What we learned from the much-anticipated Clinton emails

‘Gefilte fish,’ emailed Hillary Clinton to a pair of aides in March 2010, ‘where are we on this?’

That was it. Two words in the subject line, five more in the body. Nobody really knows what she was on about. Maybe it was code, maybe it was a reference to a new Israeli import duty slapped upon carp fillets from Illinois. Either way, in a 4,368-strong trove of emails sent and received by the former US Secretary of State, and just released by the State Department, this is the interesting bit. This was as good as it gets.

OK, so I exaggerate. Or rather, under-exaggerate. There’s also some stuff from David Miliband saying almost precisely what you’d expect him to having just lost the Labour leadership to Ed Miliband, and some peerless political analysis from the US journalist Sidney Blumenthal, in which he very cleverly tells her that Nick Clegg will look down on her because he went to public school, and that Ed, compared to his brother, ‘has more of a common touch’.