The 40 million emails sent between Bill Clinton and his White House staff in the last eight years will be a historical goldmine, presidential biographer Stanley Kutler has said.

Stan wrote a book about the Nixon Tapes - you know, the recorded conversations that proved Nixon knew about Watergate - so he knows what he's talking about. Of course, as with the Nixon tapes, the White House has done everything in its power to withhold/destroy such records. However, legal wrangles have managed to preserve them.

And this brings us to the historical value of emails. If you think about it, Stan is absolutely right. We all know about the odd phenomenon that we write in a far more relaxed tone when using email and we also tend to fire them back and forth with the original email attached. Historians would give their right arm for such insights into how an administration works. Not only that but they are utterly contemporaneous and will include the time and date.

It should prove very interesting - just like in the Microsoft trial when emails from Billy Boy Gates gave just a slightly different view of M$' approach to competitors than that which he espoused in court. Any emails between Clinton and that fat tart Lewinsky will no doubt be the first to be read. (Which reminds us of when Prince Charles' mobile conversations between him and rough bird/mistress Camilla Parker Bowles were recorded and made public. He wanted to be her tampon or something equally distasteful.)

However, there is a downside. The sheer quantity of information may mean that historians get bogged down in it and subsequently produce tedious books, lacking in wit and narrative. It's happened before. ®

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