Are Clintons heading for the divorce courts?

Is Hillary Clinton ending her marriage along with her campaign for the American presidency? Rumours are buzzing and all eyes are on the offices of matrimonial lawyers in New York where Bill and Hillary Clinton, partners in America's best-known dysfunctional marriage, are officially domiciled.

For years the deal has been that Hillary would stand by her man in exchange for his standing by her as she took her own turn in the Oval Office. It has all gone horribly wrong. The deal between wife and straying husband officially ends with her concession to Barack Obama and admission of failure in a lifetime's ambition.

"Why on earth would she stay with him now?" asks an insider to Hillary's staff as Junior Senator from New York. "It's over. The feeling is that she can do better in the Senate without him, and better if she wants to take another shot at the White House in 2012."

Hillary watchers point out that there is simply no reason for her to stay married. Bill has shot his bolt not so much with his lifetime of compulsive adultery but by his failure to win her the primaries.

Few Clinton boosters even pretend that anything other than political ambition has been the juice in their marriage for at least the last 25 years. Hillary has no use for Bill without his political potency.

This month's Vanity Fair profile by Todd Purdum suggests that the 42nd President, the Horn Dog in Chief, has lost his mind rather than the id which was supposed to have been quelled by retirement and heart attack.

Purdum comes across as Cassius with his knife in Caesar's back because he is married to former Clinton press aide Dee Dee Myers and his story reeks of the inside job. But Clinton's time has come just as it came to Caesar.

Bill has fallen not through the boyish sexual urges America had come to know and perhaps even love a little, but through a venality that he was thought to have been above. Since leaving office he has made obscene amounts of money with little real work and fewer morals.

Rich buddies are reported to have provided Bill with private jets and sexual opportunities. Staff are said to have staged "interventions" to protect Hillary from yet more scandal. And the rumours of cocaine being supplied to boost the ageing Baby Boomer's erectile function will not quite go away. And what are Americans supposed to make of President Clinton taking trips to Africa with Wall Street billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who faces jail for using under-age prostitutes?

Supporters once said that for all his sins, Clinton could be forgiven for taking one clear moral stand: he would never condone racism. His desperate use of the 'race card' to keep Hillary on track cost him that. He played his last electoral ace and lost.

Purdum quoted a former aide saying that "there is an anger in him I find surprising". Where does that come from? It is worth remembering that it was Bill who last asked for divorce, back in Arkansas, when he was determined to marry Marilyn Jo Jenkins. Hillary refused because she thought it would be the end of their political ambition, and Bill, concurring, cooled off.

It cannot be long before this tragedy of ambition trumping all finds its way to the boards of Broadway. And the divorce court. ·