There is just one question in Washington today. Can President William Jefferson Clinton survive this latest disaster? And the answer, of course, will have reverberations around the world. This is a President who is struggling to stave off the collapse of the Middle East peace process and is planning a military onslaught on Iraq if Saddam Hussein continues to thwart arms inspectors.

So is the leader of the most powerful country in the world's history to be brought down over sex, lies and audiotape? The answer is we don't know - yet. The evidence is not yet sufficiently damning. Lawyers, politicians, pundits and newspaper editorials all caution that there is not yet a smoking gun.

What we have is 20 hours of tapes of conversations between two women, one young, the other middle-aged, who both once worked in the White House. The younger woman, Monica Lewinsky, both admits and denies that she had a sexual relationship with President Clinton over 18 months.

But the mortal danger for the President is not that it could be shown that he did have a liaison under the White House roof with a 21-year-old intern fresh out of college, bad and all as that would be for his already battered reputation, but that he advised her to lie under oath about their affair.

Legally that is known as "suborning perjury" and would also be "obstruction of justice" and conspiracy to commit those crimes. You can get up to 10 years in prison for that.

President Clinton, we are told, also gave sworn testimony to Paula Jones's lawyers last Saturday that he did not have a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. If he is later shown to have committed perjury about this, here is another offence which can lead to jail.

First he would have to be impeached, but legal experts agree that the perjury charges could be grounds for Congress setting the impeachment process in motion. Back in 1974 President Nixon resigned when he saw that impeachment was inevitable, on the grounds that he tried to obstruct justice in the investigation of the Watergate break-in, not that he was behind it.

Ms Lewinsky, incidentally, lives in the Watergate complex in Washington in the apartment of her well-off parents. Hence "Monicagate".

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The wheels of justice turn very slowly here. The investigation of Ms Lewinsky's dealings with President Clinton has been formally turned over to the independent counsel, Mr Kenneth Starr, who has spent four years probing the Whitewater affair and has still not made a final judgment on the Clintons' involvement in it.

And then hasn't Mr Clinton survived the Gennifer Flowers affair, draft-dodging, smoking but not inhaling cannabis, Whitewater, Paula Jones (so far) and illicit fund-raising allegations? He has not called himself the Comeback Kid for nothing.

Also, the American public has shown repeatedly that these incidents, unsavoury though they seem, do not affect their view of how he does his job. He is the first Democratic President to be elected to a second term since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

But this is different. The public was ready to grant an absolution for their young President's Arkansas past, but if he is now seen to have continued promiscuous habits in the White House which he shared with his wife and daughter, even his own dedicated supporters would be crushed. The weekly pictures of him leaving church with his Bible in one hand and his wife on the other would have a tawdry look.

Ms Lewinski came to the White House in summer 1995, aged 21, as an unpaid intern. She was attracted to Mr Clinton and allegedly caught his eye and a relationship began which he insists was "not improper".

Nevertheless, by the spring of 1996, senior staff were sufficiently concerned at the relationship to have Ms Lewinski moved to the Pentagon. Here she struck up a close friendship with another former White House staffer, Linda Tripp. Ms Lewinsky began confiding details of her alleged affair with the President.

Ms Tripp, however, had been the source of a Newsweek report last summer that a colleague called Kathleen Willey emerged from the Oval Office one day with smudged make-up and dishevelled blouse and then confided to Ms Tripp that the President had "fondled" and tried to kiss her.

The lawyers for Ms Paula Jones, who is pursuing a sexual harassment case against Mr Clinton from the time he was governor of Arkansas, saw this report and issued a subpoena to Ms Willey to testify on her encounter with the President. His lawyers then tried to discredit Ms Tripp as a source.

Fears that she might lose her government job led to Ms Tripp starting to record her phone conversations with Ms Lewinsky where she talked about her alleged affair with Mr Clinton, which may have involved exchanges of gifts and messages left on voice-mail. These are the kinds of things Mr Starr is now investigating through White House logs and records.

Eventually Ms Jones's lawyers, who were trying to establish a pattern of behaviour on the part of Mr Clinton with women, caught up with Ms Lewinsky and demanded that she testify about her relationship. She was alarmed and contacted Mr Clinton who, it is alleged, advised her to deny the relationship and to contact his trusted legal adviser, Mr Vernon Jordan, who is alleged to have given her similar advice.

Ms Lewinsky made a sworn affidavit on January 7th denying any sexual relationship with the President, although this contradicts what she said on the 17 tapes recorded by Ms Tripp. Ms Lewinsky has been asked to testify today to Ms Jones's lawyers and will apparently seek the protection of the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating herself.

If this happens, the President is in a somewhat better position, as Ms Lewinsky's sworn affidavit denying an affair will have a much stronger legal status than the taped conversations, where Mr Clinton is apparently not mentioned by name but by nicknames such as "El Schmucko" and "The Creep".

There is one other tape which may hold the key to Mr Clinton's survival or downfall. Ms Tripp went to Mr Starr with her own tapes because she had already been questioned by him in connection with Whitewater investigation.

He arranged for her to be "wired" by the FBI for a meeting last week she was having in a hotel with Ms Lewinsky. If Ms Lewinsky repeated incriminating material on this more official tape, she may find she is faced with a perjury charge and an offer of immunity if she will co-operate with Mr Starr's inquiry.

Mr Clinton continues to deny any improper relationship with Ms Lewinsky or that he urged anyone to say anything untrue. His wife, Hillary, is standing by her man and says he has been attacked like this by political foes since he became President.

A CNN/USA Today poll finds support for the President's handling of his job stays high at 62 per cent. Some 54 per cent say he probably did have an affair with Ms Lewinsky but feel this is not relevant to his job. If he is found to have tried to obstruct justice, 72 per cent would see this as relevant and 46 per cent would be in favour of impeachment and 46 per cent against.

So President Clinton is not yet down and out. But this is his toughest fight so far.