Where is our inspiration when we most need it?

Bryan Forbes remembers listening to Churchill as a 14-year-old evacuee and now looks with envy at Obama’s capacity to galvanise hope. Where are his UK counterparts?

All across America, galvanised by an inspirational candidate, people stood in line for up to four hours in order to vote, many for the first time in their lives, and oh how I longed for an iota of that fervour and commitment to infect our own political scene. Instead, on our side of the pond, in our own hour of need, we were subjected to the same tired rhetoric that has long since been unfit for purpose. In this month of remembrance is there anybody at Westminster capable of inspiring us to rise out of the trenches with an Obama exhortation to ‘put your hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day’? In the unlikely event of such a wake-up call ever being made, would we be prepared to attack recession’s no-man’s land at the behest of Jack Straw, Harriet Harman, David Miliband, Geoff Hoon or indeed anybody in Gordon Brown’s rag-tag army of tired contemptibles?

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The answer, sadly, has to be no. It is impossible to recall anything uplifting that Brown has uttered since the current crisis began; the only difference about him one can discern is an increase in smugness accompanied by the false smile and the fact that he has now condescended to wear a white tie at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet instead of his erstwhile lounge suit. Endlessly reciting the mantra that all our troubles are exclusively the result of global mistakes, he cannot bring himself to admit that the root cause of our new era of blood, toil, tears and sweat was his decade-long plunder of the family silver, to say nothing of the family gold.