President tripped up by 'conspiracy from right wing'

At the time it sounded like the special pleading of a political spouse under the fiercest personal pressure imaginable. But when Hillary Clinton rounded on her tormentors and accused them of participating in a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband and herself, she was speaking little less than the truth.

For the entire duration of his presidency orchestrated Clinton-bashing was a major cottage industry. It stretched from internet websites to specialist newsletters. There were private networks of right-wing lawyers lending their services pro bono to anyone who had what looked a promising bone to pick with the Clintons.

It stretched from old foes of Bill Clinton back in Arkansas, such as Sheffield Nelson, to the Pittsburgh-based philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife, for whom no right-wing cause against the 42nd President was too absurd to bankroll.

Then there were the right-wing journalists such as David Brock. Mr Brock first achieved notoriety with a uniquely nasty hatchet job on Anita Hill, the prime accuser of the conservative judge Clarence Thomas, whose nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991 provoked uproar among liberals.

Later, working for the right-wing magazine American Spectator, he rushed to publish one of the first accounts, furnished by disgruntled Arkansas state troopers, of then Governor Clinton's sexual escapades. Mr Brock's special trophy was Paula Jones, unveiled to the world's press by Christian Conservatives and other groups at an unforgettably tacky press conference during a Washington snow storm in early 1994.

Mr Brock has now turned on his former allies. A forlorn figure, he has just recanted all in a book entitled Blinded by the Right, The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, in the hope, perhaps, it will earn as much money as his earlier tirade against Anita Hill. Back in 1996, a Pulitzer-prize winning Wall Street Journal reporter, James Stewart, wrote another book with a far more telling title: Blood Sport. It implied, with fair reason, that the Clintons were prey, flushed from their lair and hunted down by an unrelenting pack of hounds.

The pack included jealous rivals in Arkansas, congressmen in Washington, and of course the likes of Mr Brock. They fed on the most exotic conspiracy theories, alleging that Arkansas in the Clinton years was a hotbed of drugs, corruption and murder, all orchestrated by the evil genius in the Little Rock Statehouse, and later the White House. Videos setting out Clinton's alleged sins were distributed free to news organ- isations. Extraordinary allegations surfaced, of how Clinton and the dark forces around him arranged the sudden deaths of people who knew too much. Vince Foster's suicide only fuelled the controversy.

It was nonsense. The trouble was that enough seemed true about Mr Clinton, at least in his private life, to turn these tales into headlines in the anti-Clinton media.

The plotting has abated with the departure of Mr Clinton from the White House, but we will not have heard the end of it if Ms Clinton, since January 2001 a high-profile New York Senator, decides to launch a bid of her own for the White House.

The idea might sound preposterous, given just 14 months in political office, but inpreference polls by the Democrats, she stands second on the wishlist of candidates for 2004, behind Al Gore.

If she runs, either then or more probably in 2008, it may take more than Robert Ray's inconclusive report yesterday to deter the right-wing pack.