Meanwhile, disenchantment with all the country’s political actors has set in. The French National Assembly, far from being seen as a defender of democracy against an autocratic president, is viewed just as negatively as the presidency. It is telling that in recent days Gabriel Attal, the current caretaker Prime Minister, has become a preferred choice for prime minister. It seems as if many in France would rather forget the whole sorry episode altogether and return to the status quo ante.

But political stability is now a luxury of the past. French politics has reached such an impasse that even the eventual nomination of a prime minister cannot overcome it. Calls for action abound but have little real chance of reaching fruition. Take La France Insoumise’s call for Macron’s impeachment. The movement, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has argued that Macron’s actions are profoundly anti-democratic, positioning themselves as defenders of French democracy. Their petition for impeachment has garnered many thousands of signatures, and they have called for mass protests to take place on Saturday.

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And yet, Macron is highly unlikely to face impeachment. The motion is primarily a rhetorical device, as it is extremely difficult to pass under the rules of the Fifth Republic’s constitution. The France Insoumise has met the 10% threshold of MPs or senators required to support the motion for it be considered admissible by the relevant legislative committee. An attempt to impeach François Hollande in 2016, over claims that he had revealed state secrets in his discussions with journalists, reached this stage before being rejected. Should an impeachment motion be considered valid, it would then need a two-thirds majority in both legislative chambers — the parliament and the senate. There is little support for such a move outside of the France Insoumise, which means that it is almost impossible to conceive of it meeting the two-thirds requirement just in the National Assembly, let alone in the Senate where the LFI has no senators at all.

In the face of such hostility, Macron’s strategy has grown clearer. His hard veto of Left-candidate Lucie Castets revealed his determination not to appoint a prime minister committed to undoing his own legislative achievements. His pension reforms appear particularly dear to him.

One serious contender for prime minister is Bernard Cazeneuve, who was Macron’s one-time political confidant when he was a rising star in Hollande’s government and Cazeneuve was interior minister. The two men, who reputedly have the same taste in films (Michel Audiard’s classics) and would get together for late evening chats over whisky, fell out after Macron launched En Marche. In doing so, Macron fulminated against the very political establishment that Cazeneuve incarnated after Hollande made him prime minister in December 2016. Yet despite being a well-known figure, Cazeneuve lacks support within the New Popular Front alliance, most notably the France Insoumise. And, perhaps fatally, he seems not to be in favour of maintaining Macron’s pension reforms.

By contrast, Xavier Bertrand, a centre-right hopeful, would be unlikely to endanger any of Macron’s programme were he to become prime minister. Bertrand has an ambivalent relationship with the centre-right party, Les Républicains. His political career reached its apogee under Nicolas Sarkozy but in 2022 he had seemed likely to win the centre-right nomination for the presidential election. In his party’s primary, however, Bertrand came far behind other contenders, prompting him to leave the party. It is perhaps the party’s subsequent disaster in the 2022 election — in which its candidate, Valérie Pécresse, failed to win more than 5% of the votes, putting the party into serious financial difficulty — that explains Bertrand’s political survival. When the centre-right party leader, Eric Ciotti, decided to strike an alliance with the far-Right for the legislative elections of 2024, putting him at odds with all other leading figures in his own party, Les Républicains were weakened even more. Meanwhile, Bertrand languished in the political wilderness — a period which may have dented his presidential ambitions. He appears unlikely to challenge Macron’s pension policies.

The problem with any nomination is that it needs support from other parties in the National Assembly in order to produce a stable government. This was the difficulty posed by Lucie Castets: in promising to deliver on the New Popular Front’s programme, she was unlikely to secure the support of those parties to the right of the NPF, such as Macron’s Ensemble group, which she would need to pass any legislation. Cazeneuve, by contrast, is more amenable to Macron’s MPs but lacks support from the far-Left. His nomination would succeed only by breaking up the New Popular Front. Bertrand faces a similar difficulty on the Right, though his chances look rather better.

