It is difficult and probably impertinent to summarise a writer as rich in ideas as Christopher Hitchens. But that's book reviewing for you, and No One Left To Lie To demands that those leftish British readers who respond to the ugly spectacle of the Third Way in power with passive uncertainty are prodded to buy this record of the consequences of Clintonism.

Hitchens's theme is that bewildered (and bewildering) remnants of progressive opinion in America have sacrificed their honour and the livelihoods of the American poor in defence of a 'crooked President and a corrupt and reactionary administration' merely because Bill Clinton found it easier to advance to office by calling himself a Democrat rather than a Republican.

I can already hear you crying that the President's private life is his own affair and everyone lies about sex. The more daring and historically ignorant may even be muttering that the most powerful man on earth was a victim of sexual McCarthyism.

In reply, Hitchens asks you to consider the treatment of Kathleen Willey, a friend of the President whose husband had died unexpectedly. She went to the Oval Office to ask for a job and was rewarded by 'the guiding by the presidential mitt of her own hand on to his distended penis'. When she spoke out, everyone believed her, although many wished she'd held her tongue. (No one automatically dismisses accusations against Clinton as preposterous even accusations of rape.) Willey was a wealthy, middle-aged woman who could not be dismissed as 'trailer trash', like so many of her predecessors. What was to be done? An anonymous voice phoned to inquire after the health of her children and the fate of a missing cat, and to point out that someone had driven nails into the tyres of her car. The voice belonged to a private eye who became so ashamed of his mission to terrify her he confessed to being hired by a millionaire, Nathan Landow, who had pushed pelf into Clinton 's coffers.

You assume our author is a damned conspiracy theorist, until you learn that Landow an obscenely rich, and thus, by the standards of his time and country, impeccably respectable man felt the need to invoke the right to silence when questioned about Willey on the grounds he might incriminate himself. There is, as Hitchens says, a touch of the banana republic about Clinton 's America.

When the conspiracy trick can't be pulled, the cock-up gambit has its uses. Even the US administration was admitting this week that the pharmaceutical plant Clinton wrecked in the Sudan, one of the most violent and pestilential nations on earth, was not a chemical weapons factory after all. As I write, learned commentators are on the radio saying the President must have made an innocent mistake and the bombing couldn't be a distraction from Monica Lewinsky's headline-hoarding appearance before a grand jury the next day. They sound reasonable until you read Hitchens's forensic section on Clinton 's war crimes, which shows he excluded all his military advisers who might have warned that he was about to make a terrible error before he gave the order to fire.

Clinton 's defenders should ask if thousands of sick and dying Africans realised the distinction between the personal and the political as they suffered without relief, and count the number of innocent blunderers they know who take such care to watch their backs.

Nor do well-meaning incompetents plead the privacy defence while 'reforming' welfare so that cowed single mothers are told to drop their babies and work for a pittance for companies which, with predictable symmetry, bankroll a President who says that his affairs are nobody's business but his family's while destroying the family life of the poorest women and children in his country.

The customary pleasure of reading Hitchens is heightened by the knowledge that, as he was finishing this book, he told the impeachment inquiry what a Clinton apparatchik had told him about Willey's fate. He was denounced for McCarthyism by US comrades who inadvertently proved his thesis while forgetting that McCarthyism was about the persecution of the individual by the state, not the other way round.

Admittedly, when Hitchens is in full flow, you hesitate before wishing him on the world's worst state. But not for long.