoured and genuinely engaging performance with Snow is that Monica Lewinsky has behaved far better in this affair that the other principals - the lying, cornered Clinton, the Judas-like Linda Tripp and the obsessive and incompetent Kenneth Starr, the prosecutor who failed to get his man. 

Lewinsky was an uncomplicated young woman who found herself in an impossibly complicated situation. She never intended to kiss and tell. Having been used and then abused by the President ("that woman"), she could have dished far more dirt on him than she has chosen to do.

Even a Lewinsky admirer like myself has to confess that the pained eyes, the lengthy silence and the huge sigh as she described how she had contemplated suicide seemed more than a touch over-rehearsed. But I don't begrudge her the limelight. She has been badly treated by Clinton, badly treated by the American system, and if she can make a pile of cash out of it, good luck to her.