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To many, the job itself is a poisoned chalice. Those belonging to Les Républicains with presidential ambitions for 2027, most notably Laurent Wauquiez, are wary of joining the government. They do not wish to attach themselves to a sinking Macronist ship, which will have a deleterious effect on their own political hopes. Bertrand is unusual in that he seems willing to accept the job, but he is also likely to face opposition from the far-Right, which has said it would put forward a motion of censure should Bertrand ever form a government. It is unlikely, however, that such a motion could bring the administration down, requiring as it does an absolute majority in the chamber.

In declaring victory on the evening of the 7 July, then, the French Left was wildly unrealistic. It simply did not have enough seats in the National Assembly to be able to form a government and realise its programme. Should this stalemate continue, Macron may well turn instead towards a non-political figure, someone able to lead a technocratic government that might win the approbation of the parties in the National Assembly. One name that has emerged in this respect is Thierry Beaudet, president of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, a third pillar of government in France that represents those collective interests that sit in the space between citizens and the state, such as organised labour, business owners and farmers. This would be a curious choice for Macron given his past denunciation of these interests as self-serving and self-interested.

In the meantime, the longer the crisis goes on, the more it weakens Jupiter himself. Divided on everything else, Parliament is unlikely to impeach the President. But should the impasse continue for much longer, the howls for Macron’s resignation will begin.

These lines are from Impeachment: American Crime Story, a 10-part dramatisation of the tragedy of Monica Lewinsky, which airs in the UK this week, because our appetite for gossip does not dim with the age of it. Lewinsky was 22 when she began her affair with Bill Clinton, who was 49.  When the affair was exposed, and he was impeached — then acquitted — his personal approval ratings rose, which should be insane, but isn’t. American voters like tales of sin and redemption if the protagonist is male.

Lewinsky, though, was ruined as Christine Keeler was ruined. The man survives; the woman does not. In Impeachment, when the FBI arrest her for perjury — for saying she did not have a relationship with Clinton — she says: “I will never have children. Because no one will marry me.”  It is an accurate prophecy so far.

Monica Lewinsky need not be shamed, but we should. I am the same age as her, and all I remember is the dirty dress and the oral sex and the cigar, none of which I wish to know about, or should know. A woman giving pleasure to a man she is infatuated with is not something that disgusts me, though we were asked to call it that: why?

Monica’s sufferings after her friend Linda Tripp, assuming the dimensions of a witch from a fairy tale, recorded their conversations and made them public, were without end. She was punished, as sexualised women are always punished; drabs are punished in other ways.  Lewinsky was reduced to a series of transient acts which we are supposed to believe define her. Like Christine Keeler, she became “a dirty joke”.

The #MeToo movement invites us to examine our misogyny towards Lewinsky. She has gained some autonomy at last. She co-produced the documentary 15 Minutes of Shame about the dehumanising intent of the internet, in which she points out that she was the first woman to be destroyed by it, though many others follow her.  (The affair was an early Matt Drudge scoop. Many people made money from her.) She is an executive producer of Impeachment, so it is her story, a one-sided collection of truths.

She was not sexually harassed by Bill Clinton, but she was manipulated. It was a consensual affair, and she has always said so, but she was peculiarly vulnerable, which is surely why he chose her. It was an affair she did not want to end; an affair that he ended, though he did not seem able to let her, entirely, go. They had a cruel and tender dance of novelty gifts and meetings and telephone calls. Clinton’s secretary, a decent women tasked with managing Lewinsky’s tears, had pity for them both. Clinton once chided Lewinsky, saying all he thought about, night and day, was her search for a job after she was exiled from the White House to the Pentagon but wanted to return. Folly is neither a crime, nor a story and Electra is both adult and child – who chooses to lie down? The affair brought her, by her own testimony, anguish and joy. She defended him for years but now she thinks he abused his position: that is, she wishes he had saved her from herself. He didn’t.

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If Linda Tripp had not taped their conversations, Monica Lewinsky would have been allowed to become herself. Instead, as David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker, she became the Mona Lewinsky, whose eyes are not windows but mirrors. If you think Bill Clinton used her, look at the world. She was taken hostage to be an archetype because archetypes are obliging, particularly this one: the ruined innocent.

