Why didn't I suspect Bill?

Hillary Clinton, junior Senator for New York, is surrounded by people. She walks into the Ritz in London in the midst of six huge security guards, two press secretaries and a selection of other folk who seem to know what they are doing while appearing to do nothing much really. "We're going in the lift, Senator," says a short man very slowly to Hillary Clinton, as if she has a mental age of seven. "And then we can get you some tea."

"Your room's on the fifth floor," says a woman wearing pink high heels. Later on she tells me she wore these shoes specially because she heard that "the Senator loves shoes and she loves pink."

Today Hillary Clinton - in town to promote her new book - is in blue. She's smart, well-presented, glamorous but not sensuous. She's very glossy - wonderful hair, wonderful skin, wonderful nails, suspiciously few wrinkles. But there's something more about her. She's unexpectedly rather charming. She's lovely and smiley to everyone, even the lift man. When she was in the White House, her office was known as Hillaryland - she's the person whose team you want to be on.

She seems very calm and confident and in control yet surprisingly pleasant. I had heard that she was cold - Chillary is one of her nicknames. But she shakes my hand and looks me straight in the eye and says, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Lucy, really it is. An absolute pleasure." For a while I wonder if it is all show. Maybe an adviser has told her to be more approachable. But, in the end, she is so refreshing that I decide to be gobsmacked anyway.

Unfortunately, not everyone feels the same way about Hillary Rodham Clinton. "So much has been written about me I don't know where to start," she says. "I think I have almost become immune. In the past I would read things and think: "Why has that person been so mean to me?' Now I just think that they must have sad lives or that something horrible has happened to them to make them think and write the way that they do. I just put it to one side and keep on moving forward. That's the only way to survive."

And, gosh, has she been tested. First there was all the hoo-hah about her husband's presidency, which included law suits and accusations over the Whitewater property saga, the Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers fiascos, Troopergate, let alone the infamous intimate relations with Monica Lewinsky.

Now it has all started up again, due to her autobiography, Living History. In it she claims that she didn't know the President had had an affair with Lewinsky until he told her two days before he faced the Grand Jury.

When he did tell her she screamed at him and wanted to "wring his neck", seemingly more hurt by the lie than the infidelity. "Oh yes, this again," she says, looking momentarily guarded. "People have really focused on this - did I, didn't I know anything? In a way I don't think it matters. I've told the truth in the book. It was painful enough to write it. Why didn't I know, why didn't I suspect?

"I'll tell you why, because Bill and I were so busy. We were so, so busy and not only that, rumours were around us all the time. I can't tell you what sort of things were being said on a consistent basis. I knew those powerful people on the Right were putting round anything they could find. I thought it was a shoddy attempt by them to discredit Bill and get me embroiled in something."

So, she didn't think the rumours could be true? "I heard the rumour. I asked Bill about it. He said no, and I believed him. So, yes, he lied to me and, yes, that took a long time to forgive but what I really can't forgive is the way in which it was all made so public."

She blames the Right-wingers, again, for this. "It all turned into an investigation into Bill's private life. I never believed that he should resign over personal matters and yet it all got so personal. And it was mean. In fact, it was wicked for these people to keep going on about it without thinking of my pain, or anyone else's, for that matter. It got to a stage when I couldn't trust anyone. I had friends that I trusted, of course, but I couldn't tell them anything because of the ruthless way in which all our friends were persecuted.

"It meant I had to keep my own counsel and that makes things very lonely. I always had Bill to talk to but it got to the stage where we were just talking about us, and our relationship, on and on. In the end, running for Senate was good for our marriage, because it gave us something else to talk about."

But has she forgiven him? "It was hard, of course it was," she says. "But I turned to my faith to help me, and Bill and I had marriage counselling. I also talked to people and took on different role models, people who had been though this type of thing and survived. In the end Bill committed a sin of weakness but not of malice. I say that in the book. So, yes, I have forgiven him because there is no other way. In the end you have to rise above it all and move forward."

She talks a lot about moving forward and not letting people ruin you. In that way, she's very focused. She answers questions concisely and clearly but, for someone whose marriage seems to be more about shades of grey than black and white, she seems to have very little hinterland.

It's something that's also notable in the book - a lack of reflection, almost of self-awareness. Like lots of bright people, she gets very excited about issues and big plans, yet seems to have routinely failed to notice what was going on in front of her nose.

For example, she didn't seem to realise that her friend Vince Foster, a White House lawyer and former colleague, was so depressed that he was driven to commit suicide.

She didn't seem to know that her husband was a philanderer.

"I have lots of ideas," she says, "and I get excited by them and maybe at times I just get so busy. You know, when we left the White House I was, in a way, relieved. I love having a quiet life but yet I found I still wanted to be in politics. I wanted to continue what Bill and I had started."

Against the odds, the Clintons have stayed together. There were many people who thought that once they were out of the White House she would leave him. But she hasn't. Rumours still fly around about him - more affairs - and her - that she's a lesbian - but she brushes them off.

"I am inured to them," she says. Surely it must affect her, though, when people refer to their marriage as being based simply on the fact it is politically expedient to stay together. Isn't it better for her to appear as the wounded, wronged wife rather than someone who has sacrificed the integrity of her marriage for political accolade? She looks a little tired now.

"I stayed with my husband because I love him. I have always admired him as a man and as a President. He did great things for our country. We were doing good things, things that are now being reversed."

It must be a bit tiresome for her to be continually asked about her marriage rather than her sterling efforts as a senator to promote fiscal change and health care for all. "Yes," she says laughing, "that is true. But I wrote a book so I accept it in a way. It would be nice to talk about something else though."

So we talk about women's issues for a while. It's a subject close to her heart. She spent a lot of time as First Lady travelling the world talking about rights for women.

Didn't she ever want to have a quiet word in the ear of all the prime ministers and presidents she met? "Oh yes, all the time. But I couldn't wade in," she says. "I did talk to many people privately. In fact I talked to Nelson Mandela a lot because he is such an amazing man."

We also talk about feminism and how shocked she was when she realised, as a teenager, that there were things that women were barred from. As a girl she wrote to Nasa to volunteer for astronaut training. She was outraged when they said they were not accepting girls.

"It really has changed now, though," she says. "Feminism and the advances women have made through education have given women choices. If you choose to stay at home and be a full-time mother, then great. If you want to go out to work, then great, too. What we have now is the right to make our own decisions."

Yet look how exhausted we all are, I say. Surely she must have felt exhausted at times, being the First Lady and publishing books about the White House pets and trying to reform the healthcare system while looking after Chelsea.

"Of course I have felt that, but I had only one child. I would have liked to have had more but it didn't happen. It wasn't possible. But I love children." But Chelsea's grown up now, so maybe her choices are not that complicated any more?

Maybe, given her success as a senator, she might have a pop at the Presidency?

"I think there will be a woman President during my time," she says. "I certainly hope so."

Then her press secretary starts coughing and spluttering and my time in Hillaryland is over. But just before I leave, she offers to sign her book for me. "To Lucy. Best Wishes," she writes. Her press secretary escorts me out.

"She signed a book for me," I tell him, hugging it to me. "She signs them for everyone," he says. And then he left me, deflated and alone, at the back door of the Ritz.

Living History: Memoirs by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Headline, £20).