A diplomat who could yet be the British Obama

‘I am and always have been an activist,’ says Paul Boateng, the British High Commissioner to South Africa. ‘As a lawyer, a Methodist lay preacher and now as a diplomat, that is what I am. It is how I have been brought up and I can’t imagine ever being anything other than that.’

Boateng’s posting comes to an end next May and somehow one can’t quite see this Hackney-born, one-time firebrand of the Greater London Council allowing himself to be quietly packed off to the Lords. He will then be 57, still relatively youthful by Westminster standards and, as his late Ghanaian father, Kwaku, once told the Daily Mail, it is not inconceivable that his boy might one day, ‘with the help of God’, make it to the highest office his country has to offer.

Boateng as the British Obama is an intriguing idea. Here is another black man who is every bit as able and charismatic and, what is more, as far as the Labour party kingmakers are concerned, quite undamaged by any association with the disastrous administration of Gordon Brown.