There are three villains in this story, beyond Tripp and Clinton, twin antagonists feasting on youth and folly. They are the media, the political class, and the public.

The media reporting was disgraceful, beyond the tabloids who bought stories from her lovers that told of sexual fetishes and stalking. (Lies, all.) One married lover said she had aborted his child. They met when he was her teacher, though that was not dwelt upon by the newspaper who bought his story. Liberal feminist broadsheet columnists called her stupid and mocked her appearance. One, seeing her in a restaurant, noted and published what she ate, seemingly ignorant of — or just morally oblivious to — Lewinsky’s obvious eating disorder. All this, the public ate themselves.

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There was a genuine hater of women too, who gave the media everything:  Kenneth Starr. He was the lawyer who investigated Clinton after the Whitewater scandal, and when he could not adequately punish Clinton, he punished Lewinsky. Starr traduced, bullied and dehumanised her, eventually offering her immunity for her secrets, but I sense, in his dealings, both the self-hatred and the lust she incited in Clinton, and America more generally. Starr tricked her into perjuring herself. He threatened her family; he refused to let her friends defend her, which is why her memory is a cigar, a sexual act and a dirty dress. He is Judge Danforth in The Crucible though he does not know it. When I read that, in 2016, he resigned from the presidency of a university that failed to investigate sexual assaults against female students, it read like his final act of barbaric misogyny.

The misogyny has not waned; the reach of #MeToo, despite its noise, is small so far. Bill Clinton was not harmed by the affair, but his wife was and that is the epilogue to this tale. She had to answer for him when she ran for the presidency in 2016: was her husband’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky an abuse of power? She was, Hillary said, an adult, and it became part of the miasma of loathing that engulfed her. America, in the end, would rather have a pussy-grabber than a bad feminist whose husband exploited a young woman Hillary couldn’t bring herself, in this instance, to defend. Bill Clinton got away with it, and so Donald Trump, but Hillary didn’t. Twenty years on, and another woman lost.

The witnesses on the first day were George Kent, a senior State Department official, and William Taylor, a former ambassador to Ukraine, and currently charge d’affaires. They emerged as exemplary foreign service professionals: considered, scrupulously factual and non-partisan — which only made the picture that emerged from their testimony all the more extraordinary.

What it revealed was the extent and depth of US involvement in Ukraine, going back well into the Obama presidency. To describe it as meddling in another country’s internal affairs would be an understatement. The actual trigger for the impeachment hearings — a whistleblower’s charge that Trump had put pressure on the Ukrainian President to help him potentially slur a rival before the 2020 election — came across as just one aspect, if a particularly murky one — of a longer and continuing saga.

The single most striking point to emerge was that the United States regards Ukraine as “vital to its national interest”; not to Europe’s interest, nor to Nato’s, but to its own national interest — despite the Cold War being over and Ukraine being rather a long way from the US.

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A second point, which might come as news to a lot of people and not just in the United States, was the extent of military assistance being supplied by the Washington to a country that is in no sense a formal ally, and whose prospects of even starting the process of joining Nato in the foreseeable future are pretty slim. With Russia — and China — designated enemies of the United States, Taylor said, Ukraine was a “strategic partner” and at the “front-line” of US defences.

In fact, as can be learned from other sources, both the US and the UK have what amounts to a permanent military presence in western Ukraine, which is where the Javelin missiles — controversially denied to Kyiv by Obama, but supplied early in Trump’s presidency — are kept. Their location suggests that they are under US, or Nato, rather than Ukrainian, control. What does this say about Ukraine’s sovereignty?

A third point to emerge was how casually US officials and others seem to have approached what was potentially another big violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. In the overheard phone call whose contents triggered the impeachment hearings, the US President broached the possibility of Kyiv opening an inquiry into the affairs of a Ukrainian company that had previously appointed Hunter Biden to its board — Biden being the son of Joe Biden, then US Vice President and latterly a prospective Democratic rival to Trump for the presidency.

