Bill Clinton is not the only public figure who has had some explaining to do this week. Away from the glare of international opinion that has focused on the US President's predicament, those twin indicators of popular British culture, the Sun and the England football manager, Glenn Hoddle, have been engaging in damage limitation exercises of their own.
We can only speculate on what was going on in the mind of the Sun's sports editor when he removed the image of a wheelchair-bound spectator from a photograph of the England cricket team celebrating its Test Match victory over South Africa this week. But the hurt and disappointment experienced by the woman removed from the picture cast a harsh light on what might have been a hasty decision.
By way of explanation and no doubt with the threat of censure by the Press Complaints Commission concentrating their minds, the Sun claimed the removal of the spectator was a genuine "technical error". Some observers felt that the Sun's manipulation of the photograph was a symptom of a society that is still uncomfortable with images of the disabled, obsessed with beautiful people found in glossy magazines and wishing that women in wheelchairs would just stay at home.
Others pointed to the increasingly computerised world in which we live and the problem that many of us have experienced - press the wrong key and everything disappears. The Sun said it had tightened up technical procedures to ensure the mistake never occurred again. But the National Union of Journalists explained that doctoring newspaper photographs had become so widespread, it was considering marking pictures with a symbol to indicate they had been altered.
The Sun was not eager to argue over this one. Indeed, the manipulation of the Test Cricket photograph was not the first time it and other newspapers got into trouble on this issue. In 1993, the Sun was forced to confess it had altered a photograph of a Franciscan monk and his girlfriend to show the monk wearing his habit. Two years ago the London Independent also revealed it had published a photographic montage of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the media giant, Rupert Murdoch, in their shirt-sleeves drinking coffee. Even the Guardian has succumbed to the computer temptation when it published a doctored photograph of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, last year.
Confessions of an altogether different type appeared recently when Glenn Hoddle gave his version of the moment when the troubled England footballer, Paul Gascoigne, was told he would not be part of the team going to the World Cup in France. Just as Clinton faced the Grand Jury in Washington, comparisons were drawn with Hoddle's attempt to get out of trouble this week at a press conference in London.
That both men fashioned themselves as role models was seen as justification of the criticism and public debate surrounding the England manager. In Hoddle's case, too, it was a question of truth and loyalty. As with most aspects of Gazza's life, the public and media have not shied away from debating the rights and wrongs of his actions. However, Hoddle's revelation that Gascoigne did not simply shrug his shoulders and say, "I'll go back to Sheryl and the kids" when dropped from the national team but punched a nearby lamp shade, will have surprised few people.
The difficulty with Hoddle's World Cup diary is that he didn't explain the incident in quite the same way at the time. He explained that his player was merely disappointed and yet a few weeks later he claims he was afraid Gascoigne would punch him. Cynics suggested that a fee of £250,000 was the reason Hoddle decided to reveal the details of the incident and the subsequent "Drunken Gazza trashed my room" headline did not help matters.
Hoddle's employers, the Football Association, have stood by their manager and offered to extend his contract to 2002, but his diary begs the question of whether a private conversation between two people should be published. It achieved little when we consider that the public has read so many damaging stories about Gascoigne that one more hardly registers.
Eventually, Hoddle provided the answer to chill the heart of everyone in public life. He wished to put the incident "on the record, I wanted a memory of the situation. There is nothing in the book that is confidential, about tactics or players' opinions. It's been blown way out of proportion".