"Take a deep breath" is Hillary Clinton's advice on Monicagate. It may never happen. She would say it will never happen.

We are thinking the unthinkable. Will the President be driven from the White House in disgrace because he allegedly had an affair with a 21-year-old intern, Monica Lewinsky, and then advised her to lie about it when required to testify to lawyers of Paula Jones?

It seems an eternity since this story burst on Washington, America and the world but it is only 10 days. And Bill Clinton is still there despite many predictions of his demise. As I write he is on the TV screen speaking in the White House to the annual gathering of America's mayors, looking presidential, describing the booming economy and holding out the promise of even better times for the future. Is he a miracle worker or what?

Can he weather this hurricane which hit him last week but is now showing signs of blowing itself out? No one can be sure.

Legally he is in the same position as before the State of the Union address last Tuesday, which sent his approval ratings soaring. The independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, is still doggedly investigating whether the president and his close adviser, the influential lawyer, Vernon Jordan, encouraged Ms Lewinsky to commit perjury and whether Mr Clinton perjured himself when he testified to Ms Jones's lawyers that he did not have sexual relations with Ms Lewinsky.

That investigation rolls on regardless of opinion polls, media fatigue and public disgust at salacious details which are alarming the parents of young children.

Just two weeks ago, Paula Jones was sitting across a table from President Clinton in his lawyer's office as he was grilled about his relationships with a list of other women. One of these was Monica Lewinsky, but the world had not heard about her at that stage.

It seemed then nothing could be more humiliating for the president than to be deposed under the gaze of the woman who has testifed about "distinguishing characteristics" of his private parts. But that was nothing compared with what was to come.

Now the judge who will try Paula Jones's claim against the president for sexual harassment has barred her lawyers from bringing Monica Lewinsky into her case as a witness. The lawyers had hoped that Ms Lewinsky would help convince a jury that Mr Clinton had a pattern of abusive sexual behaviour towards young women on his staff. Both sides claim a victory here. But my view is that it will work against the president. The Paula Jones case will go ahead anyhow for public trial next May with all the embarrassment this means for the president. But the judge's decision also gives Mr Starr a clearer run in his investigation, which had been getting tangled up in the Jones case. Ironically, it was Jones's lawyers who uncovered Ms Lewinsky but now it is Mr Starr who has her as a prime witness or target.

If she co-operates with him in return for full immunity from prosecution, then this is bad news for Mr Clinton. Her taped conversations with her former friend, Linda Tripp, only a fraction of which has been published, could yet be devastating even if their legal status is dubious. Everyone thinks back to the Nixon tapes and the role they played in his forced resignation.

If Ms Lewinsky refuses to co-operate with Mr Starr and sticks to her affidavit in the Jones case, where she swore she never had sexual relations with Mr Clinton and denies that he urged her to commit perjury, then Mr Starr has a much more difficult job. He could go ahead and indict her on a charge of perjury, using as evidence the contradiction between her sworn statement and what is on tape. While the 20 hours of taped conversations between Ms Lewinsky and Ms Tripp, before Mr Starr came on the scene, may not be admissible - the taping was illegal under Maryland law - there is another FBI tape which would be admissible as it was authorised.

To avoid the perjury charge, Ms Lewinsky would have to tell a court that the hours of conversations in which she speaks freely to Ms Tripp of her alleged affair with the president were lies. This could make for a steamy cross-examination in which the president's reputation could take more battering. Can he survive a Monica Lewinsky and a Paula Jones trial with all the titillating details sure to re-emerge? The White House is grasping at opinion poll results to show that voters are distinguishing between the president's sex life and his policies. Women voters are showing themselves to be more tolerant of his alleged sexual peccadillos than men.

The White House has also found that stonewalling on media demands for the president's own version of his relationship with Ms Lewinsky, apart from his and his wife's blanket denial that there was sex or incitement to perjury, is giving it precious time. The media is getting more frustrated, but so what?

The best budget in years is about to be announced, with billions of dollars for things which are more important to American voters than Ms Lewinsky's dress. Things like the education of their kids, their health-care schemes, their pensions.

And then the president as commander-in-chief may soon have to stop the loathed Saddam Hussein from using germ warfare to terrorise the Middle East. As he prepares to send US servicemen and women on dangerous missions, do Americans want a president to be badgered with kiss-and-tell stories?

I don't know, but I don't think so.