The question on which impeachment hinges is whether Trump tried to pressure, even “bribe”, his Ukrainian counterpart to agree; was there, in the now celebrated phrase, a “quid pro quo”? Specifically, did Trump make the resumption of US military aid — then suspended — conditional on Ukraine looking for dirt that could compromise a potential rival?

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But look what is revealed almost in passing. The son of the then US Vice President joined the board of a Ukrainian company, Burisma, operating in the notoriously corrupt energy sector. If you wanted to defend Trump, you could almost argue that an investigation into this alone was warranted as a matter of US public interest — but surely in the US, not Ukraine.

In fact, Biden junior was just one of many American businesspeople drawn to the honeypot of Ukraine during its lurches towards a free market economy. Paul Manafort, briefly Trump’s campaign adviser in 2015, now in jail for tax evasion and money laundering, was another.

In essence, what emerged from the first days of the hearings was that the Obama and the Trump administrations both treated Ukraine almost as an extension of US territory and a bastion of its security and other interests. In that context, whether or not Trump was withholding military aid for a particular purpose, hardly matters. For a long time before then, favours seemed to be advanced and withdrawn almost at will, even as a lot of Americans made a lot of money in what was, and remains, a poor country.

Some have hazarded that Donald Trump deliberately set out to exploit the naïveté of the Ukraine’s president, a complete political novice who had been in office barely three months, when he placed the fateful phone call on 25 July. If so, this would have been nothing new, merely the continuation of the US interfering almost unhindered in Ukraine’s affairs on the assumption that it could bend key individuals in Kyiv to its will.

In fact, though, if Trump had hoped to take advantage of a new President, he was very badly informed on two counts. Any linkage he might have insinuated between the resumption of military aid and Ukraine launching an investigation into Hunter Biden, would have meant little, because Zelensky, it seems, was still unaware that the aid had ceased. Even if he had had any inkling, he might well have put it down to uncertainty in Washington about how to deal with Zelensky’s unexpected victory — unexpected, that is, to most of Ukraine’s Western patrons, who had banked on continuing their cosy relationship with his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko.

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He would also have been gravely underestimating Zelensky. Contrary to a widespread Western view, Zelensky is not “just” an actor who rode his television celebrity to the presidency. He has a law degree and was highly successful in the production business, alongside his acting career. Both as a candidate and in office, he has also exhibited several qualities rare in a political novice: one is patience; another is an awareness of potential pitfalls, and another is his judgement of people.

In his testimony to the impeachment hearings, Bill Taylor noted that Zelensky had been concerned from an early stage not to become embroiled in another country’s domestic politics. He also said that another US diplomat (Kurt Volker, the US special envoy on Ukraine) had warned him about giving any impression that Ukraine was a US “plaything”. In some ways, Zelensky seems to have been more aware than either his predecessor, Poroshenko, or the US President of the lopsided reality of US-Ukraine relations.

Whether it was Zelensky’s innate savvy that kept him out of trouble or whether, for whatever reason, he never became aware of any linkage between US military aid and a Biden investigation may be clarified in the hearings that follow. US military aid resumed in September, without any evidence of Ukraine having ceded anything in return.

Then again, Zelensky’s has still not been received for a full-dress summit at the White House, despite reportedly angling hard for such a meeting to demonstrate his own, and Ukraine’s, standing, especially to Russia. Zelensky did meet Trump one-on-one in September at the UN General Assembly, but an invitation to Washington remains elusive. Whether this is a mark of Trump’s displeasure is unclear, but William Taylor in his testimony clearly inferred that it was something the US might use as a bargaining chip. “It is one thing to leverage a White House meeting,” he told a questioner; “another to hold up military aid.”

And you must make another decision. Do you drive to the polling station or do you leave it and go straight home? You backed Trump last time, you think he’s a bit barmy – you and your friends call him ‘a jerk’ – but you don’t like the Democratic candidate either. So do you head home or do you take the trouble to vote in a nation where 45% of eligible people don’t bother?

What helps with the decision?

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Impeachment helps. It tells you that the folks in Washington who always think they know best are at it again. They don’t talk much about the economy (which has been booming for you: you’re tired because there’s plenty of work) but they go on and on incessantly about phone calls to Ukraine and how some foreigners don’t like the president. They clutch at pearls because he wants the next G7 conference to be held at his resort: hey, why not? You’d love it to be held at your house if it meant new garden lights on the federal dollar. Give the guy a break, you think.

