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