President confesses: 'If they ever find out what I got up to in Oxford, I'm in deep trouble'

Bill Clinton rose to his feet as the young women sitting around him shuffled in embarrassment. They had just listened to an attractive student's provocative talk on why working class men make better lovers.

But a smiling Clinton decided it was time to break the uncomfortable silence. "In case you ever decide to give bourgeois men another chance," he asked, "can I give you my telephone number?" The place erupted in laughter.

In many ways it was classic Clinton. For even as a student at Oxford he was charismatic, flirtatious and totally self-assured.

But there was certainly one big difference between Clinton the Oxford Rhodes Scholar and Clinton the President - the younger version certainly picked his girl friends with care.

The American President's old Oxford friend Michael Shea recalled that women were a major preoccupation from the time Clinton arrived in 1968. "We talked a lot about women," he said. "Bill did better than most. He started dating and going out and having relationships."

In an unguarded moment, Clinton himself more than hinted about the wildness of his Oxford days at the height of the Swinging Sixties, during a chat with the BBC journalist Gavin Esler in an hotel lobby.

"He had been out jogging and started a conversation," said Esler. Suddenly Clinton joked: "If they ever find out what I got up to in Oxford then I'm in deep trouble."

After some of the Come Back Kid's past problems over the years, the mind truly boggles.

But Clinton's University women friends have continued to show an astonishing degree of discretion in the face of endless dirt-digging amid the dreaming spires.

Rumours of serial womanising and endless sexual escapades, of course, began decades before anyone had heard of Monica Lewinsky.

And the American press, encouraged by Clinton's Republican opponents, had good reason to guess there was sensational material aplenty to be unearthed in Oxford. President Bush thought the Republicans had hit the jackpot in the race for the White House when it emerged that Clinton had smoked cannabis at Oxford.

Not for the first time Clinton was forced to make an embarrassing confession; and not for the first time his excuse was that he'd been a little naughty but had not gone the whole way. Yes, the young Bill had enjoyed a joint, but he had not taken it right down, he had never inhaled it.

There were also serious allegations of draft dodging, claims that he had come to England to avoid fighting in Vietnam. Proving an addiction to sex was altogether more difficult.

Over the years quite a number of Clinton's Oxford female friends have been ready to speak. But to a woman they have showed a degree of loyalty that only Hillary comes close to matching. Katherine Gieve, who went on to become a highly-regarded London solicitor, was one of his girlfriends. She recalled: "He was a friendly, intelligent person. All this stuff in America about him being a womaniser, I have nothing to say about that. When he was in England, he was a straight guy," she said. "My abiding impression of Bill is that of a softie. He wasn't afraid of expressing his feelings."

And the picture she paints is of a brilliant politician in the making, interested in people in the widest sense, rather than ladies in the loosest. According to her, Vietnam, rather than sex and drugs, was what mattered. "Politics, as taught in Oxford then, was about ideas," she said. "But Bill was thinking about people. He made a relationship between abstract ideas and people's experiences. That was true for all of the Americans at Oxford then."

Clinton arrived in Oxford as one of 32 American scholars to have been awarded post graduate places. He was then just 22.

He took up rugby but definitely did not go for any crude macho approach to win over women undergraduates, from all kinds of backgrounds.

Women saw him as sensitive. Friends remember tears coming to his eyes when he heard Tom Jones's Green, Green Grass of Home being played on a jukebox, because it reminded him of Arkansas. Many clearly believed they could trust him. Former student Mandy Merck recalled Clinton as the first man with whom she could share her greatest secret. "Bill was the first boy I ever came out to," she would later remember. "In fact, he was just about the first person outside my circle I ever felt that I could tell I was a lesbian," added Merck, who went on to become a lecturer in New York.

Rather than being a great ladies man, she recalls him as "flirtatious in an amiable way."

But suspicions that there was plenty to hide were encouraged by rumours that his Oxford University file had gone missing. Rhodes House was ultimately forced to make a statement that the Clinton records were in fact safely stored in a basement, along with 5,000 other confidential dossiers on his fellow Rhodes Scholars.

The President's former Oxford lodgings, a four-storey Victorian House, in Leckford Road has now become a major tourist attraction, alongside the city's more established sights.

One Leckford Road resident said that as well as tourists, ex-girlfriends still turn up wanting to look around the house, where they came to know Bill Clinton. But there are no sleazy details on offer, no feelings of betrayal or being used.

No wonder Bill Clinton's love affair with Oxford has lasted. As he sits contemplating his future in the Oval Office , it must seem like one of the few in his life not returning to haunt him.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.