So you turn off on your way home and take the trouble to park and to queue and to pull the lever for Trump. Without impeachment you would not have bothered. Impeachment reminded you, to steal the old Cold War adage, that Trump is a son of a bitch but he’s your son of a bitch. And he wins re-election because you and thousands like you did what I have just described.

This is the Democratic party nightmare. It is the reason why, until now, moderate Democrats in the House of Representatives have seen impeachment as a pretty clear trap –  a set of hinged steel clamps complete with red flashing lights and a sign saying THIS IS A TRAP –  that they would rather avoid.

But the trap has now ensnared them and in fairness what other course of action could they have taken? It’s almost as if Donald Trump did it deliberately. As if Steve Bannon, the dark artist of his first campaign, were back in the room, wondering how to mess with the heads of the president’s opponents.

That’s not the case of course: Bannon is well off the reservation and Trump lacks the discipline to think this through. But he has tipped the scales now: it looks as if his dealings with Ukraine, and the withholding of Congressional funds he had no business withholding, might amount to something so serious that a failure to take action would look like cowardice and weakness on the part of his enemies.

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Where the Russia collusion case was always opaque and multi-faceted and ultimately too tricky for prime time, the Ukraine shenanigans have the feel of something crunchier. The Democrats, if the facts are revealed to be roughly as reported so far, would have to seize the moment.

With what hope of success? On the face of it: none. The Republicans have a 53-to-47 seat advantage in the Senate. Two thirds of Senators are required to confirm impeachment. Even if one or two (Senator Mitt Romney is an obvious candidate) decided to stick it to the Donald, it would not be enough. Mr Trump will not be removed from office as a result of this action.

Not removed from office, and with his base fired up. Yes: folks, it’s Bill Clinton all over again. Impeached in the House of Representatives, with the case thrown out by the Senate. And in the mid-term elections held during the Clinton circus in 1998: his party gained support. In fact the biggest loser was Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House who fought hardest for the president to lose his job. Mr Gingrich, defeated in that aim, lost his.

An impeachment process might also involve collateral damage – by severely harming the chances of Joe Biden getting the Democratic presidential nomination, since part of the case would focus on his son’s work in Ukraine (something Trump wanted to have the new Ukrainian government investigate) and the murkiness of top folks’ kids lobbying around the world. Some Democrats would welcome this of course but it would not necessarily be the conversation the party would want to be having at the start of an election campaign with people tuning in and hoping for, well, something fresh.

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There is another outcome, though, and it’s more subtle than America’s bitter political arguments generally allow. It is possible that the Democrats could use the televised hearings that impeachment will bring about to persuade the nation that this is not a witch-hunt; that their actions are not governed by politics but by a gallant defence of The American Way. They wanted the Trump presidency to be successful, they would have to say. They understand why people voted for him and respect their decisions. But this corruption is not right. This is not American. And in your heart of hearts you people who voted for him last time know what is right. We trust you and we want to talk seriously to you. Impeachment, then, not as attack but as healing device. The denouement would be a loss of office in the time-worn way, at the polls in 2020.

It is quite a tall order isn’t it? It would take a degree of discipline that even the Democrats’ best friends might suggest is beyond the party. And yet it could work. Because, of course, not many people need to be persuaded for the election to be lost to Mr Trump. If that electrician in Pennsylvania, and his friends, decide that they are not being belittled and patronised by the Democrats any more and stay on the road and go home without bothering to vote on that November night next year, the president would lose. That state would revert to the Democratic party, where it has firmly been in recent years, and the narrow path for a Trump victory would become impassable.

An impeachment, well handled, could work for the Democrats. They need a firm message summing up why Trump has overstepped the mark. Congressional representatives who behave with restraint and decorum, even when they lose the impeachment case. Then a personable and convincing presidential candidate with captivating ideas about the future, selected at the end of an uplifting and positive set of primaries.

What could possibly go wrong?