Is a powerful husband better than a faithful one?

Widowhood bestows even greater advantages. In a sense, it is a pity Hillary didn't strangle Bill when she wanted to

If nothing else, one has to admire the hardiness of Hillary Clinton whose autobiography, Living History, is published today. After the most public humiliation of any spouse of any politician in history, she has come out, and how: an $8m (£4.8m) advance, the world warming to her, the job of US Senator which she is doing excellently (says Warren Hoge, the New York Times London bureau chief, who is, like the Clintons, a Yale graduate and a journalist whose judgements I respect enormously). And she is still with Bill, almost as big an achievement as all the others put together.

She has survived, nay conquered that abysmal position occupied by too many wives of politicians, where almost all that they do is wrong and where they then find themselves wronged by the men who handed them a role neither of them understood when they were smiling brightly at cameras, clutching hands, the first time he was announced a winner in some bygone election.

I would not myself ever consort with any politician - past, upcoming or retired - and to marry one of any of these is surely to invite chaos. Fidelity is frequently an early casualty, as it was in the Clinton marriage.

An irrepressibly buoyant Tory right-winger propositioned me back in the days when they were invincible. We met at a conference on The Family somewhere across the seas (can't tell you where or who. If I am to earn a fortune for my memoirs, this information will surely fetch a price.) I was grieving because my former husband had recently left me and my young son, and I had to endure this pompous man making loud and stupid speeches about "feckless" lone parents. Inevitably we ended up rowing.

A few months later, he asked for a meeting in his office to discuss a proposal which he thought would interest me. And it was this. He had a fine flat in Mayfair; I was on my own and "not unattractive, in fact rather pleasing and intelligent". Would I like to be his mistress for those lonely evenings which MPs have to put up with? I could then use his flat when he was away. All very discreet, of course.

A lovely photo of his blonde wife and boys hung under a picture of the Leaderine. "But they're all at it and the wives know what's going on", he laughingly informed me when I responded with shock and revulsion. I leave you to imagine the rest.

There have, in fact, been some enviably good marriages - the Healeys, the Kinnocks, the Benns, Kenneth Clarke and his wife, the Howes. And the Bottomleys must be unique in how long they have been together and in the House. So it can't be that "they are all at it". But he was right that many politicians are unfaithful and the wives do put up and shut up most of the time. Hillary chooses still to stay with Bill, just like Jackie O stayed with the even more sexually incontinent JFK and then, having learnt nothing at all, moved on to marry another philandering power merchant. Mrs Parkinson, Mrs Ashdown and Mrs Mellor quietly carried on with their lives, as did Mrs Mitterand, all of them in spite of degrading stories in the media.

It takes guts to do that. These women aren't the mules they are made out to be by feminists - maybe they have special chemicals which give them a higher sympathy threshold. Many of them must be ferociously ambitious too, not as backroom Lady Macbeths but in a more Darwinian sense. They must understand and seek out the supreme advantages which political authority and establishment connections give them and their offspring. Across the world, over time, the wives of top politicians have either been able to step into the shoes of power, or have inherited influence which would not have been as great or as easily acquired without that MP or prime minister in their beds or at least their bedrooms.

Would Chelsea Clinton, an ordinary young American woman, get pages devoted to her if her surname was Tomkins? Would Benazir Bhutto or Indira Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi or Eva Peron, or Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia, or Corazon Aquino of the Philippines or Eleanor Roosevelt have risen if they had not been related to male political leaders? No. And the canny wives know this.

When her husband was incarcerated, Azizah Ismail, the wife of Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia, started her own opposition party to fight the present government. Elizabeth Dole is building her political credibility nicely on the foundation created by her husband Bob. Ana Botella, the wife of the Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, is "doing a Hillary" as it is now known: she is standing for election as a city councillor in Madrid.

Widowhood bestows even greater advantages, so in a sense it is a pity Hillary didn't strangle Bill when she said she wanted to, after he confessed that he had indeed lied about the affair to her and the country. We would have understood the crime of passion and the harvest of support would have been boundless.

In the first third of the 20th century, political widows in the US had easier access to political life than did most other women. Of the first 14 women elected to Congress between 1916 and 1932, six were widows of incumbents and three the daughters of famous political men. The three women who served a full Senate term all succeeded their deceased husbands. It was 1978 before a woman who was not a political widow was elected to full term in the US Senate - Nancy Landon Kassebaum.

In the court that is Downing Street these days you can see just how much added value you get if you are the still youngish wife of an overweening Prime Minister busily claiming his place in history. The fawning, the glory, the lavish praise heaped upon Cherie is dazzling. From charities to dubious billionaire Asian businessmen and their own wily wives, Cherie Blair is as admired as Diana, Princess of Wales, once was. And it is not surprising that she spends so much on clothes and is increasingly dependent on gurus with strange powers who fill her up with even more of a sense of herself as a first lady who has a major role in the life of this nation. Cherie Booth, the QC, is a woman of impressive intellect and her reputation as a first-class lawyer is her own. But others do not bow to her and thrill in her presence because she is a very excellent QC. They do so because she is a Blair.

Political wifery brings much pain, exhaustion, frustration and unfair intrusion, of course. But what feminists don't begin to understand is that political wives gain more than they lose and this must be one of the more plausible reasons why the ambitious Hillary stays put. For now.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk